Flickr\/Anthony Gale. Some rights reserved.The international \u2018Supporting Syria\u2019 conference
\nin London today will serve to burnish yet further Britain\u2019s reputation as an
\naid-giver. The \u00a31.1 billion spent over the five years of the crisis makes us easily
\nthe biggest donor after the United States \u2013 more than the European Union and,
\nas British officials like to point out, twelve times more than the French.<\/i><\/p>\n
British aid is financing vital work both inside
\nSyria and among the 4.4 million refugees in neighbouring countries. It is also aimed
\nat achieving a series of self-serving national goals. For David Cameron, in his
\nforeign
\npolicy speech at the Guildhall last November, British aid to the region has
\nbecome \u201ca fundamental part of our strategy to keep our country safe.\u201d More than
\nthat, he said, it makes us \u201cnumber one in the world for soft power,\u201d and added
\nthis chest-thumping observation: \u201cI can tell you that soft power packs a real
\npunch.\u201d<\/p>\n
The outcome of the conference, which
\nBritain co-chairs with Germany, Kuwait, Norway and the United Nations, will be
\njudged by its results. Each year of the Syria crisis the needs have got larger,
\nyet in 2015 international appeals amounting to $7.4 billion were only 53%
\nfunded. With neighbouring countries under mounting pressure, the appeal total
\nthis year has risen to almost $9 billion. How much of that will be raised and translated
\ninto aid?<\/p>\n
The biggest challenges remain inside Syria where local services have been in free fall through the war.<\/p>\n
Conference organisers have made one concrete
\ncommitment to refugee communities. At present there are 700,000 Syrian
\nchildren, half the total living outside the country, who are receiving no
\neducation at all. Today there is undertaking to have them all in school by the
\nend of the 2016\/17 school year. Aid givers are also going to underwrite the
\ncreation of tens of thousands of jobs in the region for refugees and for the
\nhard-pressed local communities which host them. \u00a0Western domestic politics are at work here,
\ntoo. These programmes are aimed specifically at keeping refugees in the region,
\nand away from Europe.<\/p>\n
The biggest challenges remain inside Syria
\nwhere local services have been in free fall through the war and in many areas are
\nin a state of total collapse. Civilians are by turn barrel-bombed by government
\naircraft and starved to death in towns under siege. \u00a0With neighbouring
\ncountries restricting entry at crossing points, the uprooted now congregate
\nin the grimmest of informal border camps.<\/p>\n
Here too Britain has proved an effective aid-giver.
\nMinisters have authorised up to half of all British assistance to Syria to be
\nchannelled across international borders rather than through Damascus. This proved
\na vital initiative in the first three years of the conflict when the United
\nNations was prevented by the government and its Russian allies from conducting
\nany cross-border humanitarian operations at all. Even now what should be a
\nlarge and consistent flow of UN aid is hampered by obstruction from the regime
\nand diplomatic caution in New York.<\/p>\n
Today We Drop Bombs, Tomorrow We Build Bridges: How Foreign Aid became a Casualty of WarThe Department for International
\nDevelopment does not distribute the aid itself in Syria but acts as what British
\nofficials term the \u2018wholesaler.\u2019 The \u2018retailers\u2019 are several big international
\nNGOs. Save the Children, for instance, has a significant cross-border operation
\nin northern Syria. The American non-profit Mercy Corps which was expelled from
\nDamascus for its engagement in opposition areas has received more than \u00a340
\nmillion from DFID to run food convoys into the north. There are other NGO
\n\u2018retailers\u2019 not named, says
\nDFID, \u201cfor security reasons (operating outside the UN led response.\u201d)<\/i><\/p>\n
All the real aid work in Syrian opposition
\nareas is done by
\nthe Syrians themselves. Ever since the advance of Islamic State jihadists
\nacross northern Syria and the gruesome beheading of aid workers and
\njournalists, westerners have been almost entirely absent from the field. Even the
\nresourceful M\u00e9decins
\nSans Fronti\u00e8res has been forced to
\nretreat and now works through a network of remotely-supported hospitals and
\nclinics. \u00a0Along with courageous civil
\nsociety organisations, other local staff are employed in the war zone by Syrian
\nDiaspora NGOs started up in Europe and the United States when the war began.<\/p>\n
Here the British government aid machine and
\nother official donors have work to do. Such is the west\u2019s suspicion of Muslim charitable
\nefforts in the world\u2019s conflicts that it is seriously restricting the
\neffectiveness of legitimate aid efforts. The need for control has led to easy-to-reach
\nareas being favoured over the more distant and challenging. Similarly, official
\ndonors insist on relief goods being transported over borders rather than
\nallowing cash to be used for local purchases and thus reach more people in more
\nremote communities. New players in the aid world \u2013 from the Gulf States for
\ninstance \u2013 are said to be more flexible and very welcome.<\/p>\n
Syrian diaspora charities in Britain
\ncomplain of the level of petty and not-so-petty harassment they encounter on
\nthe way in and out of the country. A multiplicity of security
\nagencies bear down on them at home where, it turns out, the night time
\nknock on the door is not confined to Syria. Charity
\nbank accounts are arbitrarily closed down, and executives say that their
\nown Muslim donors prefer to use private, more dubious channels to help people
\nback home rather than an NGO with a high profile.<\/p>\n
Today\u2019s London conference is the first of a
\nseries of major international gatherings that will respond this year to
\nhumanitarian needs in modern conflict. It might make a start by assessing the world\u2019s
\ncatastrophic failure to stop the carnage in Syria and how this should be
\naddressed for the future. After Rwanda and the Balkans in the 1990s, the UN\u2019s
\ngreat millennium project was \u2018The
\nResponsibility to Protect.\u2019 Now it lies in ruins. Since David Cameron
\nbelieves that Britain\u2019s \u201csoft power packs a real punch,\u201d perhaps he could use
\nit to help build a humanitarian system for the 21st\u00a0century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Flickr\/Anthony Gale. Some rights reserved.The international \u2018Supporting Syria\u2019 conference in London today will serve to burnish yet further Britain\u2019s reputation as an aid-giver. The \u00a31.1 billion spent over the five years of the crisis makes us easily the biggest donor after the United States \u2013 more than the European Union and, as British officials like…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1326\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}