Now is not the time to let Syrians down

As resources dwindle after seven years of war, there is a need for Canada to do more, Jean-Nicolas Beuze says.

Last week marked the seventh anniversary of the war in Syria, and there is no end in sight. Progress toward a negotiated solution has become, once again, very elusive.

In just the first two months of 2018, intense fighting has taken a high toll on civilians across Eastern Ghouta and Idlib province. It almost erased from our memory that the second half of 2017 had seen a re-escalation of violence countrywide to new heights, including from military campaigns that toppled the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in ArRaqqah and Dayr al-Zawr.

With no effective ceasefire in place, men, women and children are trapped, traumatized, injured, cold and hungry. Those who can flee are telling harrowing stories of bombardment and shortages of food and medical care. And how many other victims, dead or disappeared, will remain untold stories?

More than five million refugees are displaced beyond Syria’s borders. Another six million are similarly displaced, but still within Syria. And an estimated 10 million who did not leave their homes inside Syria are completely cut off from livelihoods, education or health services.

Syria remains the biggest humanitarian crisis of our time. This crisis has demonstrated the inability of the international community — once again, one may be tempted to say — to make peace.

Funding for the Syria crisis has also remained a worrying concern, as we are unable to keep pace with the growing needs. Last year, the UN Refugee Agency’s response for this crisis was only 50 per cent funded, while in 2013 when I took up my position with UNHCR in Lebanon, the Syria response was 74 per cent funded. How much will we and our partners receive in 2018?

This has inevitably affected our ability to respond to the needs of millions of Syrians. As humanitarians, we have constantly been between a rock and hard place, having to prioritize interventions or beneficiaries: opening a classroom for kids or providing maternal care for pregnant women? Ultimately, we are always forced to curtail assistance. So far in 2018, the required budget to respond to the Syria crisis is only seven per cent funded. At this rate, we will end the year below the 50 per cent mark.

I returned to Jordan a few months ago — just at the onset of winter. Because of the funding shortfall, I witnessed once again our inability to provide sufficient cash to fuel the stoves that had been distributed in previous years. Families told me how they keep the stove going only a few hours in the evening: just enough to cook a meal and get a bit of warmth before sleeping. It was a stark reminder that these prioritization exercises due to lack of money are not simply an accounting exercise.

Without adequate funding, humanitarian systems buckle. UNHCR, like other humanitarian partners, is mainly funded through voluntary contributions from states. Last year, Canada, our eighth-ranked donor, contributed US$82 million to our global budget, and the Canadian public gave a further $7.9 million. While these generous contributions are deeply appreciated, they are simply insufficient to respond to the massive needs on the ground in a relentless refugee catastrophe on the scale of Syria’s.

In the absence of prospects to rebuild their lives, refugees find themselves either excluded and abandoned, or propelled into dangerous journeys alongside migrants on the move. As we witness our collective failure as the international community to bring peace to Syria, it would make the mark on our conscience even more indelible if we were also failing Syrians by not providing them with the basics to survive.

We need Canada and Canadians to do even more. They have constantly demonstrated caring for Syrians: Now is not the time to let them down. Jean-Nicolas Beuze is the Representative in Canada of UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. Before that, he served as the UNHCR Deputy Representative for Protection in Lebanon.