Giving more than a damn about Syria
“No one has come here.” The man swept his arm across the frosty valley of stones, mud and trash. “Where is everyone?”
He wasn’t alone, technically. Sheltered under the Syrian refugee’s other arm: his children, survivors. First they survived the scramble into Lebanon, away from a government abusing its own people with cluster bombs and torture cells and mass rape. Then they survived the fire that incinerated their former refugee settlement, lit by villagers tired of sharing jobs and land and hospital beds. And every day since, they survived the cloying filth and the stony cold and the agonizing, unrelenting boredom.
Other refugees survived too, barely, in neighbouring lean-tos. But the father said that in the single winter month the family had squatted there, no one else arrived. No aid workers. No doctors. No help.
Six months on, this past summer: I’d witnessed one of the most devastating humanitarian crises of our lifetime erupt in Lebanon, Jordan, Bulgaria and Turkey, and everywhere I was asked the Syrian man’s question — where’s the world? I answered in the way that only a millennial would when faced with a complex social problem: I came up with a hashtag and, with my partner, built a website.
By the grace of whatever ineffable forces govern the Internet, our campaign for more humanitarian funding and higher resettlement commitments went viral: it got shares, it got write- ups, it got shares of write-ups. That surprised us.
But the Syrians remain alone. That surprises no one.
Efforts to mobilize international actors during a humanitarian crisis rest on two simple beliefs: that people can sometimes be inspired to give a damn about what other people are going through, and that governments can sometimes be convinced to act upon what their own people give a damn about.
First, people need to empathize with people they’ve never met, who live in places they’ve never been to, who suffer in ways they haven’t — and who may be systematically portrayed as dangerous. They need to be given a way to imagine the trauma of strangers.
This, we managed. If We Were Syrian shows what the Syrian death and displacement numbers would look like in each G7 coun- try. Around 10.5 million Syrians have now been displaced, and 200,000 have died. If Canada were Syria, every person in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Calgary, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and P.E.I would have fled their homes. Every person in Regina would be dead.
If these comparisons shock you, that’s because the carnage and exodus are shocking. And millions of people were shocked by If We Were Syrian. As were BuzzFeed, CTV, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and dozens of other foreign news outlets. There was support from World Vision and CARE. There were random offers to translate letters to politicians. There were website crashes from too much traffic. There were tweets.
Then there was nothing. Or next to nothing. People gave a damn; many governments didn’t even give that much. The UNHCR has received only half of its funding request. The United Kingdom has resettled only about a hundred Syrian refugees. America: only a few hundred. Our government: hung up on a radio host when asked how many have arrived.
I imagined the Syrian man standing in the valley, alone.
My failure to do much of political consequence isn’t noteworthy — except hundreds of humanitarian and advocacy organizations have simultaneously done infinitely more, infinitely better, online and off-line, to fatally insufficient effect. While their searing letters and sobering reports are lost on governments catering to xenophobic bases or cowing to xenophobic opposition, advocacy videos and photographs mesmerize people, connecting Syrians to us all.
Somehow, the emotional chasm between strangers is easier to bridge than the democratic chasm between citizens and their leaders.
So 20 million Syrians remain united by the sense that they are on their own. That no one is coming. While they ask, “Where is everyone?” we might ask our governments, “Where the hell are you?”