World leaders pledge $ 10B in aid for refugees
World leaders pledged more than US$ 10 billion Thursday to help fund schools, shelter and jobs for refugees from Syria’s civil war, but also acknowledged that prospects for ending the conflict have rarely been worse with peace talks suspended, fighting intensifying and Russia and the West at loggerheads.
“The situation in Syria is as close to hell as we are likely to find on this Earth,” said United Nations SecretaryGeneral Ban Ki- moon.
U. S. Secretary of State John Kerry was no more upbeat. “After almost five years of fighting, it’s pretty incredible that as we come here in London in 2016, the situation on the ground is actually worse,” he said.
The one- day meeting, held under tight security, aspired to bring new urgency to the effort to help the 4.6 million Syrians who have sought refuge in neighbouring countries including Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. Another 6 million people or more are displaced within Syria, and a quarter of a million have been killed.
Previous calls for international donations have come up short, and the five- year war has driven a chaotic exodus of hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees to Europe. Thursday’s pledges are intended to slow that migration, by creating school places and secure jobs for Syrian refugees in the Middle East, and economic support for the overburdened host nations.
British Prime Minister David Cameron said participants had pledged almost $ 6 billion ( all figures US) for 2016, and another $ 5 billion by 2020. The figures for individual countries were not available.
Canada is to spell out its new aid targets “in a couple of days or so,” said International Development Minister Marie- Claude Bibeau, who attended the meeting.
Nicolas Moyer, executive director of the Humanitarian Coalition, a group of five Canadian agencies, said he’s confident the Canadian government will do more. But he said Canadians must as well.
“The reality is we are not able to fundraise ... for the Syrian crisis as much as we would like,” Moyer said. “The need far outstrips the donations coming in, the access to resources that we have from all sources.”
The government is matching donations from Canadians until the end of this month. The fund — announced by the previous Conservative government — was supposed to expire in December but was extended.
That didn’t trigger an influx of new cash because of several factors, said Moyer, including the nature of the conflict, the domestic response to the Syrian refugee crisis and the work of humanitarian agencies themselves.
“Humanitarian organizations in Canada have solicited their donor bases and those have responded in a very strong way, but after five years of engaging our constituencies and asking them for more, it’s not surprising that there is, across the country, a certain apathy to the topic,” he said.
The tally announced in London falls short of the $ 9 billion the UN and regional countries said was needed for 2016 alone, but it was a significant improvement on half- hearted previous fundraising efforts.
Last year’s conference, in Kuwait, raised just half its $ 7- billion target, forcing cuts to programs such as refugee food aid.
Aid groups welcomed the money, but slammed the international community for allowing the war to go on. Peter Maurer, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said the world had shown a “lack of political action and ambition to resolve the crisis.”
“Humanitarian aid is always just a quick fix, and never enough,” he said.
Russia gave the conference a cool reception, declining to send President Vladimir Putin or a senior minister to the event, attended by 30 heads of government or heads of state. Russia was represented by its ambassador to London, Alexander Yakovenko.
In Moscow meanwhile, The Russian military said Thursday that it has “reasonable grounds” to suspect that Turkey is making intensive preparations for a military invasion of neighbouring Syria.
Images of a checkpoint on the border between the Turkish town of Reyhanli and the town of Sarmada in Syria taken in late October and late January show a buildup of transportation infrastructure that could be used for moving in troops, ammunition and weapons, spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said.
“Maybe, in peacetime, these facts would indicate the expectation of trade turnover growth between the neighbouring countries,” Konashenkov said. “However, during wartime, in such a way the transport infrastructure is preparing on the eve of military intervention.”
A Turkish Foreign Ministry official declined to comment.