A Syrian psychiatrist on his country's future

AMMAN --I spent Wednesday afternoon talking to a Syrian psychiatrist in Amman who is treating refugees.  Dr. Mohammad Abo Hilal is a well-known figure and he escaped to Jordan after being arrested last year at his practice in Damascus. He was tortured by the regime.

He generously gave me a couple of hours to talk to his busy team of Syrian psychologists at a little clinic in a residential neighbourhood of Jordan’s capital.

They were hospitable, and along with cups of hot Turkish coffee they shared horrific stories of how their patients had been brutalized by the war.

At the end I told them how sorry I was that Syria was being torn apart and hoped the conflict would end soon. It was inadequate, of course.

What could anyone possibly say? The doctors smiled politely. They had heard this many times before from outsiders.  Dr. Abo Hilal said he would like to talk politics for a few minutes. He was calm but could not contain the bitterness in his voice.

“You are a journalist from the western world and I will not let you leave without giving you this message to send to Canadians. We asked for freedom and democracy. We thought that the free world would help us. We told diplomats that if they did not help us more violent people, more radical people would take over Syria. And the free world will see sectarianism and al Qaeda. America invaded Iraq over one fake statement,” he said, referring to the discredited claim that Saddam Hussein could launch weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes.

“We have produced a million videos that show people dying and suffering but it has not helped. So now we are recording them for history, not help from the free world. You tell us about human rights and women rights? But you in the free world have lost your legitimacy.

This UN Security Council is a non-democratic gang. The Syrian people have had a civilization for 7,000 years.  After 50 years of this malignant regime we will end it and start contributing to the world’s civilization. We will show the world how wrong they were.”

Hamida Ghafour is a foreign affairs reporter at The Star. She has lived and worked in the Middle East and Asia for more than 10 years and is the author of a book on Afghanistan. Follow her on Twitter @HamidaGhafour

Meet Syria's one millionth refugee

Bushra is the UNHCR's one millionth Syrian refugee. She fled to Lebanon with her small son Omar. (Photo courtesy Greg Beals/UNHCR)

AMMAN--UNHCR today registered its one millionth Syrian refugee. Her name is Bushra and she fled to Lebanon with her small son Omar. 

Last December the UN predicted there would be one million refugees by June. But the figure has been reached three months earlier than expected which means the crisis is escalating quickly.

Bushra is typical of those fleeing the civil war because it is disproportionately affecting women and children, who make up three quarters of the refugees. She told reporters,   in the Lebanese city of Tripoli:

"Our situation is so bad, everything is so expensive, we can't find any work. The situation is so bad, I live with 20 other people in one room."

Relief organizations are overwhelmed by the scale of the crisis and lack of funding to cope with it.

Here in Jordan there are now 420,000 Syrians. I spoke to Dominique Hyde the head of UNICEF’s Jordan office. By the middle of this month the agency will not be able to provide water to Jordanian refugee camps, she told me.

“That could lead to cholera outbreaks,” she said.

UNICEF may have to cut back on its vaccination program for the refugee children.
"Something has got to give," she told me.

But the Red Cross believes the figure is higher because not all of the refugees have been registered or assisted.

Disaster manager Peter Garrett said: “The escalation of this refugee crisis is shocking, but we know that the true figure is likely to be higher.  Some Syrians will not have registered as refugees, either from fear or pride. We know that the Jordanian Red Crescent have come across families who are worried about giving their names to anyone official. People are living in urban areas, blending in with the local population. While we often see images of camps, the reality in Jordan is that two thirds of refugees are living in rented accommodation or makeshift tents. There is a hidden refugee crisis within the towns and cities of all Syria’s border countries.”

Hamida Ghafour is a foreign affairs reporter at The Star. She has lived and worked in the Middle East and Asia for more than 10 years and is the author of a book on Afghanistan. Follow her on Twitter @HamidaGhafour.

Two years on: Syria's children in peril

Children take part in a protest against Syria's President Bashar Assad in Bustan al-Qasr district of Aleppo March 1.(Giath Taha/Reuters)

It started with a crackdown that shocked the world: 15 children thrown in jail and tortured for splashing anti-regime graffiti on a wall in a Syrian farm town.

The arrests in drought-stricken Daraa on March 6, 2011, led to swelling protests and ever-worsening repression from President Bashar Assad. The children – their fingernails torn out and their bodies beaten and burned – were released two weeks later. But it was only a preview of what was to come.

“This deplorable overreaction marked the beginning of the regime’s public attack against its children and its people,” said Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird this week.

Since the Daraa events, children have seen constant violence, and many more have been seized, tortured and gravely wounded in bombings. More than 3,500 have been killed, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tallies reports from doctors and activists who record the names and numbers of the dead.

The survivors are at risk of losing their futures to homelessness and the collapse of the education system.

The UN children’s agency UNICEF says that “Syria once prided itself on the quality of its schools. Now it’s seeing the gains it made over the years rapidly reversed.”

In Deraa alone, 300 schools have been damaged or destroyed, and at least 2,400 throughout the country. Over 1,500 are shelters for displaced people. Teachers have fled or been killed, and in the former economic powerhouse of Aleppo, school attendance has dropped to 6 per cent. The schools that manage to stay open are often overcrowded, with up to 100 to a class.

UNICEF has opened “school clubs” in major cities and towns that are giving children remedial classes and a badly needed recreation break. But like most charitable programs for Syria it’s underfunded – its educational budget of $20 million has so far received only $3 million.

Canada has committed a modest $48 million to aid for Syria. Some countries have yet to ante up. But leaders who worry about the future could do worse that investing in the education that prepares children for eventual peace – rather than generational war.

Olivia Ward has covered conflicts, politics and human rights as a correspondent and bureau chief from the former Soviet Union to the Balkans, Northern Ireland, the Middle East and South Asia.She has won both national and international awards, collaborated on two Emmy-winning films and is one of the few journalists to have a war requiem written to her work.

 

Starving Syrians fall victim to deadly bakery bombings

 Syrian women wait outside a bakery shop to buy bread in Maaret Misreen, near Idlib, Syria in December 2012. As the civil war drags on,  Syrians now spend hours in line every day for a few loaves of bread and petrol at soaring prices. (AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen, File)

Bread is the staff of life – and in Syria the stuff of death.

For months, the regime of President Bashar al Assad has been pounding local bakeries  to punish suspected opposition sympathizers, regardless of whether they are armed fighters or civilians.

Mainly, they are hungry Syrians desperate for a break in the daily attacks to find food for their families. On Thursday Al Arabiya English tweeted that the regime bombed 86 bakeries last month, according to Moaz al-Khatib, who leads the Syrian Opposition Council.

There’s no confirmation of the allegations. But they come at a time when the UN is raising the alarm that the number of refugees fleeing Syria will soon reach 1 million – many of them heading for the borders because the food supply has broken down and their meager resources are at an end.

According to the World Food Program, millions of Syrians are living on less than subsistence rations. When all else fails, bread is the last cheaply available staple. “A growing number of main breadwinners have become unemployed and soaring food and fuel prices across the country have also exacerbated the situation,” it says. The agency, working with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, is currently providing food aid for 1.5 million people – and the need is growing steadily.

Attacks on the bakeries that are still operating are making the situation more dangerous for those who remain in the country. A Human Rights Watch report last August documented 10 attacks that month alone, calling them “deliberate, indiscriminate and disproportionate.”

Since then hundreds more civilians have died for the “crime” of lining up for bread. Meanwhile, Assad has signalled he may be ready to talk peace with the opposition. But that’s months too late for those who have buried relatives. Bombing and starving his way to a settlement has failed, and evidence of war crimes is mounting. Assad will have no easy way out of the morass of mayhem he has created. While his people are running on empty, the dossiers are already full.

Olivia Ward has covered conflicts, politics and human rights as a correspondent and bureau chief from the former Soviet Union to the Balkans, Northern Ireland, the Middle East and South Asia. She has won both national and international awards, collaborated on two Emmy-winning films and is one of the few journalists to have a war requiem written to her work..

Amman's struggle to cope with Syrian refugees

AMMAN-The growing number of Syrian refugees is putting a huge strain on the Jordanian capital’s resources as the latest UN figures showed that the cash strapped kingdom received 60,000 refugees in February alone.

Refugee camps such as Zaatari in the north are meant to serve those fleeing the civil war but 80 per cent of the 300,000 Syrians head for urban centres, including Amman, looking for jobs and housing. As a result public infrastructure is struggling to cope.

Traffic jams continue into the late hours of the night because of increased number of cars. Water supplies, always scarce, are being depleted. Many state schools are overcrowded with up to 50 students in a classroom.

Jordanians, a welcoming people who have absorbed previous waves of hundreds of thousands of refugees, including Iraqis after the 2003 U.S. invasion and Palestinians after 1948, are increasingly fed up.

Abu Mohamad, whose 11-year-old son will be enrolled in a public school with 50 other students including Iraqis and Syrians said Jordanians were also suffering.

“How can a teacher teach 50 students?” he asked. “The quality of the school will not be high.”

Outside a local charity Kitab al Sunna, crowds of Syrian women and men arrive every morning waving identity papers and begging for food gas stoves to heat dilapidated apartments where several families share a home. Many are turned away because there are not enough supplies.

“I need money for rent, I cannot work and I have five children,” said one man, lifting up his shirt to reveal a thick scar across his stomach, which he said was from shrapnel.

Staff at one hospital told the charity International Relief Committee recently that they were so overloaded, patients may have to be turned away unless the emergency room and pharmacy were expanded.

The vast majority of the Syrians arriving in Amman were poor and uneducated which meant they needed extra help, said General Ali Shukri, a former advisor to the late King Hussein.

“Jordan does not have the luxury to provide out of its own pocket,” he said. “In the long term we do not know what is going to happen because we have never seen a situation like this in the Middle East.”

At a donor’s conference in Kuwait last year $1.5 billion was pledged by various nations to help the Syrians but only $200 million has actually arrived, Valerio Amos, the top UN humanitarian chief told reporters.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres told the UN Security Council on Wednesday that Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq were paying a heavy price for shouldering the burden of the Syrian refugees.

“The refugee crisis is accelerating at a staggering pace, month after month. Countries of asylum have been very generous and kept their borders open, but their capacity to do so is under severe pressure."

Hamida Ghafour is a foreign affairs reporter at The Star. She has lived and worked in the Middle East and Asia for more than 10 years and is the author of a book on Afghanistan. Follow her on Twitter @HamidaGhafour

Syria keeps UN post in spite of diplomatic snubs

Syrian Ambassador to the UN Bashar Jaafari at the U.N Security Council in New York Jan. 31, 2012.  The Arab League asked the council to adopt a resolution endorsing an Arab plan for  President Bashar Assad to transfer powers to his deputy. (Mike Segar/Reuters)

Back in the day – the early 1990s – I shared an UN office with NPR’s veteran diplomatic correspondent Linda Fasulo, overlooking the Trusteeship Council.

To be honest, it wasn’t much of an office: more of a dank, closet-sized radio booth. But by then the council wasn’t much either. Conceived along the lines of the cavernous auditorium housing the UN General Assembly, it was draped in heavy velvet curtains that lent a musty Soviet air to the room, and prudently blocked one of the best views of New York’s East River, in case diplomats should be distracted from their duties by the sight of puttering pleasure crafts.

“When decolonization began,” Fasulo recorded in An Insider’s Guide to the UN, “most of Africa was controlled by a few Western nations, while the Netherlands, United Kingdom and France ruled large parts of Asia. Japan had ruled Korea for half a century.” And there were far-flung islands also under the stewardship of Western countries.

Not surprisingly, the curtain fell on the Trusteeship Council when the penultimate trustee territory, Palau, gained its independence in 1994.

But a vestige of anti-colonialism remains – the UN’s Special “Committee of 24” on decolonization, which keeps an eye on 16 “non-self-governing territories” like the Falklands, the British Virgin Islands, Gibraltar and the Western Sahara.

And who better to oversee their progress toward freedom and civil rights than Bashar Assad of Syria?

In one of those ironies that make the world body such an easy target for its foes, Assad’s envoy Bashar Ja’afari – a French-educated career diplomat --  was unanimously reappointed this month as the committee’s rapporteur, charged with upholding  democratic rights in the last outposts of colonial rule.

Assad’s regime – now in a war that has left 70,000 dead, and counting – has made much of the event, having few international plaudits to boast of. Predictably, U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice called it “revolting and absurd,” and the Geneva-based UN Watch added, “indefensible and an insult to Syria’s victims.”

Ja’afari  is in good company at committee meetings. Among the 28 or so members are colleagues from Iran, Ethiopia, Russia, China, Cuba and Venezuela. How did they all get there?  Not, as some UN foes believe, because of a conspiratorial coup at the world body by human rights abusers. It’s a much more mundane combination of diplomatic entrenchment, laxity and cronyism that is endemic in its arcane system.

It allows regional groups to appoint their choices of committee candidates without going to messy elections. So the Old Boys Network works overtime, and democracy not at all. “Clearly, regional groups have fallen down on the job when they put forward embarrassingly inappropriate candidates to represent them,” an unnamed Western dip told the Washington Post’s correspondent and Turtle Bay blogger Colum Lynch.

Also clear: the embarrassing gap between the battlefield and the Diplomats’ Dining Room.

Olivia Ward has covered conflicts, politics and human rights as a correspondent and bureau chief from the former Soviet Union to the Balkans, Northern Ireland, the Middle East and South Asia. She has won both national and international awards, collaborated on two Emmy-winning films and is one of the few journalists to have a war requiem written to her work.  

       

PHOTO: Underground tunnel in Syria

Syrian children, walk out of an underground tunnel that their father made with a jackhammer for shelter from Syrian government forces shelling and airstrikes, at Jirjanaz village, in Idlib province, Syria, Feb. 28. Across northern Syria, rebels, soldiers, and civilians are making use of the country's wealth of ancient and medieval antiquities to protect themselves from Syria's two-year-old war. The shelters are built of thick stone that has already withstood centuries, and are often located in strategic locations overlooking towns and roads. (Hussein Malla/AP)

Syria's angry merchants backing the war: one view from Amman

A Syrian refugee tries to get a signal to make phone calls at Al Zaatri refugee camp in the Jordanian city of Mafraq. (REUTERS/Muhammad Hamed )

I am in Jordan this week looking at the Syrian refugee crisis.

Just today, 5,339 crossed the border into Jordan, according to the latest figures from the UN refugee agency. A total of 300,000 Syrians are now in Jordan and the kingdom has become a listening post for the war.

You see the cross-section of Syrian life here, from Islamists to the secular middle class and everyone in between.

But one class that is largely missing is the wealthy merchant class, particularly those from Damascus and Aleppo who formed the backbone of the economy. Most of them have gone to Dubai, Cairo or Beirut.

Here is an observation from Labib Hamkowi, a Jordanian professor I met today who is also a businessman in the oil and gas sector:

When Hafez Assad, an air force officer seized power in 1970 and set up the dynasty his son Bashar is now struggling to hang on to, he struck a deal with the merchants, Hamkowi told me.

“Hafez told them they could keep their businesses but he would govern Syria. The merchants agreed to the arrangement. Now, when his stupid son took over his people wanted to make money. He took control of 65 per cent of all business contracts.”

This included everything from telecommunications to soft drinks. Hamkowi continued: “This class of merchants are angry and some are financing the anti-regime side. The religious forces are at the front of the war but unimportant in one sense. Fundamentally this war is about economics.”

Hamida Ghafour is a foreign affairs reporter at The Star. She has lived and worked in the Middle East and Asia for more than 10 years and is the author of a book on Afghanistan. Follow her on Twitter @HamidaGhafour

War in the heart of Syria's capital

(Cikgu Yaha Alam/Facebook)

This is a photo of the aftermath of a bomb blast in Damascus today posted on Facebook by a resident who lives there and says he hid in the basement of a neighbour's house.

Dozens of people have been killed and more than 200 injured. The car bomb exploded near the headquarters of President Bashar Assad's party in the upmarket area of Maazra. 

This area of Damascus has been so far relatively insulated from the war.  

READ MORE: Dozens killed in massive car bomb in Syrian capital

Hamida Ghafour is a foreign affairs reporter at The Star. She has lived and worked in the Middle East and Asia for more than 10 years and is author of a book on Afghanistan. Follow her on Twitter @HamidaGhafour

PHOTO: Life goes on in Azaz refugee camp

A Syrian refugee has his hair cut at a makeshift barber shop at the Azaz refugee camp along the Syrian-Turkish border on Feb. 19. Some 15,000 refugees, mainly from the northern regions of Syria, are living in this camp with no running water or electricity. (CHRIS HUBY/AFP/Getty Images)

The Star in Syria: Factions emerge among rebel fighters