When the world’s attention skitters from one country’s war to another, it means fresh conflicts temporarily replace relatively older ones for their newsworthiness. In this region, the indefatigable war in Syria, now into its third hopeless year, is causing tens of deaths a day of men, women and children which, abjectly, have been reduced to ticker tape news.
Let us take a look at Syria’s figures of war: About 175,000 people are dead, more than three million have fled to become refugees and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees predicts that if the war continues, about 4,250,000 will become internally displaced persons (IDP) by the end of this year. It is a scale of disaster that calls for more than the enervating pace of diplomacy afoot at the moment. Political solutions aside, what the international community needs to consider as a burning obligation is to create mechanisms that will ensure uninterrupted and effective aid disbursement to Syrians, within and outside their country.
In every conflict, humanitarian imperatives have been superseded by political parlaying. But the fact remains that while the latter act is playing itself out, millions of Syrian refugees are in dire need of food, clothing and shelter so that they can survive on a daily basis. The UN recently mandated a cross-border aid disbursement scheme for Syrian refugees and IDPs which, if effective, could resuscitate the hopes of millions languishing in refugee camps. The world cannot allow more Syrians to die or be displaced because it cannot devise ways to resolve the crisis or provide them aid effectively.
