generalspeaking

Monday, November 04, 2013

Settling In Of Necessity

"We have been abandoned by the international community, and by the Arab world, just as Bashar al-Assad has abandoned the Syrian people, too.
"For 43 years the Assad family has been in power. This is longer even than the Prophet Muhammad was alive. This is enough. He should be made to leave."
Abdul Mujid Mohammad, Dara'a patriarch, Za'atari refugee camp, Jordan

"People are angry with the international community. People are furious because the world hasn't done anything, and then there is a sense we are about to do something, then we didn't do anything."
"The people here were saying, 'Where are your missiles? The money you are spending here is peanuts. You should be firing tomahawk missiles at Damascus, but you are not."
"We have saved lives. We have achieved all our standards, and that is something for the UN that is very rare. Za'atari is a success story, and yet we have had thousands of refugees screaming at us every day telling us we haven't achieved anything."
"Everybody came here to stay for a few months because Bashar was going to go, and the revolutionaries were going to win -- this was the psychology of the people. But it didn't happen."
Kilian Tobias Kleinschmidt, UN-German Za'atari commandant

Abdul Mujid Mohammad lives in the sprawling Jordanian camp. Among the over hundred-thousand refugees from Syria who have flooded into Jordan. And whose presence is breaking Jordan's spirit, its resourcefulness, its ability to cope, to host the refugees and still maintain their facade of neighbourly concern. Its ability to cope has been strained beyond its most miserable imagination; funding is scarce, unemployment is up, house rentals have increased, and Jordanians are beginning to stridently resent the presence of Syrians who appear to feel more entitled than the Jordanians.

Not that the Syrians want to be there. No people want to be away from their homes, their towns and villages, the country of their birth, where they are comfortable, familiar, confident that they are where they belong. Now they belong nowhere. They thought they would settle temporarily in Jordan until all the unpleasantness was finally solved and the conflict apprehended. Then they would return to their homes, their farms, their employment, the comfort of the familiar Now, they have had to re-adjust their assumptions.

Now they look about them and think: this place, this vast, flat desert with no green, no solid buildings, this is our home. For now. And so, just as Palestinian refugees flooded into Lebanon in 1948, complacently and bitterly making a place for themselves among the initially tolerant Lebanese, until they too became entitled and thought of Lebanon as their home, and Palestine as the dream of their past they yearned to return to, so too are the Syrians coming to terms with their unpleasant reality.

Work is hard to find. They had fled the fear, the torment, the violence, the oppression, and the ongoing assaults. Many of the refugees brought little with them, they are destitute. Others, choosing not to live in the camps because they were people of substance bringing their money with them, are also now facing destitution, since their money has finally run out. Just as rental prices are rising and they have been living on a bare minimum, no furniture, little clothing, scant employment opportunities, they find themselves beggars.

The UNHCR food packages represent bare necessity. For the Syrian refugees every day brings the new torture of uncertainty and fear for the future. They are angry with the international community, rage against their country's leader, feel fury against their Arab neighbours who scorn and detest what Bashar al-Assad has inflicted on his population, but do nothing on their own, waiting for the West to make decisions and take the action that they themselves decline to commit to.

And they take out their anger on the United Nations representatives. A riot broke out in the refugee camp when a platoon of the Jordanian police was ambushed and severely beaten, requiring hospitalization, accused by the refugees of taking part in a human trafficking operation involving young Syrian refugee woman. Two women had claimed to have been molested while they were in the custody of police. Relations are understandably strained.

On another plane, the refugees are settling down to assume a ghostly semblance of normalcy, perhaps to ensure that they can remain sane through their ordeal. An underground economy has seeped into the camp, with people making do for themselves, attempting to establish order and enterprise to energize themselves. Self-employed Syrians in the service trades have launched themselves under the authority of unofficial 'ministries'. Electricians tap into the UNHCR electrical grid, selling hookups to households living in tents and trailers.

Reuters

Shops have opened in the camp's new 'business district'. There are beauty parlours, appliance shops, video game rental stores, grocery stores and shawarma joints and Internet cafes. Life is being normalized. A wide variety of goods and services can be traded. Some refugees are suspected of fraud in multiple claims from the World Food Program ration system. Items meant for the use of the camp refugees can be found, including tents, being sold and used outside the camps in private enterprise.

Confoundingly, most of the children in the camp still don't attend the schools set up in the camps, on the negative side. Also negative is the appearance of episodes of vandalism and stealing. And there have been incidents of families "selling" their pubescent and adolescent daughers into marriage with wealthy Jordanians. Pilfered or illegally traded goods are sold at a markup.

"Supporting initiative is something that is very important. These are not traditional refugees, sitting and waiting for assistance. These people are moving. They are very energetic and innovative. The problem is to channel the energy in a good way, otherwise it becomes, vandalism, stealing, whatever."
Lucio Melandri, UNICEF humanitarian affairs specialist, Syria