Life

Aid agencies' work won't end when peace comes to Syria

With no sign of resolution of the conflict in Syria, Barry Andrews says that, for aid agencies and the displaced people they serve, the eventual end of the war will in many ways just be the beginning

Syrians gather at a border crossing with Turkey at the weekend as thousands of people fled a government offensives and Russian airstrikes
Syrians gather at a border crossing with Turkey at the weekend as thousands of people fled a government offensives and Russian airstrikes Syrians gather at a border crossing with Turkey at the weekend as thousands of people fled a government offensives and Russian airstrikes

LAST year may well go down as the year of the refugee. Sixty million people, the UNHCR told us in August, had fled their home country in search of refuge, while millions more had been displaced within their native borders by war, natural disaster and the effects of climate change, including famine.

The image of little Aylan Kurdi on a Turkish beach is one that will forever symbolise 2015, the year that the consequences of the almost five-year-old Syrian civil war became manifest in Europe.

Now, as we approach the fifth anniversary of the start of the conflict next month, the numbers in relation to Syria have become staggering.

Two hundred and fifty thousand people have been killed, as best we can tell, though the UN has stopped counting so it may be far more. By December, four million Syrians had fled the country – sheltering, mainly, in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon – and a further seven million were internally displaced.

Aid agencies spent much of last year expanding their programmes within Syria – trying to provide the essentials of life to the people who remain there – and supporting the neighbouring countries, however they could, with the growing numbers of refugees.

Working with refugees and internally displaced people is nothing new to the humanitarian sector, however. And sadly, the work doesn’t end when peace arrives.

While it is essential that we focus on supporting people during the current crisis, it is equally vital that we remain behind to help people rebuild their lives when it is safe for them to return to their homes.

This is the under-publicised part of what aid agencies do – quietly building resilience and capacity in poor communities so that they can, in the future, withstand crises and build sustainable futures.

Take northern Uganda, as an example. Many of the vulnerable communities in places like Koromojo were once displaced too – refugees in their own homeland.

In the mid-noughties, aid agencies like Goal provided shelter for millions of women and children every night as they sought protection from the depravations of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). From 1986 to 2006, the LRA, led by Joseph Kony, terrorised much of Uganda, taking children in particular to become child soldiers.

For up to 20 years, the fields that surrounded towns like Agago were full of displaced people living in temporary accommodation, unable to return to their villages and farms.

When the LRA finally retreated beyond Uganda’s borders, the work changed from protection and other support to helping people relocate from the camps, and from lives that had, by then, become normal to them. As ever, it was the elderly, the child-headed households and other vulnerable people who found the process of leaving the camps and moving ‘home’ particularly trying.

And home was a very different place by then. The land had not been cultivated for those 20 years of conflict, and younger people had no practical experience of agriculture.

Even now, the communities of northern Uganda have an enormous task to rebuild cohesion, having lived separate and disparate lives for two decades in different camps throughout the region. But by working within those communities and facilitating ‘community conversations’, it is possible to allow people to work through their differences and establish coherence and mutual support once again.

This is all quiet work that, while essential, is done far from the gaze of television cameras and the frenzy of the latest crisis.

Aid agencies that have worked with refugees and displaced communities in places like Uganda have developed and are continuing to develop expertise that will have to be deployed in the future in Syria.

While the circumstances and levels of development are very different, no-one should underestimate the challenge that the world will face in trying to resettle 11 million displaced people in Syria once this war ends.

:: Barry Andrews is CEO of Goal.