Ann Lundberg and journalist Roy Gutman in Istanbul.
A few weeks ago my husband and I visited our journalist friend in Istanbul who is reporting on the war in Syria, especially the plight of the war refugees. Roy Gutman, with McClatchy Newspapers, has just won a Polk Award for his reporting on Syria. He also won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the 1993 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where he provided the first documented reports of concentration camps.
We were joined at lunch by Paul Raymond, a young British translator of Arabic, and a Syrian elementary school teacher from Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city. Mohammed Gharib, 43, who had just traveled 18 hours on a bus to meet us, volunteers as a camp manager at the Atma Camp in Syria, just over the Turkish border. This refugee camp contains about 30,000 refugees in rebel-held territory, and therefore receives no help from international aid organizations.
There is no electricity at Atma, no tents for newcomers, one blanket for every four people, not even fly sheets on the tents to keep out the rain.
When Roy visited in February, 50 toilets served 30,000 people. Four doctors worked in a makeshift clinic, which was so short of supplies that they had to split tongue-depressors!
Medicines are desperately needed. Twenty-five babies are born each week, being delivered in the Atma town hospital. But there are absolutely no clothes for the newborns.
Roy’s story that ran in McClatchy in March really moved Jeff and me, as we had just welcomed two infant grandchildren into our family. We sent some money for baby clothes, but it was a drop in a massive bucket.
The McClatchy photographs of the camp were shown at a gathering of the photographer’s family and friends and $8,000 was raised, and the impression is that more money could be easily raised.
But there is a much bigger problem. There is still no agency, organization or charitable group to oversee the management of the camp, the distribution of funds, and no 501-C-3 non-profit designation for donors to take a tax-deduction for a charitable gift.
UN agencies like World Food Program are charged with feeding desperate populations, like refugees, and the UN High Commissioner of Refugees (UNHCR) provides tents and blankets elsewhere, including Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.
But inside Syria, international aid organizations such as UNICEF, would have to have approval from the Assad government to work in Syria. Private organizations may do discreet cross-border runs, but understandably they are not regular or predictable.
In rebel-held territories, the refugee camps — like Atma — are not visited even by the International Red Cross.
At our lunch in Istanbul, Mohammed described to Jeff and me how the Saudis had first established the Atma Camp and how it had then been sustained by donations from wealthy Syrian businessmen and expats, at about $15,000 a month.
But that source dried up. They contributed to an organization called Union of Syrians Abroad, which is registered in Austria, Germany and Romania — but not in Turkey.
Paul, our translator, explained why that was important. On the day after that Jeff and I arrived in Istanbul, on May 11, the Turkish border town nearest to Atma camp, Reyhanli, had been bombed, causing 52 deaths and blocks and blocks of buildings destroyed. Paul had been there and reported on the rage the Turks, who felt that their support of Syrian refugees had made them a target.
He had been in Reyhanli to assess the potential of Southern Turkey as a place to transmit foreign aid over the border into Atma. However, he learned of a new obstacle to getting assistance into northern Syria. In order to funnel support to the refugees in Syria, a charitable organization had to be registered in Turkey. And no international organizations were allowed to be registered in that country.
Furthermore, in order for a desperately ill or wounded person from Atma to enter a Turkish hospital, the patient had to have a Turkish camp ID card. No one in the Atma camp in Syria had such a card.
As recently as a month ago, Mohammed said, all that was needed was a referral from a doctor at Atma, and the Turkish medical centers would welcome the patient.
The incredible obstacles facing this largest refugee camp in Syria is just a drop in the ocean of need. UNHCR and U.S. Aid both estimate 1.5 million Syrians have fled to other countries: Jordan, which is being overwhelmed by the refugee population, Lebanon, Turkey, and even to Iraq, which had recently sent its own flood of war-torn refugees into Syria.
Inside the country there are, according to U.S. Aid, 4.25 million homeless people and 6.8 million who are hungry and in need. However, the UNHCR numbers in March were greatly underestimated, as they only counted six out of 14 provinces then.
Jeff asked Mohammed, whose home in Aleppo is constantly shelled, “Why don’t you move to a safer location, either out of the country or into a camp?”
He said that five of his 10 children had been killed. The others hang on, keep attending school, and indeed his wife will not leave the family home.
Mohammed explains that she says, “Being alive or dead — it’s all the same.”