Humanitarian appeal for Syria

After more than two years of conflict and more than 70,000 deaths, including thousands of children …

After more than 5 million people being forced to leave their homes, including more than 1 million living as refugees in severely stressed neighboring countries …

After so many families being torn apart and communities razed, schools and hospitals wrecked, and water systems ruined …

After all this, there still seems an insufficient sense of urgency among the governments and parties that could end the cruelty and carnage in Syria.

We, leaders of UN agencies charged with dealing with the human costs of this tragedy, appeal to political leaders involved to fulfill their responsibilities to the people of Syria and to the future of the region.

We ask that they use their collective influence to insist on a political solution to this horrendous crisis before hundreds of thousands of more people lose their homes, lives and future in a region that is already at the tipping point.

Our agencies and humanitarian partners have been doing everything in our power. With the support of many governments and people, we have helped shelter more than 1 million refugees. We have helped provide access to food and other basic necessities to millions of people displaced by the conflict, to water and sanitation to more than 5.5 million people in Syria and neighboring countries, and to basic health services to millions of Syrians, including vaccinations against measles and polio to more than 1.5 million children.

But it is not enough. The needs are growing while our capacity to do more is diminishing, because of security and other practical limitations in Syria as well as funding constraints. We are precariously close, perhaps within weeks, to suspending some humanitarian support.

Our appeal today is not for more resources, needed as they are. We are appealing for something more important than funds.

To all involved in this brutal conflict and to all governments that can influence them, we appeal in the names of all those who have suffered, and the many more whose futures hang in the balance: Enough! Summon and use your influence, now, to save the Syrian people and save the region from disaster.

Valerie Amos, OCHA emergency relief coordinator; Ertharin Cousin, World Food Programme executive director; Antnio Guterres, UN high commissioner for refugees; Anthony Lake, UNICEF executive director;

Margaret Chan, WHO director-general.

Via e-mail

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(China Daily 05/06/2013 page9)