Press briefing by Martin Griffiths, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, New York, 7 July 2023 – Syrian Arab Republic

July 7, 2023 admin-dominor

Thanks for this opportunity. I’ll do the usual few opening remarks and, of course, be eager to take questions.

I was in Syria last week, had meetings with the authorities in Damascus – President [Bashar Al-]Assad and his Foreign Minister [Fayssal Mekdad] – and also in Amman on the way in with Foreign Minister [Ayman] Safadi. And the focus of these discussions was, of course, the crossborder resolution negotiations that are now very much underway here, very active at the moment. We’re three days away, I think, from the decision point for renewal of that resolution, which we are all very clear about, and the Secretary-General has been very clear about what he has as a strong position, a good 12 months and as many crossing points as possible – a natural position.

Also, looking into ensuring that we can look at increasing funding for Syria. Syria is 12 per cent funded in terms of its Humanitarian Response Plan halfway through the year. It’s a deeply, deeply shocking situation. And Syria is not the only place, as I will say in a while, where we have these very grave funding gaps – but 12 per cent funding, for example, means in the Syrian context, the World Food Programme, as they told me in Damascus, looking to cut food rations by 40 per cent for lack of $200 million. And UNRWA [UN Relief and Works Agency] as well, of course there’s a large Palestinian refugee population in Syria as elsewhere, I think they are 18 per cent funded at the moment halfway through the year. So it’s very real, these are real impacts, so we talked about how we could leverage a few more funds, particularly for the issue of early recovery. But the Syrian economy, of course, is suffering. The numbers of people beneath the poverty line, and we say it every month to the Security Council, now about 90 per cent of the Syrian population is below the poverty line. So the big story for me on Syria, among many, many other aspects of the tragedy of that conflict, is this absence of sufficient aid.

I won’t say anything to duplicate or amplify the statement by the Secretary-General, which I think [Deputy Spokesperson] Farhan [Haq] has provided on the Black Sea Initiative. We’re in the middle of that negotiation. I should just say it’s been about a month since the Kakhovka Dam, and we have managed to deliver many, many, almost daily convoys of clean water and medicine to the population in that area. We never managed to get across the line into the populations on the other side of the river, despite our best efforts. And, as I said at the time, including to Edie [Lederer], I think, that we haven’t seen the full consequences of that terrible act as yet because of the damage to that breadbasket, for example – never mind the worry about mines being removed and floating. It’s a hugely mined area. So I don’t think we’ve seen the humanitarian outcome yet from that terrible, terrible morning.

I want to say something, simply because it’s come recently very strongly to me in my daily life. I had the opportunity to discuss, in recent days, the situation with colleagues from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As you know, there was a Security Council discussion last week, I think it was. My colleague, [Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator] Bruno Lemarquis was here. And, in all the terrible, terrible tragedies of that country – I grew up there, in fact, myself, many years ago – in all those terrible tragedies, if you want to pick invidiously one, it would be the gender-based violence that is so utterly rampant in parts of the eastern Congo, the displaced people from Ituri. And I don’t want to repeat the statistics and the stories of the daily lives, of the women and girls who are suffering so much from the heedless behavior of those in control of their lives. But it’s a terrible shock, I hope, even to all of us who are used to hearing about shocks and tragedies and horrors. This is beyond, for me, imagining. This is beyond imagining.

I spoke a couple of days ago to Natalia Kanem, [Executive Director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA)], as well as to Cindy McCain, [Executive Director] of the World Food Programme.
We need to shine a light on this issue because it’s not just the DRC: the Secretary-General spoke about it in the context of Haiti, it’s also in Sudan. But the DRC, for me, epitomizes the appalling nature of man’s inhumanity, mostly to women and girls. I will give you one statistic on this [in] DRC: if the rate of gender-based violence, instances that we know about would continue, and it’s obviously going to be much more than what we actually know about, it would reach an extraordinary 125,000 cases this year. And a “case” is a terrible word, I think you would agree, to be used for what we are looking at.

I want to say a couple of words on Sudan and then something on climate, maybe climate first and ending with Sudan.

As you probably know better than me, and we all know it from here, June has been the hottest month in the history of meteorological data globally. And you know, for those of us with the work that I do, this is no surprise, because look at the extraordinary effect of climate on places like the Horn of Africa – the [fifth] failed rainy season in a row. As we keep saying, it’s unprecedented, and it isn’t over yet – and that’s just drought. We’re still coping with the earthquakes coming out of Syria and Türkiye. And, of course, Pakistan, kind of off the news, but is still coping with a massive rebuilding challenge in Pakistan from those floods that we visited with the Secretary-General last year. As a result of this very, very clear and unequivocal impact of climate on my world, on humanitarian needs, Oxfam, I think, has said that the impact of climate events on humanitarian needs has grown by 800 per cent in the last 20 years. I’ll make sure that we get the exact quote there for you on that.

We have stepped up, not just [the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs] OCHA, but the Inter-Agency Standing Committee of the humanitarian agencies that I represent, have stepped up our activities with relation to the COP [climate conference] process. And there is talk about possible field travel with the Emirati COP leaders before the COP and of course, going to the COP. And you know, with a man like our Secretary-General, there is no place in this building that isn’t aware of the terrible effect of climate on daily life. And our emphasis in the humanitarian [realm] going into COP will be to try to maximize the use of climate funds for frontline communities around the world, which are directly impacted by climate. So it’s about adaptation and resilience. And our offer being made in the discussions now with Member States is also to offer humanitarian funding channels – our own funds that we oversee and manage, which are very rapid disbursement mechanisms, as you can well imagine, being in the humanitarian world – as places where you could put through green climate funds to deliver to frontline communities. And as much as anything else, and I think perhaps I take this as even more important, to bear witness to what actually is the case in places like Somalia and elsewhere of climate on families displaced, destroyed, livelihoods eroded for good, and so forth. So we are putting a lot more emphasis on climate.

And now finally, Sudan. I shall in fact be leaving tomorrow to join [Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Sudan] Volker Perthes in an IGAD [Intergovernmental Authority on Development] Quartet meeting in Addis Ababa on Sudan. Sudan, and you will know all this better than me, but Sudan is a story which has not gotten any better in the last weeks at all. I was fortunate enough to have some direct exposure to it some weeks ago, but it just hasn’t gotten any better. Access to Darfur remains virtually nil. Getting in from Chad, Chadian authorities are being extremely helpful and cooperative to get us into West Darfur, they’re great, [but] the security situation in West Darfur is still extraordinarily dangerous. And getting aid from Port Sudan across Sudan, through El Obeid and into Darfur from the east is made all the more difficult by the fact that the battle zone, of course, has also moved south towards the Kordofans and the SPLM [Sudan People’s Liberation Movement].

So Sudan is, from my perspective, a place of no hope at the moment – and a place where there is only everything to do. And everything to do includes mobilizing the funding. We did make a splash, we did a funding event, and it brought in money. We need the money in the bank. Number two, access – cross-border access, definitely, from Egypt, from Chad, from Ethiopia, I’m sure that will be discussed on Monday – but access internally as well. And on that regard, number three, the complete partnership that I’ve talked before with you about between ourselves, the humanitarian agencies and civil society. Civil society is the frontline deliverers, for example, in Khartoum, those extraordinary people who’ve risked life and limb daily to help their local communities and their neighborhoods. We are lucky because they’re also helping us to deliver the aid that is being delivered, and aid is being delivered. ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] and MSF [Médecins Sans Frontières] have been present in Khartoum for some time, despite the dangers. The UN moved up towards Khartoum from Port Sudan. But it’s just not a pretty sight. It’s really, really, really, for me, in my position, not a place of greater safety. It’s a place of great terror, and the appalling crimes that have been carried out, and the displacement which has now reached just short of 3 million people – 2.8 million people have left their homes in Sudan in a matter of weeks, not all out of the country, but displaced. And we all know from everywhere that we work, displacement is the cri de coeur of these families because it leads them to much greater needs and much greater dependency.

Thank you.