By RANA F. SWEIS
Published: February 8, 2012
RAMTHA, JORDAN — This impoverished Jordanian city across the border from Dara’a, Syria, has become a temporary haven for Syrians who continue to flee the violence that has swept their country.

Residents and family members point out that it was the arrest and torture last March of more than a dozen schoolchildren in Dara’a for scribbling graffiti critical of President Bashar al-Assad that sparked the uprising against the Syrian regime.

Abu Hadi, 40, who used to work as a painter in Dara’a, arrived in Ramtha two months ago; his last name has been withheld for security reasons. His family, including his six children, has fled Dara’a but remain in hiding in Syria.

“I was wounded while assisting an injured protester and underwent surgery in a makeshift hospital,” he said. As a result of his injury, he suffers from the pain of having a metal rod in his leg.

“Syrian informers arrested the injured protester I was helping and he provided them with my name after being tortured so they began searching for me,” Abu Hadi said, as he sat in a rundown Ramtha mini-market owned by a Jordanian. “A day later I heard the protester who they interrogated was found in a garbage bin, his body dismembered and his eyes ripped out.”

“My wife called me and said they stormed my house, humiliated and threatened her and our children.”

The residents of Ramtha have strong tribal and family ties with people in Dara’a and some have taken shelter with relatives here. But others, like Abu Hadi, live in precarious conditions in cramped apartment buildings as they wait for the crisis to play out across the border. He reported major difficulties among the refugees in finding food and getting access to electric power.

The United Nations refugee agency has registered 3,063 Syrians in Jordan and says the number is rising. But this number does not reflect all the Syrians who have crossed the border, legally or illegally, since some do not register with the United Nations. Jordanian media have published several estimates, ranging from 5,000 to 15,000, but these cannot be verified.

The U.N. agency has pressed for an urban-based response to this refugee crisis, with the option of placing them in camps being a last resort.

On a visit to Jordan at the beginning of this month, the U.N. secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, warned that the situation in Syria was deteriorating and said that the international community must provide aid to the refugees.

“We will support the Jordanian efforts in offering humanitarian aid to the refugees so that Jordan does not feel they are left out in facing this challenge,” he said in Amman during a press conference with Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh.

Abu Hadi, who is in regular contact with army defectors and activists who fled Syria for Jordan as well as with rebels inside Syria, said: “I saw many people who were killed, dismembered and injured in front of my eyes by the Syrian Army.”

“The violence has increased,” he added, “and includes torture and rape.” His claims could not be independently verified.

The United Nations Children’s Fund, Unicef, issued a press release this month mentioning reports of “children being arbitrarily arrested, tortured and sexually abused while in detention.”

Abu Hadi said activists and rebels had told him that protests against the Syrian Army would no longer remain peaceful, especially after the latest bombardments of the city of Homs in which scores of people have died.

In Abu Hadi’s view, civil war has begun in Syria, and will likely worsen even if the Assad regime falls. “Now at the checkpoints they look at your I.D. to see who you are,” he said. “Being Sunni or Shiite or Alawite can determine whether you live or die.”

Many Syrian refugees in Ramtha remain fearful of speaking about their experiences, fearing for their safety and for family members they left behind. Only when other refugees or local Jordanians whom they trust persuade them of the importance of revealing their current living conditions in Jordan and what they witnessed before they left Syria do they agree to speak.

Abu Qusay, 29, and his family arrived here recently from Homs and live in together in a one-room hovel. His three sons, all under the age of 4, looked subdued and unresponsive, and Abu Qusay, who also declined to give his family name, said that the eldest one sleeps nearly all day.

“If the boys heard anyone knocking on the door before we came here from Homs they would be terrified because they would think it’s the Syrian Army,” he said. “Now all we do is watch the news together and think about how we will survive economically.”

His wife, Um Qusay, 25, said life had become unbearable in Homs as gunfire and shelling became constant. “Leaving the house to buy bread meant we could die on the way,” she said.

Abu Samir, 45, another Syrian refugee in Ramtha who would did not want his family name published, recounted how he had been wounded by Syrian Army soldiers who stormed Dara’a early in the uprising last spring.

He said it was 1 a.m. when he awoke to the sound of gunfire and saw hundreds of soldiers surrounding his neighborhood. Young men began calling to each other from windows and rooftops to come out witness the violence taking place. Abu Samir said he was wounded as soon as he stepped outdoors.

“I believe that several of the snipers were Iranians and from Hezbollah,” he said. This claim could not be verified, but several refugees and former rebels said the snipers did not speak like Syrians and wore green bandanas, a hallmark of Hezbollah. That evening, while Abu Samir was still recovering from his wounds, a local radio station announced that he had died.

“I was traveling abroad for work, exporting vegetables to the United Arab Emirates, and after appearing on a television interview three months later I became a wanted man by the Syrian forces,” he said. Now he lives in Ramtha, where he continues to export vegetables and meets with other refugees and rebels fleeing the violence across the border.

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By RANA F. SWEIS
Published: January 25, 2012

AMMAN — A year ago, a video surfaced of a 6-year-old boy, Ahmad al-Saket, standing in front of a large classroom chalkboard crying, shaking and pleading for mercy. A teacher carrying a wooden stick in her hand is scolding him in front of other students for writing the number nine incorrectly.The video went viral, and sparked a fierce debate.“A lot of students hate school because of her and I also hate school,” Ahmad said in an interview published in the newspaper Al Arab al-Yawm shortly after the incident.

The video went viral, and sparked a fierce debate.

“A lot of students hate school because of her and I also hate school,” Ahmad said in an interview published in the newspaper Al Arab al-Yawm shortly after the incident.

A survey in 2007 by the United Nations Children’s Fund, or Unicef, found that more than half of Jordanian children were physically abused or exposed to violent behavior by their parents or teachers.

“After the study was published there was real commitment brought on the issue and awareness was raised on the plight of children across the country,” Dominique Hyde, the Unicef representative in Jordan, said in an interview in Amman.

More recent nationwide surveys have not been conducted, but the number of reported cases of child abuse is rising, experts say, reflecting factors that include growing economic hardship and poverty, increased awareness among abuse victims, social acceptance of corporal punishment and a legal system that condones some forms of domestic violence.

“It’s not like a vaccination,” Mrs. Hyde said. “Having an immunization campaign across the country is not easy — but it is, compared to reducing child abuse in all its forms.”

In 2011, nearly 70 percent of Jordan’s population was aged under 30. Of that group, 37 percent were 15 or younger.

Residents in Amman and Zarqa, the two largest cities in Jordan, said they perceived poverty and unemployment as the main cause of violence in their communities, according to a study published last year by the Information and Research Center of the King Hussein Foundation, a part of the National Task Force for Children.

The unemployment rate in Jordan is on the rise. It was 11.8 in 2010 and 12.1 percent last year, according to the department of statistics, and the United Nations said in a briefing last year that it considered poverty one of the biggest challenges facing Jordan.

This month, King Abdullah declared that the economy remained a main focus for comprehensive government reform and development efforts.

“The economic situation is one of several stress or risk factors that together may lead to child abuse,” said Zeina Abu Innab, manager of psychosocial counseling services at the Jordan River Foundation, a nonprofit organization that also runs a child protection program, including a help line.

Despite some progress in the well-being of children across the region, income and gender inequities remain, keeping many children in a situation of poverty and vulnerability. The Unicef study from 2007 found that at least one in eight children in Jordan was financially exploited, most often by neighborhood adults.

“The first victims of poverty are children,” Mrs. Hyde said. “In all countries when you see an economic downturn, the first people to get effected are children and it can affect education, health and a variety of different aspects of a child’s life.”

In addition to economic factors, social attitudes that condone verbal and physical abuse as a form of discipline have endured. The study found that more than half of parents believed that it was sometimes important to use corporal punishment to maintain discipline at school and more than 80 percent believed hitting was justifiable when a child refused to perform an assigned task.

After the national survey on the prevalence of violence against children was released, a campaign called “Ma’an,” meaning “together,” was started to reduce child abuse by teachers. A year after the start of the campaign, designed to reach all public schools, there was an 11 percent drop in physical violence at schools, Mrs. Hyde said.

“Parents believe that hitting their children will instill fear and prevent them from wrongdoing,” said Mohammad Shobaki, a consultant psychiatrist. “Children spend most of their time at home or at school and if they’re exposed to violence it will effect their development in every way,” he added.

The legal and social systems set up to protect children against family violence sometimes fail, as in the case of two boys, Yazan and Qusai, who died in 2009 as a result of severe physical abuse by their families.

“We are talking about cases that could have been prevented if the system worked,” said Hani Jahshan, a forensic pathologist at the National Institute of Forensic Medicine. In December, he served as chairman of Jordan’s first national conference on violence against children.

In both of the boys’ deaths, he said, “it was revealed that there was an error either in the system itself or lack of communication between the stakeholders and the police.”

Mohammad Meqdady, family programs manager at the National Council for Family Affairs, said that “even if some institutions do their part, others are not aware of it and it causes repetitive procedures, lack of information sharing and delays in general.” The council itself was established to create clear roles and encourage cooperation between institutions working to combat family violence.

Similarly, legal gaps hinder the protection of children. Article 62 of the Jordanian penal code recognizes the use of disciplinary beating of children by their parents.

“Even though Article 62 was modified, it needs to be removed all together,” said Mr. Jahshan, the forensic pathologist. Amendments to Article 62, proposed last year, are pending approval in the upper and lower houses of Parliament.

The office of Mizan, a nongovernmental organization that provides legal aid and representation in court cases, has also recorded a rise in the number of inquiries and cases involving family violence.

A child-protection law passed in 2008 does not explicitly make domestic violence illegal. The law specifies punishment for abuses against children, and conviction for the rape of a child aged under 15 can carry the death penalty. But gaps remain in a legal system that allows for lenient sentencing in child abuse cases, particularly in cases involving family. The penal code gives judges the ability to reduce a sentence when the victim’s family does not press charges.

Meanwhile, Ahmad al-Saket, whose maltreatment was caught on video, still attends the public school where he was subjected to abuse by his teacher, according to his father, Radwan al-Saket.

The teacher became the subject of an investigation by the independent National Center for Human Rights in Jordan.

“Although the teacher is no longer there,” Mr. Saket said, his son “is still frightened and sometimes I have to push him to go to school.”

The school “remains in bad shape, but I cannot afford to move him and I have nine other children to take care of as well.”

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