Syrian Refugees Strain Resources in Jordan
By RANA F. SWEIS
Published: January 2, 2013

MAFRAQ, JORDAN — Shaking with fear, Abu Abdel Hadi tripped and fell three times in the dark as he fled across the desolate desert from Syria into Jordan.

The 65-year-old was clutching his grandchildren, intent on shielding them from snipers who often lie in wait along the border. But that night the family — 19 members in all — made it safely through the danger zone.

Now all they dream about is going back. While they wait, they are housed in a tiny, freezing apartment with no windows, cracked walls and worn carpets piled on top of one other.

Their most recent threat: frigid winter weather. The temperatures are down to 0 degrees Celsius (32 Fahrenheit) at night, and prices of basic commodities, including gasoline and electricity, are rising.

“We suffer from the cold and we are poor here but we are safe,” said Abu Abdel Hadi, whose last name is being withheld for safety reasons. “When we came here we thought we would stay one week, maybe one month, but it’s been six months and now we learn to live with the uncertainty.”

About 80 percent of Syrian refugees across the region are not housed in camps, according to the U.N. refugee agency. Many of them live in grim apartments along narrow dirt roads, blending in with poor Jordanians.

Jordan has drawn waves of refugees in the past, but this one is particularly severe. The flood of refugees is straining the limited resources of the Jordanian government and aid agencies, though agencies say they are also trying to steer funds to poor Jordanians. Foreign assistance is only trickling in, leaving many in need.

It is challenging to distribute aid to refugees who are scattered across urban areas. While the total number of registered refugees or those awaiting registration with the U.N. agency in Jordan is more than 150,000, many others have not been counted.

“We are trying to expand the registration and roll out assistance to the urban refugees in the region, but of course a lot of the attention goes to the camps,” Panos Moumtzis, the U.N. regional coordinator for Syrian refugees, said in an interview.

An estimated 40,000 Syrians are living in the Zaatari camp in northern Jordan. The camp is not far from areas where most of the urban refugees are concentrated.

The United Nations has appealed for $1 billion as the refugee crisis has grown across the region. The appeal is based on estimates that as many as one million Syrian refugees will need help in the first half of 2013.

In countries like Lebanon, which is sheltering more than 90,000 Syrians, there are no camps for refugees; they live in villages and cities.

“We want to focus on the community outreach where we hire refugees who become community workers to identify problems and vulnerabilities,” Mr. Moumtzis said. “We need them to help us find the most vulnerable and tell them what kind of support they can find.”

The International Catholic Migration Commission, which works to help refugees and internally displaced people, has found that the vast majority of urban Syrian refugees in Jordon have no income and rely heavily on humanitarian aid.

The group says that one in three households of Syrian refugees has more than eight members. Children younger than 18 make up more than 50 percent of the refugee population.

Annika Hampson, a commission official, said: “A lot of the Syrian refugees living in urban areas have been evicted because they couldn’t pay rent anymore, so some have gone back to the refugee camp and others have gone back to Syria. They had no choice.”

When the conflict in Syria first started, many Syrians took shelter with relatives in Ramtha, a Jordanian border town, but with their own economic conditions increasingly tough, Jordanians are becoming wary of taking in yet another long-term wave of refugees.

For families, like Abu Abdel Hadi’s, who fled with only the light clothes they were wearing, the winter has been especially harsh.

When they first arrived, in scorching temperatures, there was no refugee camp or organized system of support. Like many other Syrians who arrived in Jordan in spring or summer, they lived in a makeshift holding facility for the Syrian refugee community in Ramtha before settling in their apartment.

“We received aid money for rent. That is why we are able to stay here in this apartment. But we make sure that any other costs are very low,” Abu Abdel Hadi said as his wife and family members sat across from him.

While he recalled the shelling they had left behind in the Syrian city of Homs, his grandchildren ran barefoot around the room. The large number of children living in one household and the lack of financial support put them in the category of extremely vulnerable families who are eligible for financial aid — in his case, the cost of rent is covered for the next few months.

“Now, we never use heat and we hardly use water or electricity, because I can’t afford it,” he said. “I just keep telling my family we are here because we need to be safe for now and that’s all.”

Despite plans by aid organizations to help at least 50,000 urban refugees, with monthly cash assistance for the most vulnerable families, a large number will be left out because of the rising numbers of Syrians fleeing across the border each day.

Other urban refugees said that they were not receiving any assistance and that rent was their single greatest expense.

The U.N. refugee agency plans to increase the provision of one-time emergency cash assistance grants to help cover urgent needs like clothing, fuel for heating and rental payments. The majority of those seeking such emergency assistance in Jordan say they have been threatened with eviction and need help paying the rent.

At the Zaatari camp, trailers have been set up to begin housing some of the families who are living in tents.

“The plan at the moment is to help over five million people by 2013. That’s a quarter of the Syrian population being uprooted,” Mr. Moumtzis said. “It is the largest humanitarian crisis in the world right now, so we need an urgent financial response.”

Read in the NYTIMES

12/10/12
by Rana F. Sweis

As a reporter, you must gather information and interview sources quickly, then explain what you’ve learned concisely and clearly. Once that’s done, it’s tempting to ship the story to your editor or hit “publish” on your blog.

Resist that temptation. You need to do one more thing to ensure your story contains only accurate, unbiased and verified information: edit your story line by line.

Investigative reporter Nils Hanson shared his advice for line-by-line editing at the recent Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) conference in Cairo. More than 200 journalists and academics, mainly from the Middle East, attended the conference, which included training sessions and networking opportunities with international investigative reporters and trainers.

Hanson, who reports for the popular Swedish TV news station SVT, and is a member of ARIJ’s board, offered these tips for editing for accuracy:

Have your address book and notes handy

Make sure your list of sources and their contact information, as well as notes from your interviews, are close at hand. There may be facts you will need to double-check as you edit.

Keep an open mind

“Are you hit by tunnel vision? That’s the big trap,” Hanson said. Tunnel vision is the tendency to hold on to a certain belief even when evidence points elsewhere. Reporters sometimes do this without realizing it, Hanson said, so stay open-minded when reporting and editing your story.

“Listen to the skeptical, examine the expert and question the victim,” Hanson said. Think of the recent BBC scandal, in which an alleged sex-abuse victim admitted to wrongly accusing a former politician of attacking him. “Can victims prove their allegations?”

Examine each fact

Ask yourself if there is essential information missing and if all assertions are grounded in fact. Mark each fact, name, figure and quote in your story, and then verify it. “Watch out for overstatements, such as ‘everybody says’ or [that] they haven’t done anything,” Hanson said.

Verify all data, including statistics. “Even data presented by interviewees must be verified,” he says.

Evaluate your sources and decide if you need more interviews

Do your sources make conclusions that others might criticize? Point that out.

Reporters need to make sure they talk with many people, including those they don’t like or who don’t like them. They should also include people who are controversial or who may seem a bit odd—or just wrong—to the reporter.

“Did the people criticized in your story have a chance to reply to all serious criticism aimed against them?” Hanson asked.

“Look at the overall picture and check if it is unbiased or if it is written in an accusatory tone,” he explained. “Who or what could give a different picture?”

Protect sources and check copyrights

Make certain that a source you have promised not to identify will not appear in published documents or in photos or video. Also examine graphics and copyrights, including logos and statistics revealed in charts or graphs.

Check your gut

After examining your report line by line, Hanson says to ask yourself two final questions. First, ask yourself, “Are you troubled by anything?” If the answer is affirmative, be honest with yourself and your editor about what that is.

Finally, ask yourself, “What might generate criticism?” Don’t automatically take those parts out. Instead, address those critiques in your story.

If you follow these steps, you’ll be much less likely to need to issue a correction—or to regret publishing the story at all.

Rana F. Sweis is a freelance journalist and media researcher. She writes mainly about political reform, refugees and social issues in the Middle East. She is also the lead researcher in Jordan for the Open Society Institute-sponsored Mapping Digital Media Study. You can visit her website and follow her on Twitter.

Photo courtesy of Rogue Sun Media, used with a CC-license

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