Published in Sun Herald on Sunday 30 June 2013
By Tim Costello, World Vision Australia chief executive
Last week I sat in a tent in Lebanon with a Syrian refugee couple who had escaped with their five children. Tameer and Delal fled with only the clothes they were wearing after three of their neighbours - including a cousin - were killed outside their Damascus home by an aerial bombing campaign. Once they reached the Lebanese border, the family walked for more than a day before finding help through World Vision in the Bekaa Valley.
Tameer and Delal’s children cannot access Lebanese schools due to overcrowding, and when I met them, five months after their escape, the kids were desperately bored. Each of them told me their greatest wish was to go to school.
I asked Tameer if he had hope, because this seems to be profoundly important for many refugees. He said his faith in the omnipotence of Allah has not been shaken, but he prayed each day to return to his Damascus home and lead a normal life as an iron worker. The palpable humiliation he felt as a result of not being able to provide for his family was matched only by the anxiety and strain etched into his wife's face.
As fate would have it, a few days earlier I had been in the company of someone who if not omnipotent, is certainly one of the world’s most powerful leaders. This is a man whose decisions could determine the fate of Tameer’s family and millions of other Syrian refugees.
I was in Moscow to meet Vladimir Putin in my role leading Australia's civil society response to the policies of the G20. I raised with President Putin the urgent need to guarantee humanitarian space in Syria, so aid agencies can reach the four million refugees now internally displaced in Syria. I begged him not to keep supplying arms. I did not see how more weapons could mean anything but more deaths. Already more than 93,000 Syrians have lost their lives in this conflict.
Putin was prepared to say he would push for a diplomatic solution at Geneva 2 - a promise he kept the next day when he attended the G8 meeting. But I left convinced that the war in Syria is now a war by proxy with major powers like Russia, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar - not to mention the West - all positioning for influence and for their preferred political outcome. In doing so, they are flooding an already weapons-drenched region with more arms. It could be years before Tameer can ever go home.
But in the midst of this despair, hope came to me in a surprise encounter. Back in Beirut I was walking back to my hotel one evening and was beckoned in to a small workshop and offered coffee by a total stranger. The man was a Lebanese Christian called Milat. Sitting in the dim torch-light was a Syrian Sunni woman and her two sons. Without any place to call home, Milat had taken them in. He explained that he supported President Assad as most Christians in the region do but the woman and her sons were praying fervently for the rebels’ victory.
Genuinely surprised, I asked how he could live with such political tension and provide food and shelter for them with no end in sight? He shrugged and said they are fellow humans. It was just so simple and his hospitality struck me as a modern-day re-run of the Good Samaritan, a story which took place 2000 years ago just down the road.
Many Lebanese are deeply concerned that the new arrivals from Syria will stay like the Palestinians did after 1948, and many others are terrified by the prospect of Lebanon itself being destabilised. And yet, thousands upon thousands of Lebanese like Milat have taken these refugees into their homes without question.
I was moved and wondered about how many Australians would respond like this. It stunned me to think with an estimated 550,000 Syrian refugees now in Lebanon, a country of just 4.3 million people, that ordinary citizens still find it in their hearts to treat the refugees as humans. It gave me hope and perspective. If only the world’s leaders, with the fate of Syria in their hands, could meet Milat.