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Economy
In reply to the discussion: Weekend Economists Get Syri-ous August 30-September 2, 2013 [View all]Demeter
(85,373 posts)57. City of the Lost In the world’s second-largest refugee camp, Syrians find that it’s not easy to flee
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/08/26/130826fa_fact_remnick?mbid=nl_Daily%20%289%29
...Zaatari, a village six miles east of the city of Mafraq. Until a year ago, there was nothing much in the vicinity: some modest brick mosques and schools, a Royal Jordanian Air Force base. Zaatari, one aid worker told me, had been little more than sand, snakes, and scorpions. The uprising in Syria, which began twenty-five miles away, in Daraa, changed all that. The flow of refugees from Syria into Jordan reached such a point of emergencythousands every night, evading sniper fire, crossing the frontier on footthat Mafraq, to take just one city, doubled in size. Jordan, with a population of six million, many of them displaced Iraqis and Palestinians, could not go on absorbing limitless refugees. It became necessary to build a camp. During Ramadan last summer, the U.N.H.C.R., the Jordanians, and a laundry list of international aid organizations built and opened the Zaatari refugee camp in two weeks. One of the first things to be done was to overlay the sand with gravel, an expensive project intended to prevent sandstorms in summer and rivers of mud in the rainy winter. It didnt really work. There were sandstorms. There was mud. The snakes and the scorpions remained...
...When Zaatari opened, in July of 2012, its population numbered in the hundreds. By late August, it had fifteen thousand residents. Now that number is a hundred and twenty thousandthe population of Hartford, Connecticut, or Santa Clara, California. The main drag is on the western side of the camp, a boulevard of ramshackle shops, makeshift clinics, schools. The smells are city smells: sewage, sweat, cigarette smoke, eau de cologne, meat roasting on spits. The boulevard is known to the Syrians and the aid workers as the Champs-Élysées.
Since the revolt began in Syria, more than two years ago, the death count has passed a hundred thousand. In Zaatari, the dispossession is absolute. Everyone has lost his country, his home, his equilibrium. Most have lost a family member or a close friend to the war. What is left is a kind of theatrical pride, the necessary performance of will. This place is a graveyard for camels, a refugee in his thirties named Ahmed Bakar told me one morning. Camels cant even live here. But Syrians can....
8 PAGES OF WOE AND LOSS AT LINK
...Zaatari, a village six miles east of the city of Mafraq. Until a year ago, there was nothing much in the vicinity: some modest brick mosques and schools, a Royal Jordanian Air Force base. Zaatari, one aid worker told me, had been little more than sand, snakes, and scorpions. The uprising in Syria, which began twenty-five miles away, in Daraa, changed all that. The flow of refugees from Syria into Jordan reached such a point of emergencythousands every night, evading sniper fire, crossing the frontier on footthat Mafraq, to take just one city, doubled in size. Jordan, with a population of six million, many of them displaced Iraqis and Palestinians, could not go on absorbing limitless refugees. It became necessary to build a camp. During Ramadan last summer, the U.N.H.C.R., the Jordanians, and a laundry list of international aid organizations built and opened the Zaatari refugee camp in two weeks. One of the first things to be done was to overlay the sand with gravel, an expensive project intended to prevent sandstorms in summer and rivers of mud in the rainy winter. It didnt really work. There were sandstorms. There was mud. The snakes and the scorpions remained...
...When Zaatari opened, in July of 2012, its population numbered in the hundreds. By late August, it had fifteen thousand residents. Now that number is a hundred and twenty thousandthe population of Hartford, Connecticut, or Santa Clara, California. The main drag is on the western side of the camp, a boulevard of ramshackle shops, makeshift clinics, schools. The smells are city smells: sewage, sweat, cigarette smoke, eau de cologne, meat roasting on spits. The boulevard is known to the Syrians and the aid workers as the Champs-Élysées.
Since the revolt began in Syria, more than two years ago, the death count has passed a hundred thousand. In Zaatari, the dispossession is absolute. Everyone has lost his country, his home, his equilibrium. Most have lost a family member or a close friend to the war. What is left is a kind of theatrical pride, the necessary performance of will. This place is a graveyard for camels, a refugee in his thirties named Ahmed Bakar told me one morning. Camels cant even live here. But Syrians can....
8 PAGES OF WOE AND LOSS AT LINK
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