Thank you, Mr. Chair and distinguished members of the committee, for the invitation to discuss the situation in Syria.
I'm here as a representative of the Mennonite Central Committee, MCC. I direct our advocacy office here in Ottawa. I'm joined by my colleague Bruce Guenther, who's the director of our disaster response program. Bruce is based in Winnipeg.
I'll share our opening statement, and Bruce will also be available to answer specific questions about MCC's programmatic response to the crisis in Syria as well as in the neighbouring countries, Jordan and Lebanon. We hope that hearing the perspective of one Canadian non-governmental organization will be helpful as you consider this very complex situation.
MCC is the relief, development, and peace-building agency of Mennonite and Brethren in Christ churches in Canada and the United States. We currently support programs in 60 countries through the efforts of more than 1,000 workers, and in Canada, more than 13,000 volunteers and 120,000 members of our supporting churches.
MCC has worked in Syria since the late 1980s, in Jordan since the late 1960s, and in Lebanon since the late 1940s. Thus I want to begin by stressing that MCC's response to the Syria crisis is rooted in long-standing partnerships. We did not arrive on the scene recently, and we intend to be there over the long term.
In Syria, for example, for two decades before the conflict broke out, MCC accompanied local partners as they strove to build just economic relationships, dismantle oppression, and practise non-violence. Through the provision of funding and training, and the placement of international volunteers, we established meaningful relationships with Syrian communities and with key leaders in these communities. Now that we are no longer able to place staff inside the country, these same partners are able to implement MCC's response by identifying needs, planning, coordinating, and delivering aid where it can make the most impact. This is where often other agencies have been unable to gain access or provide consistent support.
Over the past two years, MCC has allocated $15 million in U.S. funds for our Syria crisis response. This includes $8.2 million for programming in Syria, $4.8 million in Lebanon, and $2 million for programming in Jordan. We're grateful for the generosity of MCC supporters in Canada, who thus far have contributed almost $1.4 million in cash. Beyond that, Canadian supporters have also contributed material resources valued at $1.8 million, enabling MCC to ship a total of 31 containers containing 83,000 homemade blankets, 83,000 hand-packed relief and hygiene kits, and 120,000 school kits. This has truly been a remarkable level of support from our constituents for a crisis of this sort. We're also grateful that the Government of Canada has enabled us to scale up this response, through direct contributions to several MCC projects and through MCC's account at the Canadian Foodgrains Bank.
MCC's Syria crisis programming has four main dimensions or components. First and primarily, we have focused on the provision of emergency humanitarian assistance. Thus far, over 13,000 Syrian families have received food, non-food items, or shelter assistance. Second, as the crisis has gone on and the needs have continued to grow, we have focused on capacity building in order to make MCC's response, and that of many other NGOs, I should add, more effective. This has included training on the delivery of humanitarian assistance for 130 Syrians within and beyond our partner network. Third, we have focused on education, which has included things like tuition support for children in Syria and Lebanon and an informal education program for refugee students in Jordan. Fourth and finally, we have focused on peace building and psychosocial support by providing training that has equipped almost 400 individuals with conflict prevention and peace-building skills and training that has equipped over 230 individuals to identify and respond to trauma.
We think these conflict prevention and peace-building initiatives are a particularly interesting dimension of MCC's response.
I'd like to give you a glimpse into one of these projects in Lebanon.
In September 2012 the Permanent Peace Movement, an organization MCC helped get started at the height of the Lebanese civil war, ran a three-day training and dialogue session. Participating in this session were representatives from the youth sections of all 18 different political parties in Lebanon. The goal was to build connections among these very diverse youth leaders in order to prevent violence and the outbreak of violence.
Remarkably, several months later and after lengthy negotiations, the same group was able to come to agreement on a civil code of conduct that included the absolute rejection of violence in all its forms among student groups. This code was signed in a public ceremony in Beirut on December 2, 2012.
I also want to stress, however, that conflicts have been prevented and the prospects for peace have been enhanced in less formal ways, thanks to the efforts of creative, courageous, and resourceful partners implementing MCC's humanitarian assistance projects within Syria.
To give you one example in greater detail, an organization called the Forum for Development, Culture and Dialogue has been implementing MCC's emergency food assistance response in the Qalamoun region, supporting 5,000 families that fled the city of Homs in 2012. It turns out that the provision of food baskets to these Orthodox Christian and Sunni Muslim families ended up being multiplied in unexpected ways. Not only was the food itself shared far beyond the initial recipients, but the interfaith relationships it helped to sustain ended up being strong enough to overcome significant tests during several recent periods of conflict. In one striking incident last October, armed members of an opposition group took control of the town of Deir Atiyeh. Soon after they attempted to defile the Christian church. Upon entering the church, however, they were met by a group of Muslims from the town who stated, “If you want to defile this church, you will have to kill us first.”
Stories like this are not often told, stories of cohesion and solidarity between Muslims and Christians in the midst of a context of division and crisis, but they highlight the larger point, that the impact of neutral and impartial humanitarian assistance can go far beyond the obvious project objectives.
I'll conclude our statement with a few observations and recommendations.
The key humanitarian needs that MCC's partners have identified will not be news to this committee or to staff in the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development. These include support for shelter, food, and education, which align well with the priorities currently guiding the Government of Canada's response. Indeed we appreciate the leadership role that Canada has been playing in encouraging the international community to increase its commitment to meet the ever-increasing needs in the region. We're also grateful for efforts to secure humanitarian access inside Syria, and for efforts to address the longer term impact of Syrian refugees on host communities in surrounding countries.
I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear me say, however, that MCC is reminded every day by our partners that there is more that we can do, and more that our government can do.
From a political policy perspective, there's also much that MCC can affirm in the Government of Canada's approach to the Syrian crisis, and more that we would like to see. For example, we've appreciated statements from the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and from a united House of Commons, emphasizing that more violence is not the answer to the crisis. In our view, deciding to not support the arming of opposition forces does not mean that our only option is to sit on the sidelines, but alternatives do require creativity, effort, and perseverance. Thus, we urge increased engagement on the part of the Government of Canada in seeking opportunities to intervene diplomatically in support of a political resolution to the crisis. This kind of engagement is clearly evident in contributions Canada has made to the effort to rid Syria of chemical weapons. Our partners would also welcome concrete actions in order to address the way that free-flowing arms threaten the stability of the entire region.
Beyond these broad initiatives, however, we think that MCC's partner organizations make it clear that there's tremendous capacity for peace-building initiatives among religious leaders and civil society organizations in Syria and in the surrounding countries. This capacity has not been widely recognized, nor has it been receiving much support form the international community. As one of our partners put it in a meeting in Beirut earlier this week, “There's actually a quiet, peaceful revolution still occurring on the ground in Syria, but it doesn't get press.”
In closing, Mr. Chair, I would like to invite this committee to highlight the crucial role Canada is positioned to play in efforts to address the situation in Syria, particularly if we continue to enhance our humanitarian assistance and our diplomatic engagement, and particularly if we find new ways of supporting grassroots peace-building initiatives.
Thank you for your attention, and we look forward to your questions.