For Syrian refugees in Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, winter has brought bitter new hardship and at least one death.
More than 50,000 people are estimated to live in Zaatari camp, roughly one third of the nearly 150,000 Syrians who have sought refuge in Jordan from the 22-month long conflict gripping their country. As my colleagues have Rick Gladstone and Nick Cumming-Bruce reported, wind and rainy weather this week wrecked scores of refugee dwellings in Zaatari, where many tents flooded or collapsed. People were left shivering in the cold, and outrage soon boiled over in an angry riot that injured 11 people, over half of them aid workers from the charity group Save the Children. It was the latest in at least four violent episodes in recent weeks between refugees, aid workers and the police.
Video of the Zaatari camp on Monday, posted online by Syrian activists, showed an area almost as large as a football field covered in shallow, muddy water. Inside a soaked tent, a young boy told the cameraman that he and his family, including his injured father, “went to a neighbor’s tent because of the water.”
The suffering in Zaatari was given a human face on Wednesday when an activist uploaded a moving video interview with a refugee in the camp named Khaled al-Hariri, an amputee who described the difficulty of getting proper medical care in the camp. According to the activist, Abushakraa Horanee, Mr. Hariri died on Tuesday night before the video was uploaded to Facebook and then copied to a Syrian activist YouTube channel. Mr. Horanee, the filmmaker, called Mr. Hariri, “the martyr of negligence and cold.”
In the video, Mr. Hariri, who lost a leg in Syria before fleeing to Jordan, said he suffered from a range of respiratory problems that went untreated by camp doctors. Mr. Hariri broke down crying as he explained his health problems and alleged negligence and poor treatment on the part of doctors in the camp, which is run by the United Nations. “I don’t even want my health to improve,” he said. “I want my brothers’ health, the people all around me, to improve.”
Describing his ill-health, Mr. Hariri said, “I have hoarseness, chest pain, and mucus. With my leg pain. Here my leg, all of it, is inflamed. My chest also, my chest is inflamed.”
When asked if he was given a medical diagnosis by camp doctors, Mr. Hariri responded:
Diagnosed? No one diagnosed me. I stayed here for three months and no doctor gave me a proper drug, no doctor told me ‘there is a drug for that’, no doctor gave me anything. I just want something that will give me some relief. I just want something to give me some relief, that’s all. Pain killers. They didn’t give me that. I don’t know, what can I do?
Asked how doctors in the camp hospital responded to his visit, he responded:
Their response? I would go at night from here to the emergency room and call on them and tell them ‘my brother, for God’s sake….’ I would tell the ambulance driver, ‘my brother, for God’s sake, I swear I can’t breathe. I need oxygen, I need oxygen.’ So the ambulance would arrive and they wouldn’t even pick me up themselves. My brother, the broken one, would pick me and my uncle. They would pick me up and put me in the ambulance. Is that okay?
I would go and sit there. I’d be wearing this track suit while it’s cold outside. I would ask ‘Where is the doctor for him to put me in a bed?’ And the doctor would say ‘there is no bed. You’re going to have to wait a bit for the patient to leave.’ ‘Doctor, I swear I’m very tired. At least give me oxygen, I want to breathe. I can’t breathe.’ I could not breath at all.
U.N. officials said that most dwellings in the camp withstood the recent rainfall and attributed tensions in Zaatari to a range of factors, including fear of worsening weather conditions and a surge of as many as 9,000 new residents in the last week. On Twitter, Unicef, the United Nations children’s agency, said the organization was fully focused on improving conditions in the camp.
We’re working around clock to tackle flooding in #Zaatari camp and ensure all refugees have shelter & sanitation http://t.co/8SYmLRUi #Syria
— UNICEF (@UNICEF) 10 Jan 13
