Justine Greening: Why Britain must strive to give Syria a future

Secretary of State for International Development Justine Greening (right), during a tour of the Bourj Hammoud School, a mixed school teaching Lebanese and Syrian children in Beirut, Lebanon, to see how the UK's response and aid is helping the refugee crisis.

Living in the besieged town of Homs, they have faced guns, bombs and slow starvation for almost five years.

Maryam recalls how, after a chemical weapon attack, they couldn’t even peel the clothes off the skin of family members who were hit.

She herself was imprisoned in Damascus before managing to flee the country.

Thanks to UK aid, she now has somewhere to live and has set up a small business in the Jordan town of Amman. The rest of her family remain in Homs. “All they have to eat is what they can grow,” she told me when I visited Jordan last month.

Maryam’s story is Syria’s story countless times over. Lives and families torn apart by conflict.

Today, after nearly five years of fighting, there are 13.5 million people inside Syria in need of humanitarian assistance. More than four million Syrians have, like Maryam, fled the bloodshed and are now refugees.

The world cannot afford to turn its back on this tragedy. Today the UK is bringing together heads of state, UN agencies, civil society and NGOs, and business CEOs at an international conference in London to galvanise more support for Syria and the region.

Our work on the Syria crisis gives people in the region hope for a better future and is also firmly in Britain’s national interest. Without British aid, hundreds of thousands more refugees could be risking their lives by seeking to get to Europe.

The UK has pledged more than £1.1bn in aid so far, our largest ever response to a single humanitarian crisis, and making us the second biggest country donor.

UK support inside Syria and in the surrounding region has delivered food, shelter, medical care and clean drinking water for hundreds of thousands of people affected by the conflict. Our country has a long, proud history of helping those in need and the response from individuals, charities and organisations across the country has been typically generous.

Being from Rotherham, I know the people of Yorkshire will have played an important part in the response.

The UK can’t do it alone. We need other countries to step up. The 2015 UN appeals for Syria and the region were only 56 per cent funded. Countries like Lebanon and Jordan are bearing the brunt of the refugee crisis and desperately need more support.

The UK is both leading and setting the pace of the international response. At the “Supporting Syria and the Region, London 2016” conference, alongside our co-hosts Kuwait, Germany, Norway and the UN, we will be calling for far greater global efforts.

I’m clear there will be no future for Syria if we do not invest in its young generation now. Around a quarter of Syrian schools are destroyed, damaged or non-functioning.

Hundreds of thousands of refugee children have no way of learning. That’s why in 2013, working with Unicef, I launched the No Lost Generation Initiative which, through UK help alone, has helped over a quarter of a million Syrian children get back into education.

We are ambitious – at the conference we will be pushing for major commitments to get every refugee child from Syria and host countries in education.

Humanitarian action alone will not be save Syria however. This is a man-made disaster and a negotiated political settlement is the only way to end the conflict.

Until then, we will use the London Conference to call on all parties to this conflict to agree to respect humanitarian law. There can be no excuse for using starvation as a weapon of war.

This means ending the use of siege tactics and ensuring unimpeded access for humanitarian organisations trying to get aid to people who need it.

I’ve met many Syrian refugees in the last few years and what strikes me is how much they all want to return home and rebuild their shattered country. For many of them coming to Europe is a last resort.

After nearly five years of unrelenting tragedy, time is running out to offer these people hope for a better future. We must make the London Conference a turning point for Syria and its people and help give them want they want – a better life close to home.

Justine Greening, from Rotherham, is a Conservative MP and the International Development Secretary.