Add a potential polio epidemic to the threats that innocent civilians now face because of Syria's civil war. It is part of what American officials say may be the worst humanitarian disaster since the 1994 Rwandan genocide that killed an estimated 800,000 people. But while the tragedy is unfolding in full view, many countries, including Russia and China, have given hardly anything to the United Nations campaign to meet the Syrians' basic needs.
Civilians have paid a terrible price ever since President Bashar al-Assad of Syria used force to crush peaceful protests that began in 2011, touching off a full-scale civil war. Officials now put the death toll, including combatants, at 115,000.
Of the Syrians who have survived the war so far, some five million are virtual refugees in their own country — trapped in neighborhoods isolated by military blockades, or uprooted from their homes and living in vacant buildings, schools, mosques, parks and crowded homes of relatives. Most are desperately short of food and medicine, a deprivation likely to worsen as winter sets in.
Meanwhile, another two million Syrians have fled to Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt, meaning that seven million people, or about one-third of Syria's population, have seen their lives upended by the war.
Now comes another trial: the country's first outbreak of polio in 14 years. United Nations officials have begun to vaccinate 2.5 million children in Syria and more than eight million others in the region after discovering that 10 children in the eastern city of Deir al-Zour have contracted polio. A 25-year campaign by the World Health Organization had largely eradicated what had been a global scourge, narrowing the afflicted states to Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Public health experts suspect that jihadists who entered Syria to join the fight against Mr. Assad may have been the carriers.
The United Nations has asked its members for $1.5 billion to provide food, schooling and medicine to vulnerable Syrians. That is short of the need, yet the response has been disgraceful. Only 61 percent of the money earmarked for refugees outside of Syria has been collected, while 36 percent of the aid for Syrians inside the country has been collected, according to United Nations figures. China, the world's second-biggest economy after the United States, has donated a miserable $1 million, while Russia, awash in oil and gas profits, has given $10.3 million.
An analysis by Oxfam America, the international aid agency, says that relative to their wealth, France, Qatar, Russia and the United Arab Emirates have donated far less than they can afford. The United States, at more than $1 billion, is the largest contributor, but it can still do better, Oxfam said. Because of the difficulty of obtaining comparable numbers, China was not part of this analysis.
The best way to help the Syrians is to end the war. The next best thing is to mitigate the suffering by contributing generously and by pressuring both sides in the conflict to allow aid workers to deliver essential supplies.
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