UNITED NATIONS, May 26 (Xinhua) -- UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Mark Lowcock on Wednesday asked the Security Council to renew its authorization for the cross-border aid mechanism for Syrians.
The authorization for UN cross-border assistance into northwest Syria expires in just over six weeks. A failure to extend it would immediately end direct cross-border deliveries by the United Nations, he said.
That means food deliveries for 1.4 million people every month, millions of medical treatments, nutrition assistance for tens of thousands of children and mothers, education supplies for tens of thousands of students -- all of those things would stop, he told the Security Council in a briefing.
Other crucial support the United Nations provides to water and sanitation, to health, to camp management, and other services would also end, along with the ability of the United Nations to channel approximately 300 million U.S. dollars in annual financing for operations to local partners on the ground, he said.
The UN Monitoring Mechanism, which verifies the humanitarian nature of all UN deliveries, would shut down. The result would be a smaller, more fragmented operation of non-UN actors which would be less transparent and less accountable, he said.
Without a Security Council decision so close to the expiry of the current authorization, his team must prepare, just like last year, for a worst-case scenario. So agencies have started pre-positioning supplies on the Syrian side of the border to draw on should access from Turkey be cut, said Lowcock.
But he warned that pre-positioning can only provide a very limited, short-term buffer. And due to the low levels of funding of the operation this year, that buffer will be much smaller than it was last year.
"We want to see both more cross-line and more cross-border assistance. The cross-border operation -- which is a lifeline for more than 3 million people -- cannot be substituted. We look to this council to ensure that that lifeline is not severed," said Lowcock.
The United Nations has worked for months to find an arrangement for cross-line missions to the northwest that all parties can agree to, he said. "Consultations continue and I am now more hopeful that an agreement can be reached, at least for an initial set of conveys."
UN Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen, in his briefing, also asked the Security Council to reach consensus on the issue.
"Let me also stress ... the fundamental importance of full, sustained and unimpeded humanitarian access to all parts of Syria, through intensified cross-line and cross-border deliveries. As the secretary-general told the General Assembly, a large-scale cross-border response for an additional 12 months remains essential to save lives. I appeal for the members of the (Security) Council to focus on achieving consensus to that end," said Pedersen. Enditem
