By NNN-KUNA
Cairo : The Arab League has announced a wide-scale media campaign for solidarity with 4.5 displaced Iraqis, both at home and abroad.
The three-month campaign seeks to raise a minimum of USD 123 million.
Hisham Youssef, chief of Cabinet of the League’s Secretary General held a joint press conference with Iraqi musician Naseer Shamma, who called for the campaign, and the representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Cairo Tuesday.
The campaign is launched under “Arabs hand in hand with Iraqis.” The campaign is part of the Arab League’s efforts to relieve the sufferings of the Iraqi displaced people in line with a resolution made by the Arab Foreign Ministers’ meeting last September, Youssef told the new conference.
He added that the TV campaign aims at raising money from the Arab governments, businessmen and citizens to be put in a special bank account and would be spent with “full transparency.”
“The chief aim of the campaign is to reveal the conditions of the displaced Iraqis in Jordan and Syria as well as at home and in the meantime deliver to them that there is Arab solidarity to relieve their sufferings,” he pointed out.
“The campaign is meant to be a love and healing one” for the displaced Iraqis in a bid to avert the repetition of the tragedy and the fate of the Palestinian refugees problems, Shamma told the conference.
Other forms of donation could be providing free seats for Iraqi students at the Arab universities and institutes, Shamma said urging the Arab businessmen to play due role in the campaign.
For her part, the UNHCR’s Cairo regional public information officer, Abeer Etefa, said that the volume of the displaced Iraqi was wider than the abilities of the UN refugee agency or any “single” country.
She added that there are about 200,000 in Syria noting that they could offer aid to only 7,000 families of the poorest among them.
Etefa noted that USD 98 million of the agency’s last year’s USD 120 million budget came from Europe and America in addition to USD 10 million from the UAE. In addition, the Iraqi government has presented direct aid of USD 50 million equally divided between the host countries Syria and Jordan.
According to Etefa, 67 per cent of the Iraqi displaced children do not go to school.