It was planned as a short-term refuge, but many of the 150,000 Syrians now living in the camp may never go home
When Zaatari camp was first carved out of the sand of northern Jordan a year ago, it was envisaged as a short-term refuge that would allow Syrian refugees to seek shelter, draw breath and prepare to return home.
But the camp seems very different now. Urban planners have taken a stake. The stopgap supply of essential services such as water, electricity and housing is taking on a more permanent feel. A realisation has taken hold here, in the corridors of power in Amman and among the international aid community, that this makeshift city in the desert may be here to stay.
More than 150,000 refugees now live in Zaatari, almost three times as many as it was intended to hold when the camp was opened on 28 July 2012. Between 500 and 1,000 arrivals have been registered most days since March. The continued influx has at times overwhelmed officials at the camp. It has also changed the calculations of political leaders, some of whom are predicting that the refugee crisis could permanently alter the demographics of Jordan and Lebanon, just as the Palestinian exoduses of 1948 and 1967 did.
"They are not going home, and nor can they be expected to at a time when communities are being slaughtered and Syria is disintegrating," said a Jordanian official who declined to be named. "We are living the reality of a long and devastating war with perhaps unmanageable consequences for us."
High summer is this year coinciding with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, a period of dawn-to-dusk fasting in temperatures of 38-42C. As a desert sun blazes on black bitumen, UN-supplied tents tinged brown by the sand flap against a baking wind. Little else moves here as the days wear on, except trucks carrying ready-made cabins and tens of thousands of litres of water to pour into silos.
The cabins, supplied by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, are adding to the newfound permanence of Zaatari. But for all the efforts to civilise the camp, this is still an edgy and dismal place. Tempers fray. Protests abound. Standoffs are common, as are spillovers of frustration between the Jordanian army and the men and women they are tasked with protecting.
"They are the guards of all the inefficiencies," said one man, pointing at rows of soldiers alongside their armoured cars, policing a protest about electricity shortages in the camp. "Without them, things would be better. I'm starting to think I should take my chances back in Syria."
Many actually do. Up the road from the protest, at least 1,000 people waited in the brutal heat of an afternoon for seven buses that would take at least some of them back to the border fence after dark. From there, they would make their way back to Deraa, about six miles away, from where a large number of the 150,000-plus refugees in Zaatari had fled.
"There is no electricity and there is no security," said one shopkeeper from Deraa as he stood in the harsh sunlight. "The regime is still in part of the city, but it's better than being here."
"Why should it be this hard to get home?" asked Zaid Abdul Wahab, a plumber from Deraa who had packed up two frugal bags of belongings and abandoned his UNHCR-supplied tent. "I tell you, we will all go crazy if we stay here. Even my wife wants to leave."
Another man lifted his shirt to show dozens of burn marks all over his torso. His words were unintelligible and his cognitive reflexes diminished. He offered a plastic pipe and mumbled words that no one else in the throng could understand.
Then another Deraa local stepped forward. "I know him," he said. "He was in prison in air force intelligence in Homs for a year. He got out in April, came here and now wants to go home. He was electrocuted and hit with a pipe every day he was there."
Zaatari, for all the certainty it offers, is not a happy place. However, after the urgent scramble of the past 12 months to turn barren land into Jordan's fourth largest city, a semblance of order has taken hold. So too have the rhythms of a life of sorts, where all water and most food is provided, where most forms of medical care are on offer, and where children deprived of an education for more than one year can now return to class. Syrian teachers work alongside their Jordanian counterparts, two in each class, where a homegrown curriculum is taught.
"It's pretty much the same education," said the headteacher of one of the schools, in the heart of the camp. "Except for history. The Syrians teach a very different form."
Water coolers dot the courtyard of the school, which has been patched together from wooden huts sent from Saudi Arabia. Children seem eager to learn, if only they could find a way to escape the relentless heat.
The electricity supply to the school it is under constant threat from bootleg engineers who are constantly looking for ways to reroute power to ramshackle neighbourhoods nearby. "They are ingenious," said a Jordanian aid worker who works in the education sector, of the electricity thieves. "Last month, it took us days to work out what they had done and how they had done it. They had built concrete walls and dug trenches to cover their tracks."
Aid workers from all the major international organisations have set up a base camp in Zaatari, from where an increasingly complicated effort is under way to provide for more people than even worst-case scenarios had prepared for a year ago. Managing the expectations of the refugees seems to be as cumbersome a task as supplying essential services.
"This is a crisis camp after all," said one UN worker. "This was only ever meant to be a place of respite. There is no one starving here, there is no one out in the open."
While almost everyone in Zaatari has access to essentials that can no longer be reliably supplied in their corner of war-torn Syria, some people – even children – are slipping through the cracks.
Late in the afternoon earlier this month, not far from where those who wanted to leave the camp were restively gathering, a young girl squatted in the middle of a road as giant lorries and water trucks veered past her, their drivers honking horns in alarm.
The girl's tattered and filthy hot-pink dress was stark against the black tar. Her child's face was worn brown by the sun and her eyes were set in a catatonic stare, oblivious to the mortal risks only metres away from her. Her parents were nowhere in sight, and eventually a young boy from a tent wandered across the gravel to take her by the hand.
"Who is she?" we asked. "I don't know," the boy replied. "She's just a girl. Her parents might have gone home to Syria." Reported by guardian.co.uk 23 hours ago.
When Zaatari camp was first carved out of the sand of northern Jordan a year ago, it was envisaged as a short-term refuge that would allow Syrian refugees to seek shelter, draw breath and prepare to return home.
But the camp seems very different now. Urban planners have taken a stake. The stopgap supply of essential services such as water, electricity and housing is taking on a more permanent feel. A realisation has taken hold here, in the corridors of power in Amman and among the international aid community, that this makeshift city in the desert may be here to stay.
More than 150,000 refugees now live in Zaatari, almost three times as many as it was intended to hold when the camp was opened on 28 July 2012. Between 500 and 1,000 arrivals have been registered most days since March. The continued influx has at times overwhelmed officials at the camp. It has also changed the calculations of political leaders, some of whom are predicting that the refugee crisis could permanently alter the demographics of Jordan and Lebanon, just as the Palestinian exoduses of 1948 and 1967 did.
"They are not going home, and nor can they be expected to at a time when communities are being slaughtered and Syria is disintegrating," said a Jordanian official who declined to be named. "We are living the reality of a long and devastating war with perhaps unmanageable consequences for us."
High summer is this year coinciding with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, a period of dawn-to-dusk fasting in temperatures of 38-42C. As a desert sun blazes on black bitumen, UN-supplied tents tinged brown by the sand flap against a baking wind. Little else moves here as the days wear on, except trucks carrying ready-made cabins and tens of thousands of litres of water to pour into silos.
The cabins, supplied by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, are adding to the newfound permanence of Zaatari. But for all the efforts to civilise the camp, this is still an edgy and dismal place. Tempers fray. Protests abound. Standoffs are common, as are spillovers of frustration between the Jordanian army and the men and women they are tasked with protecting.
"They are the guards of all the inefficiencies," said one man, pointing at rows of soldiers alongside their armoured cars, policing a protest about electricity shortages in the camp. "Without them, things would be better. I'm starting to think I should take my chances back in Syria."
Many actually do. Up the road from the protest, at least 1,000 people waited in the brutal heat of an afternoon for seven buses that would take at least some of them back to the border fence after dark. From there, they would make their way back to Deraa, about six miles away, from where a large number of the 150,000-plus refugees in Zaatari had fled.
"There is no electricity and there is no security," said one shopkeeper from Deraa as he stood in the harsh sunlight. "The regime is still in part of the city, but it's better than being here."
"Why should it be this hard to get home?" asked Zaid Abdul Wahab, a plumber from Deraa who had packed up two frugal bags of belongings and abandoned his UNHCR-supplied tent. "I tell you, we will all go crazy if we stay here. Even my wife wants to leave."
Another man lifted his shirt to show dozens of burn marks all over his torso. His words were unintelligible and his cognitive reflexes diminished. He offered a plastic pipe and mumbled words that no one else in the throng could understand.
Then another Deraa local stepped forward. "I know him," he said. "He was in prison in air force intelligence in Homs for a year. He got out in April, came here and now wants to go home. He was electrocuted and hit with a pipe every day he was there."
Zaatari, for all the certainty it offers, is not a happy place. However, after the urgent scramble of the past 12 months to turn barren land into Jordan's fourth largest city, a semblance of order has taken hold. So too have the rhythms of a life of sorts, where all water and most food is provided, where most forms of medical care are on offer, and where children deprived of an education for more than one year can now return to class. Syrian teachers work alongside their Jordanian counterparts, two in each class, where a homegrown curriculum is taught.
"It's pretty much the same education," said the headteacher of one of the schools, in the heart of the camp. "Except for history. The Syrians teach a very different form."
Water coolers dot the courtyard of the school, which has been patched together from wooden huts sent from Saudi Arabia. Children seem eager to learn, if only they could find a way to escape the relentless heat.
The electricity supply to the school it is under constant threat from bootleg engineers who are constantly looking for ways to reroute power to ramshackle neighbourhoods nearby. "They are ingenious," said a Jordanian aid worker who works in the education sector, of the electricity thieves. "Last month, it took us days to work out what they had done and how they had done it. They had built concrete walls and dug trenches to cover their tracks."
Aid workers from all the major international organisations have set up a base camp in Zaatari, from where an increasingly complicated effort is under way to provide for more people than even worst-case scenarios had prepared for a year ago. Managing the expectations of the refugees seems to be as cumbersome a task as supplying essential services.
"This is a crisis camp after all," said one UN worker. "This was only ever meant to be a place of respite. There is no one starving here, there is no one out in the open."
While almost everyone in Zaatari has access to essentials that can no longer be reliably supplied in their corner of war-torn Syria, some people – even children – are slipping through the cracks.
Late in the afternoon earlier this month, not far from where those who wanted to leave the camp were restively gathering, a young girl squatted in the middle of a road as giant lorries and water trucks veered past her, their drivers honking horns in alarm.
The girl's tattered and filthy hot-pink dress was stark against the black tar. Her child's face was worn brown by the sun and her eyes were set in a catatonic stare, oblivious to the mortal risks only metres away from her. Her parents were nowhere in sight, and eventually a young boy from a tent wandered across the gravel to take her by the hand.
"Who is she?" we asked. "I don't know," the boy replied. "She's just a girl. Her parents might have gone home to Syria." Reported by guardian.co.uk 23 hours ago.