Yarmuk Refugee Camp, Syria, February 4 – Syrian troops surround this crowded, dangerous camp as snipers, starvation, and lack of medicine takes the lives of dozens of its residents, but the Palestinian refugees living here are expressing gratitude to their supporters overseas for the latter’s noisy attention to an American actress’s endorsement deals.
Syrian forces have besieged Yarmuk for six months, cutting off its inhabitants from basic supplies and forcing them to scrounge for food. Women have resorted to prostitution to obtain as little as a cup of rice, and snipers routinely target the camp’s residents at random. Pro-Palestinian activists across the globe have rallied to their support, boldly agitating for Hollywood personality Scarlett Johansson to stop acting as spokeswoman for an Israeli carbonated drink machine manufacturer.
The activists latched onto the seeming contradiction between Johansson’s work as an ambassador for the anti-hunger group Oxfam, which opposes Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories, and her appearance in advertisements for SodaStream, a company that does some of its manufacturing in the West Bank. Yarmuk residents hailed the move, calling it a welcome sign that people outside Syria are taking an interest in the immediate, pressing concerns of the desperate refugees.
“When Johansson decided to end her relationship with Oxfam and continue endorsing SodaStream, we all felt a surge of hope,” said Ahmad al-Rashid, 56, who sits on the camp’s leadership committee, as he crouched beside a broken window to avoiding being spotted by snipers. “Finally, people are seeing our precarious position here, caught between the rebels and Assad loyalists and being trusted by neither.” He spoke of skulking through the camp’s 2.11 square miles, with its population topping 110,000, foraging for scraps and anticipating the immediate benefits of all the activism.
“I thought everyone had forgotten about us after all these years,” said Fatma Mabruk, 33, a mother of seven. “I’ve been turning tricks for the last three months just to feed my children, but things just got a little easier,” she sighed, noting that two of the seven had died from infections that could not be treated, as a result of the lack of antibiotics in the camp’s beleaguered clinics. Her two oldest had been injured by mortar shells during a battle between loyalists and insurgents, but now Ms. Mabruk does not have to engage in nearly as much prostitution to feed the remaining five, who are smaller and whose elevated stress levels reduce their appetite anyway.
UNWRA, the United Nations agency that oversees the basic health, education, and nutritional needs of registered Palestinian refugees, has been unable to function effectively in Yarmuk, but called the kerfuffle about Johansson a breath of fresh air. “It’s about time people around the world began noticing what we’ve been doing, day in and day out, for the last sixty years,” said UNWRA spokesman Redd Herring.
“Companies that offer actual employment to Palestinians are a threat to our work, which is creating a population that’s dependent on handouts and nursed on entitlement. Organizations such as Oxfam come dangerously close to creating initiative among dependent populations to empower themselves economically to end their own hunger,” he added. “We’re glad that Johansson and Oxfam have parted ways, for that reason.”
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