Sister Annie Demerjian, delegation councillor for the Sisters of Jesus and Mary for Lebanon and Syria, said she did not want to paint a totally dark picture, "because always there is hope."

She said for Syrians who are employed, the monthly salary of a family is barely sufficient for one week.

"Many, many people are really hungry. They don't have even one meal a day," she told journalists May 25.

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The brutal Syrian conflict has left an estimated 146,000 people dead, half of them reportedly civilians, and caused millions to flee.

Aid experts say up to 4 million people could be displaced by the end of this year, making it the worst exodus since the Rwandan genocide 20 years ago, and there is no end to the conflict or solution to the refugee crisis in sight.

Mark Mitchell, Caritas Aotearoa New Zealand's Humanitarian Programmes co-ordinator, recently returned from Lebanon where more than 1.2 million refugees have sought safety. He said the situation there was dire.

"The feeling I had was in many ways a sense of hopelessness. At the moment Syrians I met in Lebanon feel there is no end in sight," he said.

Syrian refugees, most of whom live outside the camps, were forced to find shelter where they could, including in abandoned chicken coops, storage sheds or other derelict structures, often without running water.

Diseases such as cholera and polio were major concerns in the cramped and unhealthy conditions, Mr Mitchell said.

He said the refugee influx was also putting a huge strain on resources in Lebanon.

"Imagine if war started in Australia and we suddenly had 1.2 million refugees in an area the size of Northland? It's hard to imagine, but it is just the situation in Lebanon."

Mr Mitchell urged people to donate to aid organisations as the UN launches its largest-ever appeal for a single humanitarian crisis, saying $6.5 billion was needed to meet the need of all those affected.

New Zealanders have already donated more than $2m while the Government has given $12.5m to help those agencies.

Source:

• Dominion Post
• Image: Dominion Post

On Saturday, President Obama expressed his desire to "hold the Assad regime accountable for their use of chemical weapons." "Holding accountable," as so many journalists have rightly identified, is loosely-veiled language that disguises the purpose of an American-led military intervention: punishment.

The use of military force as punishment - in this case, for the alleged use of chemical weapons against Syrian rebel forces - was understood as a just use of force by one of the founding figures of western just war theory, St. Augustine of Hippo. Writing in the early-fifth century, Augustine believed that "just wars as defined as those which avenge injuries." Indeed, the view of punishment as a justification for war continued to be given salience in the Catholic moral theology, from which modern just war theories emerged, up until the seventeenth century, where it features in the writings of Hugo Grotius. The justification of these moral theologians' insistence on punishment as a legitimate use of force emerged from:

• the lack of a sovereign authority to pronounce on disputes between states and the need for states to defend themselves; and
• the divine authority of a sovereign to serve as, in the words of thirteenth-century theologian St. Thomas Aquinas, "God's minister" in punishing sin.

The first claim explains why states can use force while private citizens cannot. When an individual is wronged by another, "he can seek for redress of his rights from the tribunal of his superior," as Aquinas put it. However, prior to the emergence of international law, if a state sought redress for alleged wrongdoings by another state, it had no authority to turn to for justice. Thus, it had license to pursue its claim directly, exercising its own force in an effort to, in a sense, install itself as a sovereign who could pass (just) judgement over its enemy's wrongdoing. The second claim involves not only the existence of a deity, but a deity who might sanction or even directly command wars in some situations. Augustine held the wars of Moses against the Egyptians as an archetypal just war, for in obeying God's command Moses "showed not ferocity but obedience." Continue reading

Sources

• Religion & Ethics, ABC
• Image: PRI's The World