FAYETTEVILLE — About 150 people gathered Saturday in the sunshine in front of the Fayetteville Town Center to raise awareness and donations for a group of people who haven’t seen a bright day in years.
Arkansas’ Stand for the Children of Syria was organized by Syria native and University of Arkansas associate professor Mohja Kahf as part of a larger global event, the Walk for the Children ofSyria, which was expected to take place simultaneously in 21 U.S. cities and eight other countries.
Saturday’s event in Fayetteville was a “stand” rather than a walk “because the logistics of a walk was just too complicated,” said Kahf, also a member of the Syrian Nonviolence Movement.
The “stand” proved more effective than a walk since Kahf and other rally speakers and musicians had a captive audience to whom they could talk about the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria,particularly its effect on children. Kahf likened Syria’s five major war-torn cities to “five [Hurricane] Katrinas, except this is all manmade” during the country’s ongoing civil war.
Kahf was born in Syria, took her first steps there and “got my first hugs there,” she said. But the country today is nothing like she remembered it.
“Today our name is blood,” Kahf said. “The world knows us now, but only by blood.”
The death and destruction in her country is coming at such a rate that there’s little time for Syrians to reflect on the mass loss of life, she said. They have no choice but to go on and try to take care of the living, she said.
“There has been no pause in the massacres. Between a massacre and a murder and a bombing and a sniping, there is no pause to mourn,” she said.
Human-rights experts estimate that upward of 3,000 children have died as a result of ongoing brutality in Syria, and nearly 350,000 Syrians have been forced to flee to neighboring countries.
“It truly is an international crisis,” said emcee and poet Moshe Newmark. “It’s a crisis for the children and a crisis for all of us, really.”
Even with an average turnout for the event, organizers made the best of the sights and sounds of it all. Many of those in attendance took pictures and videos to put on Facebook and YouTube.
Kahf first led the group in a back-and forth chant where she recited a poetic, almost lyrical, line, and the crowd answered with: “For the children, hand in hand. Syrians and world unite.”
Even though technology is crippled by Syria’s disastrous conditions, “YouTube images are very powerful,” Kahf said.
Volunteers manned a table to collect donations for UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, which provides health services andremedial schooling for children in Syria and around the world. An anonymous donor attending the rally promised to double the proceeds raised for UNICEF during the event, Kahf said.
“These children have needs. They have needs such as food, shelter, blankets,” Newmark said. “These are things that we take for granted in this country, especially around Thanksgiving time. But these are children who are going without the basics of life.”
A clothesline draped across the plaza in front of the town center was pinned with pictures of children from Syria - a girl whose legs were amputated and another of a younger girl with diabetes who is unable to get the medication she needs for treatment.
The photos and messages were interspersed with items of children’s clothing to drive home the fact, organizers said, that the most vulnerable of Syria’s population are at the greatest risk.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 17 on 11/18/2012