“It is the responsibility of the international community to find a global solution to the situation in Syria and Iraq, because the conflict in the region represents a major danger to the whole world”, István Mikola said on Wednesday in Budapest on the closing day of a two-day conference on Syria.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s Minister of State for Security Policy and International Cooperation said the humanitarian situation in Syria was a “catastrophe”, pointing out that the world had currently not found a method “for handling this terrible state of affairs”.
Mr. Mikola told the press that the Hungarian pledges made at the conference may be divided into three groups: the Government has offered to provide five million euros towards handling the healthcare disaster in Syria, 14.6 million euros to support people living in refugee camps in Turkey, and 250 scholarship places for Syrian students to attend Hungarian universities.
In an interview for Hungarian news agency MTI, the Minister of State said that in his opinion the crisis in Iraq and Syria was getting increasingly serious, and declared that he was sceptical with relation to the fact that “this negative trend will change in future and some kind of order will be created, but we cannot stop believing in a long-term solution”.
As he explained, the situation is extremely serious and a humanitarian crisis of previously unseen proportions has developed, which the international community is having difficulty getting to grips with. “The goal of the pledges made at the conference is not only the management of the humanitarian situation, but also the long-term resolving of the conflict and the initiation of some kind of long-term consolidation”, he said.
Representatives of around seventy countries are attending the conference in Brussels. The participants are reviewing the state of the undertakings made at last year’s donor conference in London and are expected to agree on providing further funding. The other important topic of the summit is to discuss methods of finding a long-term solution to the civil war.