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Dubai's shipping prowess bolsters Lebanon relief effort |
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7/25/2006 8:46:11 AM |
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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - A relief effort for war-stricken Lebanon gathered pace here on Monday, with organizers shipping the first 50 metric tons (55 U.S. tons) of donated food, clothing and other emergency aid that Lebanon has requested.
Dubai’s already deft cargo handling is being streamlined for the emergency shipments, with most customs procedures waived and carrier Emirates airline flying the goods for free, organizers said. Boxes of rice, milk, blankets and tea shipped via Damascus, Syria, are arriving in Lebanon a day after they are sent.
“It’s going fast. We send it now, they get it tomorrow,” said Elie Sawaya, the maintenance and purchasing director of the American University in Dubai, where much of Dubai’s aid was being collected. “It’ll be a big help. But it won’t be enough.”
The university’s neoclassical campus has been converted into a cargo depot, with hallways and classrooms jammed with boxes of Kraft cheese, baby wipes, medicines and clothes. Arab, Western and South Asian volunteers, many of them students, loaded and unloaded trucks from the marble stairs under the college’s domed portico.
Arab countries of the Persian Gulf acted quickly after Israel began bombing Lebanon in response for Hezbollah’s July 12 raid that captured two Israeli soldiers and killed eight others. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Emirates donated US$90 million for emergency aid, while residents sent money and goods to private relief drives like the one here. More than 300 metric tons (331 U.S. tons) has been collected.
“Nobody can understand how the international community can be silent on this,” said Dania Bazzy, the American University’s Lebanese-born director of external affairs. “For God’s sake, if they’d just look. We have to help. Everybody has to help.”
Bazzy, a member of the Emirati-Lebanese Friendship Association, which is overseeing Dubai’s aid drive, said the shipments aim to ease the suffering of some 600,000 Lebanese driven from their homes in the Israeli siege that has destroyed swaths of the country and killed nearly 400 people, mainly civilians.
In Damascus, volunteers haul the aid in small pickup trucks over the mountain roads into Lebanon.
“It’s a very dangerous job,” Sawaya said. “Israeli planes are hitting every big truck or trailer, never mind what it’s carrying. They don’t care.”
Dubai ruler Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum asked the friendship association to organize the relief and has asked for cooperation from the emirate’s logistics operators, Emirates news agency WAM reported.
The American University in Dubai is a branch campus of American InterContinental University in Atlanta, Georgia. |
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