Children are the main victims of the conflict in Syria, Cardinal Mario Zenari, Apostolic Nuncio to Syria said on Monday evening in Budapest.

In his lecture delivered at the Pázmány Péter Catholic University, the cardinal highlighted that eight years ago “a flood of violence” had taken Syria by surprise. The brutality of the war has primarily affected minorities, Christians the most, and among them, the most vulnerable – women and children – have undergone the greatest suffering.

Never before have this many children been killed and this many women raped in a single conflict, he said.

Mario Zenari said the war had claimed more than half a million lives, over one and a half million people had been injured, 35 per cent of residential buildings had been damaged, every third school had been destroyed, and more than half of hospitals and medical centres had been destroyed or rendered unusable.

More than seventy per cent of Syrian people live in extreme poverty, and some sixty per cent of them have no jobs, the cardinal said.

He added that “the greatest wound” is not the destruction of buildings, but the flight of Christians from Syria. Christians have greatly contributed to Syria’s economic and cultural development, and most of those who have left Syria are qualified young people. Therefore, the country’s situation will deteriorate further. Additionally, mostly men are leaving; as a result, it is ever harder for Christian girls remaining in Syria to find Christian husbands for themselves, and they are therefore likely to marry Muslim men, he pointed out.

The cardinal also spoke about the invaluable support and assistance of Christian organisations. He said hospitals operated by local Christian churches with international support provide medical care not only for Christian patients, and therefore Muslims are often surprised in hospitals that they receive help from those whom they called faithless. In consequence, these health care facilities are not only curative centres, but also serve the cause of peaceful co-existence and the preaching of the gospel, Mr Zenari added.

Azbej Tristan, Minister of State for Helping Persecuted Christians at the Prime Minister’s Office said the Hungarian government’s Hungary Helps Programme – whose mission it is to assist persecuted Christians – has a dual purpose in Syria. On the one hand, they would like to save lives, and on the other, they seek to give people a vision and hope.

“Different responses have been given to the great challenge of our time, the economic, humanitarian and resulting migration crisis” in the world, and “we believe that the responses of Western governments are not satisfactory”. They supported migration, and invited people to leave their native land. By contrast, Hungary says that it is in every person’s best interest to be able to stay in their home country, the Minister of State said.

The goal of the government is “to take help where there is trouble, rather than bringing trouble to Europe”. This is why they set up the Hungary Helps Programme through which they provide help in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Nigeria.

He said they support the operation of five schools in Syria alone, and assist the open hospitals programme which is also based in Syria. More than half of the institutions providing hospital care in Syria have been destroyed, and due to the lack of medical care more people are dying than the number of those killed in the war, Azbej Tristan added.

Balázs Orbán, Parliamentary and Strategic State Secretary at the Prime Minister’s Office, said that while “the citizens of large countries and empires” immediately want to resolve problems which have persisted for centuries whenever they visit a conflict-ridden region, small countries, including Hungary, take the view that they are unable to administer justice and are unable to solve those conflicts.

“We immediately understood, however, that we have friends in those regions whom we must help not because it is in our best interest for geopolitical reasons, but because they are our allies, brothers and sisters, in a human sense”, he said.

In the past three years, the Hungarian political, economic and cultural elite have learnt a great deal because they have recognised this alliance, this natural kinship with Christians in the Middle East, Mr Orbán added.

Giampaolo Silvestri, Secretary General of the AVSI Foundation coordinating the open hospitals programme in Syria, highlighted that the Foundation is running 179 programmes in 31 countries. They primarily wish to maintain education and to provide food supplies in countries afflicted by war. He said they had started the open hospitals programme in order to support the population of Syria with medicines and medical aids. Another goal was to enable the three surviving Catholic hospitals to operate at full capacity again, and to provide free medical care for the poorest.

Mr Silvestri thanked the Hungarian government for its support, highlighting that Hungary is the first country to support their work from public funds, and it is to be hoped that by doing so it is setting an example for other European countries as well.

The lecture was attended, among others, by Cardinal Péter Erdő, Archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest, and several members of the Hungarian Catholic Bishops’ Conference.

(MTI/Prime Minister's Office)