While the U.N. tries to raise billions for Syrian relief, it is under
growing fire for helping the Assad dictatorship carry out a brutal
“surrender or starve” strategy against its opponents, who are also beset
by the scourge of ISIS.
Frustrated aid workers, academics and beleaguered
Syrians are pointing to the U.N.’s long-standing, cooperative ties with
the regime of President Bashar Al-Assad in dispensing humanitarian aid
inside the country as empowering the dictator to funnel relief supplies
to his supporters, keep food and supplies away from desperate civilians
who do not support him and use the relief to free up money for military
campaigns against moderate and extreme opponents alike.
As one group of besieged anti-Assad Syrian aid
workers put it in an open letter to the head of the U.N.’s Office for
the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Stephen O’Brien: “For
many of us in Syria, the U.N. has turned from a symbol of hope into a
symbol of complicity.”
The rising frustration comes as a major donor meeting
is getting under way in London, aimed at getting wealthy nations to
contribute $9 billion this year for relief efforts in Syria and
surrounding countries, where millions of refugees have fled. The U.S.
has given some $4.5 billion to the effort since the Syrian crisis began
in 2011, and Secretary of State John Kerry announced an additional $925
million contribution at the London meeting.
For its part, the U.N. pushes back vehemently against
any idea that its relief efforts help Assad. “Civilians bear the brunt
of the inhumane actions by all parties to the conflict, the government
and armed groups, which the international community has failed to stop
for nearly five years,” declared an OCHA spokesperson in response to a
question from Fox News.
“We and our partners continue to call for an end to
the brutal violence, for those committing war crimes to be held
accountable, and for the international community to take action. The
voice of the United Nations humanitarian agencies has been loud, clear
and unequivocal on this.”
Meanwhile, Assad’s forces, supported by Russian attack bombers, are instead drawing the noose of desperation even tighter.
This week, they continued to blast away at relief
corridors that provide intermittent aid to hundreds of thousands of
desperate Syrians in the northern city of Aleppo, and sparked a sudden
“pause” in U.N.-sponsored peace talks in Geneva that had nominally
flickered into existence at the end of January.
The Syria Institute, a Washington-based think tank,
contends that no fewer than 46 Syrian communities with a collective
estimated population of about 1.1 million are now under siege in Syria,
with all but two sieges involving the Assad regime, though some
communities also are besieged by ISIS.
CLICK HERE FOR THE TALLY
The Syria Institute population figures, produced in
collaboration with a Dutch organization called PAX, do not include some
40,000 people estimated to be clinging weakly to life in the town of
Madaya, where only one U.N. relief convoy has recently been allowed to
enter, and where, according to a January 16 story in Foreign Policy
magazine, U.N. officials had known about the town’s desperate plight for
months but downplayed it.
Meantime, as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha
Power noted last month, “Out of a total of 113” relief convoy requests
the U.N. sent to the Syrian regime, “this U.N. member state approved and
completed only 13.” In 80 cases, she added, Syria “did not even bother
to respond to the United Nations within three months.”
Power called that “part of a deliberate, systematic strategy aimed at killing and displacing civilians.”
The continuing offensive and the diplomatic pause put
a shadow over a British-backed preliminary to the donor conference
where Syrian and international non-government organizations issued a
strong appeal to wealthy donor nations to “demand an immediate end to
siege tactics and demand unhindered access to humanitarian aid.”
Along with additional pleas to the donors to
“strongly and unconditionally condemn all attacks on civilian life and
infrastructure, the non-government attendees also called on rich
countries to “provide long-term funding directly to Syrian civil society
organizations,” a pointed departure from the U.N.-coordinated global
funding process that has dominated the relief effort so far.
“Civilians bear the brunt of the inhumane actions by all
parties to the conflict, the government and armed groups, which the
international community has failed to stop for nearly five years.”
- OCHA spokesperson
“It sounds like the major donor partners increasingly
understand the need for changes in the way things are done,” said
Simon O’Connell, executive director for Europe of the major U.S.
humanitarian organization Mercy Corps, which is deeply involved in
getting aid to Syria without the involvement of the Assad regime.
“There is recognition that at least some of the assistance is not able
to make it to some of those most in need.”
O’Connell diplomatically pointed no fingers of blame
in discussing the non-governmental appeal with Fox News, which he saw as
a coming sea-change in the way that international aid is organized and
delivered around the world.
But other humanitarian workers have had no such qualms.
In a toughly-worded article that appeared Monday on
the website of the Council on Foreign Relations-sponsored magazine,
Foreign Affairs, Dr. Annie Sparrow, a veteran international medical aid
worker and assistant professor at Mount Sinai Global Health Center,
declared that “long-festering concerns over OCHA’s lack of neutrality
are growing.”
OCHA is the U.N. department that draws together
global and international appeals for response at events like the donor
mega-conference underway in London, and then helps redistribute the
money to the sprawling U.N. array of agencies, funds and programs, as
well as other aid groups. It also coordinates relief efforts on a
regional and national basis, including in Damascus, where it meets in a
committee with members of Syrian government departments, and all
non-U.N. aid agencies working in tandem must be approved by the Assad
regime.
“Characteristic of many agencies of the United
Nations, OCHA places a premium on maintaining good relations with the
Syrian government, a position fueled by its desire to stay in Damascus,”
Sparrow declared. She added that “it is worth asking whether OCHA’s
bottom line is harming the agency’s efforts to alleviate the
catastrophic consequences of Damascus’ anti-civilian strategy.”
Among other things, Sparrow charged that some $1.7
billion of the U.N.’s appeal for Syria “is allocated for U.N. and
national agencies operating from Damascus, all controlled by the
government and providing aid almost exclusively to government territory.
In non-government territory, the U.N. in Damascus must work through the
Syrian Arab Red Crescent” –whose local branches are often non-partisan
and perform countless heroics, but whose leadership has close ties to
the Assad regime.
Despite a 2014 U.N. Security Council resolution
authorizing cross-border relief convoys into the northern half of Syria,
she declared, citing a 2016 U.N. Humanitarian Needs Overview, “U.N.
agencies reached an average of 4 per cent of the civilians in besieged
areas (about 16,500 people) each month with health assistance, 0.6
percent (roughly 2,500 people) with food, and less than 0.1 percent
(fewer than 500 people) with nonfood items such as tents, blankets and
soap.”
(The same U.N. overview notes vaguely that “OCHA is
“aware of” more than 185 Syrian NGOs working in humanitarian and
development aid, including 75 that “continue to deliver substantive
quantities of assistance to Syria from neighboring countries”—but also
says they work “alongside” U.N. cross-border operations—in other words,
there is no U.N. connection.)
More dramatically, Sparrow charges that OCHA’s 2016
Humanitarian Response Plan for Syria, which asks international donors
for $3.2 billion to provide aid to some 13.5 million people, is a
“watered down document” in which the Syrian government “revised the
narrative, the budget and the programming,” including any reference to
the removal of land mines, a constant hazard to foraging civilians.
“According to the final Humanitarian Response Plan,”
Sparrow declared, “there is no war in Syria, only a crisis and
insecurity, which, incidentally, is not the government’s fault.” She
also offered up samples from a draft version with tracking changes that
removed touchy references.
CLICK HERE FOR THE DRAFT VERSION
Asked by Fox News to respond to the article, an OCHA
spokesperson emailed that “the Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs and its staff are impartial, neutral and
independent. Suggesting otherwise is not only untrue but also
irresponsible, and could be detrimental to the safety of the unarmed aid
workers risking their lives every day to bring vital aid and protection
to people in dire need.”
“The United Nations provides humanitarian aid on the
basis only of an objective assessment of need -- in this and all
crises,” she added. “Our focus is and will always be on the quickest,
fairest and most efficient way of safely bringing people aid and
protection, and telling the world what is happening on the ground.”
Many Syrians, however, disagree. In their open letter
last month to the head of OCHA, Stephen O’Brien, members of anti-Assad
non-government Syrian aid organizations -- “medical workers, teachers,
rescue workers and civil society activists”-- declared that they were
among those living under siege, and described their nightmare of “being
starved, deprived of medical supplies and in almost all cases bombed
daily by the regime of Bashar al-Assad.”
What made the grim suffering more painful, they said
“is knowing that in many besieged areas, such as those around Damascus,
U.N. warehouses full of lifesaving aid are often just minutes away.”
They accused O’Brien of “choosing not to deliver that aid to us . . .
because the Assad regime is not giving you permission. This is hardly
surprising since it is the regime imposing the sieges in the first
place.”
“By allowing the regime to veto aid to civilians in
areas outside its control, you have allowed the U.N. to become a
political tool of the war,” they declared and urged him simply to defy
the government.
In reply, O’Brien said he was “deeply saddened and
concerned,” and called the siege conditions “unacceptable,
unconscionable and unlawful.” Saying that he had personally accompanied
cross border relief convoys, and stressing the personal risks U.N. aid
workers had taken, he offered assurances that “the U.N. is neither too
close to any party nor acting in such a way to encourage the use of
siege tactics.”
Repeating the mantra that only a political solution
will solve the problem, he reiterated that “it is our duty to act
impartially, neutrally and independently.”
The fact, however, is that all U.N. agencies, and not
just OCHA, are careful to show deference to “national partners” in the
planning processes for their activities in acknowledgement of the
primacy of national sovereignty -- and Syria is no different, except in
the bloodthirsty and violent way that it treats much of its population.
In its own country plan for Syria, for example, the
United Nations Development Program declares that its country office,
“with full cooperation with national partners, will identify target
areas and beneficiaries …using available assessments of needs and
priorities”—which are unlikely to come from rebel enclaves. UNDP also
says that some 933,000 people in Syria are already benefiting directly
from cash-for-work schemes.
The child aid agency UNICEF, in a Syrian country
program that it considered at its most recent Executive Board meeting
this week, declared that over the next two years, its programing will
focus on “interventions that enhance the resilience of families,
communities and systems,” and states that while “working closely with
all national partners, UNICEF will build positive coping mechanisms in
communities.”
Overall, the UNICEF document said, “The country
program priorities and strategies have been aligned with the future
priorities of the Government of the Syrian Arab Republic.” The agency is
appealing for $389 million to carry out its Syrian work.
In response to questions from Fox News, a UNICEF
spokesman said that its country program, “including its humanitarian
response, is informed by discussions and consultations with a range of
partners, including national partners. This is normal practice, for
operational and technical reasons. UNICEF delivers assistance based on
the core humanitarian principles of neutrality and impartiality.”
After conducting more than 100 interviews with aid
workers, volunteers and Syrian “stakeholders” over two years, a
freelance journalist and a Ph.D. candidate at Cambridge University have
come to the opposite conclusion about U.N. aid efforts. Despite their
“pretensions to neutrality,” the two concluded, in an article published
in the prestigious British journal International Affairs, that U.N. aid
deliveries have “consistently benefited the Assad regime.”
One reason, they argue, is that the Assad regime’s
authoritarian socialist development model had always involved “various
welfare policies aimed at ensuring food security and political
compliance,” such as subsidized bread supplies.
In other words, by “channeling most assistance”
through Assad-approved local partners, “external donors have helped the
regime fulfill some of its welfare responsibilities.” The regime also
“shares credit for welfare provision without diverting resources from
its military efforts.”
In some cases, the authors cite witness testimony that food aid is simply expropriated by the Assad military.
On the other hand, the regime’s refusal to allow aid
convoys to reach dissident communities is the traditional harsh side of
the same policy.
As the two authors put it: “While emergency aid can
appear apolitical on the surface,” the “undeniable importance of food
during wartime makes a position of neutrality untenable.”
“By bringing external resources into life-or-death
situations,” they conclude, “aid agencies inevitably become implicated
in war’s inner workings.”
The need to get aid to suffering populations
regardless of the protocols of neutrality is one reason why Mercy Corps’
O’Connell feels there is a growing argument for putting more resources
in the hands of non-governmental and local Syrian organizations, as the
NGO conference he attended strongly endorsed.
Mercy Corps itself, he noted, is managing to get aid
supplies --not always regularly -- to some 500,000 people per month in
the Aleppo governate that is now under increasing Assad pressure. The
current Assad offensive, he subsequently declared, is having a
“significant impact” on Mercy Corps’ work, causing temporary suspension
of aid operations in some villages; the aid organization is “monitoring
the situation closely.”
Before the suspension, O’Connell told Fox News, “We
see areas where at times we have to vary our strategies for delivering
aid. On certain days we are able to get through, and others, not.”
The current humanitarian system, he observes, “is broken.”
