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MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA’S GRAVE HUMANITARIAN CRISIS!

No nations have engaged in such fully concentrated diplomacy to open and secure humanitarian corridors and bring supplies to cities being starved and cut off from the rest of the world and to make sure Syria’s children do not go hungry.

By Dr. Mohammad Ajmal Qasmi The author is guest lecturer and research fellow on West Asia and Middle East Affairs at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

T

he world has devoted a great deal of diplomatic energy to securing Syria’s chemical weapons. It has yet to do the same for providing security after the emerging of Syria’s untold stories’ of people including children, women and elderly persons being killed ruthlessly.

Their future is as important for international security and stability, even if the consequences of inaction will take far longer to be seen and realized.

The war in Syria between the regime of Bashar al-Assad and forces opposed to him, be they Syrian Free Army, the Oppositions or the militias fighting to get rid of the autocratic despot government have ground on for more than two years and claim new victims each day. More than 100,000 have been killed. Starvation has become a gruesome reality, with a Sheikh leading Friday prayers in a mosque of Dera city of Syria, saying it is ok to eat cats and dogs given the lack

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of anything else.

Polio and other fatal illnesses likely brought by foreign fighters, have resurfaced to claim tiny victims younger than 2 years old. In the past two weeks, barrel bombs – drums filled with shrapnel and explosives – are reported to have killed more than 500 people alone in the city of Aleppo.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based group with links to Syrian opposition, children accounted for more than 150 of the dead.

Refugees fleeing the conflict, most to Syria’s overwhelmed neighbors Jordan and Lebanon, and top a whopping 2 million. Some U.N. officials expect that number to climb as high as 4 million in 2014. More than 1.1 million of these refugees are younger than 18.

Indeed, Syria’s youngest citizens are paying dearly for a war they did not create, one that is laying waste to their present and their future.

Three out of four Syrian children “have lost a close friend or

family member in their country’s ongoing conflict” and “many have witnessed violence”, notes the International Rescue Committee.

Charities such as IRC and Mercy Corps. Children tell of young people isolated, lonely and struggling with the impossible task of coming to terms with all that they have seen and lost.

If the measures are not taken on time quickly, a generation of innocents will become lasting casualties of an appalling war.

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The world has devoted a great deal ofdiplomatic energy to securing Syria’s chemical weapons.

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According to a report released in Arabic Daily “As Safir” published from Beirut: “A grave consequence of the conflict is that a generation is growing up without a formal education”. More than half

MIDDLE EAST of all school-aged Syrian children in Jordan and Lebanon are not in school. In Lebanon, it is estimated that some 200,000 school-aged Syrian refugee children could remain out of school at the end of the year.

They join 25 million kids of primaryschool-age around the world out of school because of war.

It will not be out of place if the humanitarian crisis in Syria called

as the largest turmoil leaving behind the case of Iraq, as the numbers swell beyond Syria’s borders. Security and education are bound together: Low educational attainment is among the strongest predictors of violence.

Anyone hoping for a safer, more secure world had better start with educating children.

And yet until now, the international community’s reaction to the escalating death count and the rising number of hungry, homeless and displaced children has fallen somewhere between a shrug and a sigh. Although U.N. agencies have released a slew of dire warnings about the situation’s urgency and its gravity, it is unclear whether anyone is listening, let alone ready to act to change the realities on the ground.

In September 2013, a round of feverish and focused diplomacy unfolded between Russia and the United States to reach a deal with

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the Assad regime on its chemical weapons.

No nations have engaged in such fully concentrated diplomacy to open and secure humanitarian corridors and bring supplies to cities being starved and cut off from the rest of the world -- and to make sure Syria’s children do not go hungry.

Although chemical weapons may be close to being secured, conventional weapons face no such limitations and are being used to kill, injure and maim with impunity.

This leaves children to pay the price. And so will the rest of the world, eventually, if nothing is done to help a lost generation find a way to a more secure future.

In this connection, an investigative report from a UN panel was released December 19, 2013 and uncovered a consistent countrywide pattern in which people, mainly adult males, have been seized by the Syrian security and armed forces, as well as by pro-Government militias, during mass arrests, house searches at checkpoints and in hospitals.

The Government has perpetuated a system of arrests and incommunicado detention that is conducive to enforced disappearances. In some instances, the disappearances appeared to have a punitive element, targeting family members of defectors, activists, fighters as well as those believed to be providing medical care to the opposition.

In all the cases documented by the Commission, survivors of enforced disappearances described being subjected to torture during their detention. The Commissioners note that this underscores a deeply

disturbing trend, which sheds more light on the systematic use of torture. Victims were consistently denied their fundamental right to due process and placed outside the protection of the law and were at the mercy of their captors.

The Commission also concludes that authorities have refused to provide information about the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared and in some instances there appeared to be a policy of not providing such information to families. Evidence collected also indicates that relatives who approached the security services were themselves arrested in certain cases. As a result, Syrian authorities have further violated the families’ right to know the truth regarding the circumstances of the enforced disappearance and the fate of the disappeared persons.

In this commotion, under the umbrella of the great powers of the world, such as USA, France, Russia, UK, China and Japan, the Geneva2 conference was held on 22 January but really nothing concrette comes to pass there! Or just shrugs and gestures was the the outcome of the conference, nevertheless and that is to decide whether Syria is destroying its nuclear ammunitions or when Bashar al Asad sees his appropriate time to step down or how the truce might be brought in the Syrian soil?

Humanitarian values have not been given importance in this so called Geneva2 conference. The world community is keen to know the follow-up action to provide security to the Syrian people so that they can foresee peace and tranquility in Syria.