With another 400 Syrians killed and 2000 more injured in besieged Aleppo alone, a UN humanitarian official has appealed to the Security Council for action to stop the bloodshed in the devastated Arab country.
The latest reminder for UNSC action to save the stranded Syrians came as civil society leaders, rights and peace activists wondered why the UN Security Council, whose primary task is to ensure safety of people, not acting.
The answer is multifaceted – members of the Council have divergence of interests. Russia is working to save Bashar al Assad and other members wanting his ouster. Then there are disparate campaigns against terror organizations. Then there are regional sectarian players backing armed groups. The whole world is to blame for letting Syria fester into a cauldron of death and destruction.
“These are people just like you and me – not sitting around a table in New York but forced into desperate, pitiless suffering, their future wiped out […] peoples’ lives destroyed and Syria itself destroyed,” the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, Stephen O’Brien, told the 15-member body.
O’Brien asked the members of the primary UN organ for maintenance of international peace and security to “[do] the right thing to stop the draining of the blood of Syrians.”
According the UN, in eastern Aleppo, which is besieged by the Syrian Government, has had no UN assistance in nearly four months and faces regular bombing by Syrian and Russian forces.
The tactics employed on the city are as obvious as they are unconscionable, O’ Brien said:
]“Make life intolerable; make death likely. Push people from starvation to despair to surrender. Push people to leave on green buses.”
The Syrians in Aleppo face terror, he said, pointinh to leaflets, dropped from Syrian and Russian aircrafts, that read – “This is your last hope […] Save yourselves. If you do not leave these areas urgently, you will be annihilated.”
“And it is clear that the aircraft which drop the bombs, the generals who give the orders and the politicians who have designed the strategy intend to make good on that horrific promise,” he added.
O’Brien also spokeof the plight of the children. Nearly eight million children have lost their parents, their homes, their schools and have suffered immense emotional and physical traumas.
“It is within your power to do it. If you don’t take action, there will be no Syrian peoples or Syria to save – that will be this Council’s legacy, our generation’s shame.”
“It is in your hands today to take the right path, and avert this looming irreversible tragedy of our time,” he concluded.
