“All of northern Syria has become a disaster zone. We urge international assistance. Help, please” is the cry from the heart of a charity organization in Aleppo in the aftermath of the biggest earthquake that has hit all of northern Syria and beyond.
The extent of the despair of the inhabitants of Aleppo, a densely built city and formerly the economic heart of the country, is beyond imagination. Several million inhabitants who were already struggling to find subsistence and heating due to the aftermath of the war and the brutality of the sanctions are now facing an earthquake disaster on a scale not seen since the twelfthe century, when most of the city was destroyed.
Neither the government nor what remains of civil society are able to deal with it. Only exceptional international assistance and a major easing of sanctions could come to the aid of these hundreds of thousands of families who are living through a particularly cold and rainy winter, deprived of almost everything and now even of roofs to shelter themselves.
Genesis and effects of sanctions
Angered at not having been able to overthrow the power in place, the United States and Europe impose economic sanctions on Syria, and, in doing so, wash their hands of the conflict, to quote a recent editorial in Foreign Policy. However, it is the population that bears the cost of this impasse. In her damning report of November 2022, Alena Douhan, UN special rapporteur, notes that “Syria is the scene of a humanitarian catastrophe and the brutal economic sanctions have a lot to do with it”.
Before the earthquake, Syrians were already experiencing the harshest winter since 2011. Ninety percent of Syrians now live below the poverty line. The vast majority want to leave the country; those who remain struggle to meet their most basic needs. “It’s not a turtleneck that I have to put on, it’s three blankets to protect me against the cold,” a friend who still lives in Aleppo, my hometown, wrote to me a week ago. No oil, no heating. Imagine the situation after the earthquake.
Contrary to what the spokespersons of the powers imposing these sanctions claim, and contrary to naive assurances that humanitarian aid is being sent everywhere, Syrian civil society today lacks all the tools that allow it to feed itself, housing, repairing destroyed houses, running electricity and drinking water, operating wastewater treatment plants. Also missing are farm tractors, ambulances, vehicles for transporting food and medicine, buses and, of course, care for all of society, especially for the elderly and disabled.
We can already predict the next post-earthquake catastrophe: epidemics and infectious diseases. The population has already been hit, since September 2022, by an epidemic of cholera which affects the north-west, where the former director of United Nations operations for the coordination of humanitarian affairs Reena Ghelani listed 24,000 cases between August and October 2022. .
Another maddening consequence: a million inhabitants of the city of Hassaké have been deprived of drinking water for weeks because of the cuts imposed by Turkey. However, when drinking water is no longer pumped into the network due to the drying up of the resource upstream and dysfunctional purification and filtration plants lacking spare parts, families in rural areas obtain their supplies from even the river that receives their wastewater.
It is therefore surprising to read again, on the Canadian government’s website, under the heading Canadian sanctions, that “the sanctions related to Syria were adopted within the framework of the Special Economic Measures Act in order to respond to the humanitarian crisis and disruption of international peace and security in the region”. The American law establishing the sanctions also bears a misleading title, the “Ceasar Syria Civilian Protection Act”, which came into force in June 2020.
Once again, the reality on the ground is quite different: rather than responding to a humanitarian crisis, or protecting civilians, we are doing the opposite. The humanitarian crisis measured by the number of food insecure people has worsened by a factor of 15, according to Moutaz Adham, director of Oxfam Syria. The breakdown of internal peace was amplified by internal tensions between rebels and loyalists. As for international security in the region, it has never been more unstable in the countries bordering Syria (Turkey, Israel, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan).
In addition to economic sanctions, there is the loss of use and income from gas and oil deposits controlled by American forces and Kurdish militias in the northeast. As for the surplus oil extracted daily from areas outside government control, it is sold and transported, under military escort, to Iraqi Kurdistan, which is causing an unprecedented fuel shortage.
What should be done ? There now seems to be a consensus on the ineffectiveness of sanctions, but not on what to do about it. However, Canada could very well today distance itself from its American ally, obsessed with a change of regime which does not occur, and attempt a rather humanitarian and innovative initiative, delicate, certainly, but how saving by easing its own sanctions. and by applying the strategy of small steps, as the United Nations program called Oil-for-Food did in the past, without the pitfalls that the experience in Iraq has shown us.
The unimaginable seismic disaster of February 6 offers us an opportunity to relieve the Syrian martyrdom. This will perhaps allow this population, which suffers in silence from collective punishment, oblivion from the cameras and the media, to hope again.