Despite Madaya Aid, U.N. Still Fails To End Country's Sieges

Hundreds of thousands of people are living under siege in Syria, where starvation is being used as a weapon of war. Syria Deeply spoke with James Sadri, director of The Syria Campaign, to learn more about the prevalence of siege tactics in Syria, the perpetrators, and the charges of U.N. failure to help end the sieges

The United Nations is failing in a "dramatic way" to end the widespread use of siege tactics in Syria, said director of The Syria Campaign James Sadri.

With nearly one million people under siege and three successive U.N. Security Council resolutions giving the global body permission to cross conflict lines in the delivery of aid "you’d expect the U.N. to be looking to leverage every bit of power it could to try and get life-saving aid to these communities where we know people are starving to death," Sadri as his organization launched a new awareness campaign on Tuesday to highlight the widespread use of siege tactics in Syria.

The launch of Break the Siege comes at a time of international relevance, as word of deadly sieges in Syria has made global headline news over the past week.

Pictures and video from the town of Madaya just outside of Damascus show emaciated children and malnourished adults. Under tight, government-imposed siege since July 2015, at least 23 residents from the community have died due to lack of food since December, according to global charity Doctors Without Borders.

But while aid convoys earlier this week managed to break the siege on Madaya, in addition to rebel-encircled towns of Fou'a and Kafraya in Idlib, there are some 48 other besieged communities throughout the country, according to the watchdog organization Siege Watch .

“We want to break the silence around sieges in Syria and push the U.N. to get life-saving aid in,” said Sadri. “People are now talking about Madaya, but there are 1 million people currently living under siege, where starvation is being used as a weapon of war.”

While the latest U.N. figures detail some 400,000 people under siege in Syria, other organizations like Siege Watch estimate the figure to be closer to 1 million.

Formed on the third anniversary of the Syrian uprising, The Syria Campaign is an independent advocacy group focused on highlighting the lives and voices of Syrian civilians “trapped between the regime and extremist groups like the Islamic State (ISIS),” according to Sadri.

“[Civilians] are being increasingly silenced and ignored by both international media and politicians,” he said. “We campaign for those people.”

Syria Deeply spoke with Sadri about the prevalence of siege tactics in Syria, the perpetrators of the sieges, and the charges of U.N. failure to lift the blockades.

Syria Deeply: As you’ve noted on your new site, many Syrians have accused the U.N. of complicity in government sieges of civilian areas. Is there any truth to this?

James Sadri: There are two things that the U.N. is failing on in a fairly dramatic way when it comes to sieges. One is that they are not using the authority given to them in three successive Security Council resolutions – 2165, 2191 and 2258 – to cross conflict lines in the delivery of aid. They have been given a mandate to get this aid into besieged areas without asking for bureaucratic permission from the Syrian regime. And yet they’re still asking for it, and if you read their latest report to the Security Council in December, they list the requests that are still pending with the Syrian authorities.

The U.N. shouldn’t be waiting for unnecessary authorization from anybody. This is not a security issue at all – that should be addressed separately. What we’re talking about is unnecessary bureaucratic permission. Security Council resolution 2165 states that “United Nations humanitarian agencies and their implementing partners are authorized to use routes across conflict lines.”

The resolution says “notification” should be given to the Syrian authorities, in the same way as they do when aid crosses the border. But by saying the regime has the right to grant permission or not, you’re offering the principal besiegers a veto over aid delivery to these starving populations. The U.N. is permitting the regime to hide behind bureaucratic red tape while a million people are going hungry. It’s pretty scandalous.

If the U.N. was serious about delivering aid to these sieges, it would notify the regime that “we are delivering to area X, on date Y using route Z.” If indeed it is the regime or any other forces that are threatening these aid deliveries, this should immediately be reported to the Security Council so it can be escalated. When you have 1 million people living under starvation siege, you’d expect the U.N. to be looking to leverage every bit of power it could to try and get life-saving aid to these communities where we know people are starving to death. Knowing that the U.N. isn’t using all the power that it has to do that is beyond frustrating. 

The second way in which the U.N. is failing is in the classification of besieged areas, or what some call the silencing of sieges. The U.N. does not consider many of these critical areas as besieged, and in doing so it is understating the scale of the problem and therefore the response that the international community is likely to generate. We’re simply not seeing the full extent of the problem. There is no more concrete example of this than Madaya itself, which still isn’t classified by the U.N. as a siege. It’s officially a hard-to-reach area, and yet we’ve seen dozens of people starve to death. So whether you go for the figure of a million under siege, of if you look at the Doctors Without Borders’ figures of 2 million under siege, it’s clear that the U.N. is grossly underestimating the number of people who are besieged in Syria.

Accusations of U.N. complicity, or really the lack of impartiality in its Syria operations is not just coming from Syrians or NGO workers I’ve spoken to, in some cases it’s from the U.N. staff themselves. Part of the problem comes down to a split in the way the U.N.’s operation works. It’s divided between its Damascus office, an office in Turkey and an office in Jordan that together form its response for all of Syria. And there are many that feel that the Damascus part of the operation, which works very closely in its day-to-day functioning with the regime – it needs permission for its visas and its presence in the country, etc. – is essentially overriding concerns from other parts of the organization. That is a serious concern.

One small recent example of this is that during the consultation that went into forming the 2016 humanitarian response plan, the Damascus office agreed to some last-minute edits from the regime that included removing all mentions of the words "siege" or "besieged" from the plan. The Damascus office accepted the edits without consulting with any of the other regional partners. That’s just one micro-example of the kind of ongoing pattern that lots of people are pointing to – as I mentioned, not just Syrians themselves, but NGO workers and even in some cases, people inside in the U.N. itself.

This article originally appeared on Syria Deeply . For weekly updates about the war in Syria, you can sign up to the Syria Deeply email list .

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