|
 Yet it is months since convoys from the United Nations and other
agencies have delivered food or medical care to many such areas — prevented by a Syrian government accused of using hunger as a weapon
of war against its people.
As the United Nations launched an annual appeal on Monday to help 16
million people affected Syria's civil war, divisions among world
powers that have crippled peacemaking are also denying U.N. staff
the power to defy President Bashar al-Assad's officials and push
into neighborhoods now under siege.
"In government-controlled parts of Syria, what, where and to whom to
distribute aid, and even staff recruitment, have to be negotiated
and are sometimes dictated," said Ben Parker, who ran the U.N.
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Syria
for a year until last February.
"According to the Syrian government's official position,
humanitarian agencies and supplies are allowed to go anywhere, even
across any frontline," he wrote last month in the journal
Humanitarian Exchange. "But every action requires time-consuming
permissions, which effectively provide multiple veto opportunities."
Fighting and rebel groups are also obstacles.
The United Nations appealed for $6.5 billion on Monday to help 16
million people affected by the Syrian civil war, including millions
made hungry and homeless by the conflict soon entering its fourth
year.
The world body estimates about a quarter of a million Syrians are
living under siege as winter bites, most of them encircled by
government forces, but also including 45,000 in two towns in the
north that are besieged by anti-Assad rebels.
A binding Security Council resolution could formally oblige the
authorities to let aid agencies into areas like the Damascus suburbs
and the old city of Homs, where local doctors say children are dying
of malnutrition. But divisions between Western powers, backing the
rebels, and Russia, have paralyzed the world body over Syria since
the conflict began in 2011.
As a result, international agencies are legally obliged to work with
a government which aid workers say has used threats — say, to deny
visas to foreign staff or hinder efforts to help millions of people
outside besieged districts — as a way of muting criticism and
discouraging attempts to break the sieges.
"It is a fundamental flaw in the international system that it is
possible for a rogue state to hold its own people hostage," said a
Western diplomat who works on aid issues.
"Syria ... can threaten access to its own population and say
'millions will starve if my instructions are not followed'.
"The reality is there is a risk of being thrown out," he said. "You
have to look ultimately at what the moral obligation is to serve as
many as you can."
"TROJAN HORSE"
As far as Assad's government is concerned, said former U.N. Syria
staffer Ben Parker, aid operations are "a Trojan horse to
delegitimize the state, develop contacts with the opposition and win
international support for military intervention".
To criticism that they should complain more loudly, aid workers
speaking privately cited the case of a U.N. agency chief who ended a
posting in Damascus last year after clashing with Syrian officials
over access for aid distribution. Syria had made clear that the
official's visa would not be renewed.
An internal U.N. document seen by Reuters last month said visa
applications for international staff were more likely to be turned
down or put on hold in 2013 than to be approved.
It described Syrian bureaucracy hampering operations, as well as
difficulties posed by fighting and a lack of cooperation from
numerous, often rival, rebel groups across the country.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said this month
that both sides have blocked medical aid to the sick and wounded.
"Where we haven't been particularly successful is in increasing our
medical activities in Syria, which remain below our expectations,"
ICRC President Peter Maurer said.
"On both sides we are struggling with the argument that whatever
medical aid is brought to one part or the other is interpreted as an
indirect military support to the other side."
Syrians in areas where little or no aid is getting through say they
feel abandoned and blame world powers for not only extending a war
that has killed over 100,000 by backing warring parties but also
failing to ease the impact on civilians.
An opposition activist in Damascus who uses the name Tariq
al-Dimashqi and works in a field hospital in the besieged eastern
suburbs of the capital says that he has seen no medicine or food
from the United Nations for more than a year.
"The United Nations should do something to save civilians," he said.
"They have to force the regime to end the siege."
Some medicines are smuggled in to the area, he said, but the
hospital is very low on supplies.
CHILDREN DYING
Lack of access for independent agencies makes it hard to verify food
and medical supplies in many areas. But opposition activists have
posted video of the bodies of several skeletal children who local
doctors say died of malnutrition.
In September, footage of the body of one-year-old Rana Obeid, ribs
protruding and belly swollen, was accompanied by statements from
doctors saying she was the sixth child to die from malnutrition in
Mouadamiya, about a quarter-hour drive from the Four Seasons Hotel
in Damascus.
More broadly, providing aid across a patchwork of front lines across
Syria has proved a struggle. Of a population of 23 million, the
United Nations says 2.3 million refugees have fled the country,
taking the misery of the war into often fragile neighboring states,
while 9.3 million need help inside Syria.
Two million of these are in areas that are hard to reach.
[to top of second column] |
A 2013 U.N. appeal for $1.41 billion to finance aid work in Syria
reached only 62 percent of its target. U.N. humanitarian chief
Valerie Amos launch the funding appeal for 2014 on Monday for more
than four times as much money.
"This is the largest amount we have ever had to request at the start
of the year," she said. Twelve U.N. staff and 32 staff or
volunteers of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent have been killed and 21
U.N. staff remain in detention, last month's U.N. document seen by
Reuters says — without specifying which groups were holding them.
In a country in the grip of a population explosion before the war
began, half of Syria's needy are children.
"The time will come that whatever aid you bring it is far too late
and the scars on children will be far too deep to repair," said
Maria Calivis, Middle East and Northern Africa director for the U.N.
Children's Fund UNICEF.
This month the U.N. failed to deliver food to 600,000 out of its
monthly target of 4 million, a goal never yet reached.
Of 91 public hospitals in Syria, 36 are not functioning and another
22 have been damaged, while almost half of the 658 ambulances have
been stolen, burned or massively damaged, according to the World
Health Organization (WHO).
The domestic drug industry — largely based in some of the areas
hardest hit by fighting — collapsed in August 2012 and has virtually
halted production, the WHO added. Rights groups say the Syrian air
force has deliberately bombed hospitals.
The WHO said last month that polio, which is incurable and paralyses
children within hours, had spread from the eastern city of Deir
al-Zor to the major city of Aleppo and around Damascus. It is the
country's first outbreak since 1999.
The WHO must work through the government and a vaccination drive has
not reached all areas, although the agency says 600,000 people have
been reached in contested areas.
"The pressure has to be kept on" for access for medical supplies,
said Elizabeth Hoff, the WHO representative in Syria.
"POOR" RESPONSE
Lebanon-based public health researchers Fouad Fouad and Adam Coutts
criticize the local and international response:
"The outbreak and now spread of Polio Type I in Syria represents
more than just a breakdown of a public health system during a time
of conflict," said Coutts.
"It is symptomatic of a humanitarian response in which public health
has been neglected and which remains underfunded and poorly
coordinated."
Fouad said more than 70 percent of medical staff have left Syria due
to the crisis and that no data is being collected on mental health
inside Syria. Mental health care is a neglected area and a
"heartbreaking" challenge, the WHO's Hoff said.
Leishmaniasis, a disease transmitted by sand flies which causes
sores on the skin, is spreading so fast it has earned the local
nickname the "Aleppo boil".
In Aleppo, once Syria's most populous city, Fouad said no one had
had heart surgery in more than a year: "This is not a new crisis.
This is not the first conflict," he said.
"The U.N. should be doing better."
Peggy Hicks, the head of advocacy for lobby group Human Rights
Watch, said that U.N. efforts have lately made some modest progress
in eliminating bureaucratic obstacles to aid.
"But with winter fast approaching, these grudging steps by Syria are
nowhere near enough," she said.
"The U.N. should keep emphasizing that the real test is a change in
the situation on the ground, particularly for the 280,000 Syrians in
besieged towns."
On Oct. 2, the U.N. Security Council urged the Syrian government
in a non-binding statement to allow immediate cross-border aid
deliveries. U.N. aid officials said that access has improved
somewhat since then.
U.N. aid chief Amos said this month that there had been "modest
progress" with Damascus, such as issuing 50 visas for international
staff and permitting the setting up relief hubs to store and
distribute supplies. But U.N. convoys from Turkey are still
forbidden and besieged communities are still blocked off.
Last week, the U.N. announced that Damascus had approved a first
airlift to Syria from Iraq to supply the mainly Kurdish northeast,
though snow has so far delayed the start of flights. The breakthrough followed secret talks chaired by Amos with
countries including Syria's allies Iran and Russia.
Hicks at Human Rights Watch said more should still be done to press
world powers to demand humanitarian access in Syria.
"There is always room for more vocal engagement," said Hicks. "I
think there is more room for explicit movement and to pressure the
Security Council to act on their words."
(Additional reporting by Dominic Evans;
editing by Alastair
Macdonald and Peter Graff)
[© 2013 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2013 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. |
