Open Letter: Urgent Need for Cross-Border Aid for Syrians

[Logo of Doctors Without Borders. Image from doctorswithoutborders.org] [Logo of Doctors Without Borders. Image from doctorswithoutborders.org]

Open Letter: Urgent Need for Cross-Border Aid for Syrians

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following open letter was published by Doctors Without Borders on 18 December 2013]

Letter to the Member States of the High Level Group on Syria

Your Excellencies,

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has been providing assistance to victims of the Syrian conflict since April 2011, and we welcome the diplomatic negotiations addressing the urgent humanitarian needs in this extremely violent conflict. But we would like to draw your attention to the vital subject of cross-border aid for populations living in opposition-controlled areas in Syria.

An urgent need exists to significantly increase cross-border assistance and to prioritize this issue in negotiations on humanitarian aid. If the government of Syria remains the sole distribution channel for international humanitarian relief efforts, then millions of Syrians will continue to be deprived of adequate assistance, particularly essential medical services.

Today, almost all international humanitarian aid transits through the Syrian capital. United Nations agencies and international aid organisations providing this aid are subject to strict control measures by the Syrian government, which greatly limits the number of international staff in Damascus and rarely authorises them to travel outside Damascus. The government also insists that aid be distributed through state controlled bodies, mainly the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC), which alone evaluate needs and select beneficiaries.

Without a doubt, SARC volunteers and employees have demonstrated exemplary dedication and professionalism in their work. They are nevertheless under great pressure from the Syrian government and its policy of limiting or prohibiting the distribution of humanitarian aid—particularly medical aid—to areas controlled by the opposition. Intense fighting and the fragmentation of opposition groups, some of which are deeply suspicious of foreigners and of aid deliveries sanctioned by the government, present further obstacles to getting assistance across frontlines. The hostage-taking of humanitarian workers in opposition controlled areas has also clearly been detrimental.

These obstacles have led to the almost complete blocking of aid for people in enclaves that are controlled by opposition groups and are surrounded by government forces. This is the case in the besieged neighbourhoods of Homs and Ghouta where 200,000 people have struggled for months to survive with little to no assistance.

In the opposition-held areas close to Syria’s neighbours, five to seven million people receive no medical assistance and very little relief aid from Damascus. They are less isolated than the enclaves, largely because of the humanitarian role of neighbouring states, especially Turkey. Turkish hospitals treat hundreds of wounded every month. Turkish authorities have allowed the transfer of food, drugs, tents and blankets by international NGOs and by Syrian organisations working in opposition-held territory, despite the objection of Damascus. However, this assistance falls far short of urgent needs.

For example, in Aleppo and Idlib Governorates, tens of thousands of displaced persons are crammed into tented camps without adequate sanitation facilities. Field hospitals and ambulance services have been targeted since the beginning of the crisis and lack both personnel and medical supplies to care for the hundreds of people wounded daily in indiscriminate bombardments. The destruction and closure of district hospitals has deprived countless patients of vital medical care. The public health system has collapsed. The national immunisation programme has been suspended, as a polio outbreak spreads across the country.

Fewer than a dozen international NGOs, including MSF, are able to provide assistance through neighbouring countries to the populations living in these opposition-controlled areas.

United Nations agencies do not provide such cross-border aid, fearful that their operations in Damascus will suffer reprisals. The complex and insecure environment also limits the provision of assistance; for example, some armed groups block aid access to Kurdish and isolated Shiite communities. However, the work of international NGOs, including MSF, shows that it is indeed possible to engage with opposition groups—even the most radical—in order to directly help the sick, wounded, and displaced.

Although the needs increase on a daily basis, the meager cross-border assistance risks grinding to a halt. The few international NGOs that are present face increasing difficulties to bring teams and equipment across borders into Syria. UN agencies appear to have given up negotiating cross-border access to people living in opposition-held areas.

We therefore urgently call on you to support the efforts of all humanitarian organisations, whether they are working from Damascus or from neighbouring countries. While it is essential to help humanitarian organisations in Damascus to overcome blockages to delivering assistance to enclaves and hard-to-reach areas, it is just as vital to increase the provision of humanitarian aid across borders directly to the population living in opposition held areas, particularly from Turkey.

We also ask you to recognise the important humanitarian role played by Syria’s neighbours, who bear the brunt of this humanitarian crisis, and to encourage them to facilitate the transit of humanitarian teams and material across their borders.

Finally, we call on you to prompt UN agencies to do more to assist populations living in opposition-held areas, at the very least by providing food, medicine, winter tents, blankets and other basic necessary items, at the borders of Syria.

We thank you for your attention to this urgent matter. 

Dr. Joanne Liu

President of MSF International

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412