Residents walk past buildings destroyed by the earthquake in the Syrian town of Jindayris. Photo: Mohamed Al-Rifai

The selective Western vision of humanitarian aid to Syria

6 min read MIGUEL MOLLEDA

MIGUEL MOLLEDA

En a recent press conference at the United Nations headquarters in New York, Farhan Haq, one of the Secretary General's spokesmen, dodged as best he could, and could rather badly, questions from Chinese journalist Edward Xu about the occupation. US military in Syria. In his surprising responses, the spokesman assured that "there is no US military presence inside Syria." In his questions and cross-examinations, Xu exposed the UN spokesman, demonstrating with information and data the well-known US military occupation of northeastern Syria and the hypocrisy and double standards of the international body, which condemns the Russian military occupation of a part of Ukraine, but ignores and even denies Washington's occupation of Syrian territory of similar size. And not only does it occupy, but the United States has seized the existing oil production in this northeastern part of the Arab country.

Shortly before this episode of supervening ignorance by the United Nations spokesman, extendable to the reporting focus of the corporate media on what is happening in Syria and Ukraine, an American arms contractor had been killed and six other Americans were wounded as consequence of the attack of a suicide drone in northeast Syria. The kamikaze bombing had occurred at an advanced military post known as the RLZ. Another attack of the more than 80 that have occurred on US military bases in Syria and Iraq since January 2021.

The United States accused the Iranian militias, which operate inside Syrian territory in aid of the Damascus regime, of this new hostile action. But the truth is that huge amounts of US weapons in transit through Syria have disappeared in transfers to which the Syrian armed groups allied to the US are no strangers. Many of these groups are responsible for the destruction suffered by the country, immersed since 2011 in a terrible civil war conveniently fueled by the United States and Israel to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Asad, which has been able to survive thanks to military aid from Russia, Iran and the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah militia, despite onslaughts from Islamic State and so-called Syrian rebel groups.

But the United Nations is not just trying to ignore the illegal US military occupation of northern Syria. The UN also voluntarily ignores the almost daily bombardments that Israel carries out against different locations in Syria, including the country's capital, Damascus, which is a serious violation of international law, also routinely ignored by the mainstream media. The same ones that, yes, daily report on the war in Ukraine.

If the Chinese journalist, Edward Xu, revealed the double standards of the United Nations in conflicts, and the international hypocrisy in the treatment of Russia's war in Ukraine, regarding the US military occupation of Syria, a The recent and devastating earthquake was going to teach us that even humanitarian aid, far from being an absolute and sacrosanct principle of international humanitarian law, has become a new and sectarian measure that speaks to us of the beneficent nature of a Western society immersed in a pathetic crisis of values.

In early February 2023, a powerful earthquake caused by the East Anatolian fault lines caused extensive destruction and thousands of deaths in southern Turkey and northern Syria. Destruction and death that, in the Syrian case, must be added to the havoc already caused in the country by the 2011 war with its close to 300.000 deaths and 13 million displaced persons and refugees.

Although the Chernobyl nuclear accident had shown us that radioactive leaks had administrative borders, until today we knew that a group of men and women of good will were not going to look away or stop at a border in the face of vital necessity. of thousands of human beings affected by the scourge of war, or by a tragedy, this time, caused by nature.

The recent earthquake in Turkey and Syria would show us another new and terrible reality of our days: Syrians do not exist. For the well-thinking and humanitarian international community, the Syrians did not perish under the ruins of their battered homes, shaken to death by the unleashed telluric forces and urgently needed our sympathy and help, however, if it was offered and taken to the southern Turkey. For these societies and their leaders, the Syrians are rather inhuman, subhuman, or perhaps just avatars, virtual beings. Western governments, starting with the United States and continuing with those of the European Union, so eager to send arms to fuel the war in Ukraine, decided to turn a blind eye to the humanitarian aid that the Syrian people needed after the February earthquake.

Washington, like Brussels, which despite the earthquake barely lifted the economic sanctions that have caused terrible hardships in Syrian society, prohibited humanitarian aid to Damascus and all for the sake of Western-style democracy in the Middle East. As happened to the ill-fated Iraqis in his day, in the proverbial phrase of that great woman, Madeleine Albright: "If the price to pay for democracy has been the death of 500.000 (Iraqi) children, it has been worth it." The same has now happened to the Syrian children and all the other Syrian victims of the February earthquake; victims also of our comedy humanitarianism, which in reality only hides a fictitious charity, a humanitarianism used as another weapon of war.

For this reason, we Westerners have not provided aid to the Syrians, on the contrary, we allowed, without the slightest bad conscience, that Israel's warplanes even bombarded the Aleppo airport, a vital communication hub for the limited humanitarian aid that the Damascus government sent to the battered north of the country. And all this seasoned by a media that was not even able to ask the pertinent questions: Why are we not helping the Syrian people? Possibly because the Syrians are not worthy of our televised Western-style farce charity.