Earlier this week the Syrian pro-democracy and media activist Rami Jarrah used the word “holocaust” to describe the carnage underway in parts of Syria. Jarrah told a Canadian interviewer that the word was a necessary alternative to the conventions of war reportage because frontline observers in places like Aleppo were witnessing “the sort of ethnic and geographical cleansing” that warranted such a comparison. Although he carefully distanced his usage of the term from the capitalized phrase that is commonly used to refer to the Nazi atrocities of the Second World War, Jarrah nevertheless hoped that some of the horror associated with the original phrase would jolt his audience into paying more attention to what is happening in Syria.
A similar sense of exasperation was evident when the International President of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) recently addressed the United Nations Security Council. Joanne Liu pointed out that many instances in which military actions had led to mass civilian casualties – not only in Syria but in Yemen and Afghanistan – have been attributed, vaguely, to mistakes made in “the fog of war.” Liu noted that notwithstanding a large number of well-known constraints in international law on what constitutes acceptable warfare, the reality is often obscenely different to the sanitized language of diplomacy. “The conduct of war today,” said Ms Liu “knows no limits. It is a race to the bottom. The unrelenting assault on Aleppo by Russian and Syrian forces over recent days, with no evacuation possible, and bodies lying unburied, testifies to that.” Liu added that four of the UN Security Council’s five permanent members have been implicated in attacks that have recently claimed the lives of both medical workers and patients – actions that clearly amount to war crimes if done intentionally.
The collective apathy and inaction that has allowed the Syrian war to drag on for so long, and to develop into a daily horror show, is hardly new. In an August 2015 New York Times Op-Ed, Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch described the impact of a ‘barrel bomb’ on the civilian areas that the Assad regime has routinely targeted during the civil war. According to Roth the bombs are “dropped without guidance from helicopters hovering just above anti-aircraft range, typically hitting the ground with huge explosions and the widespread diffusion of deadly shrapnel. They pulverize neighbourhoods, destroy entire buildings and leave broad strips of death and destruction.” Russia and Iran have not pressed Assad to stop using such terrible weapons and a February 2014 UN Security Council call for an end to their use had no noticeable impact. During the early years of the conflict Western governments shied away from placing too much pressure on Assad, fearful that a sudden collapse of his regime might lead to an ISIS takeover. Since then the threats facing civilians have worsened considerably but the absence of political will for a comprehensive and enforceable ceasefire remains more or less the same.
President Obama’s confusing stance on Syria – particularly his empty threat about the use of chemical weapons as a ‘red line’ that the international community would not tolerate – has received a great deal of well-earned criticism, but there is little reason to believe that the next US administration will fare any better. The suffering of the Syrian people has become so remote from the American public that the presidential candidate for the US Libertarian party recently asked “What is Aleppo?” when asked about the situation in Syria. When such profound ignorance has been normalized, and the Republican nominee’s strident vagueness about the wider world irrefutably proves that it has, it is hardly surprising that the general public does not know enough about the wholesale slaughter, displacement and starvation of tens of thousands of Syrian civilians to force its political leaders into action.
When people witness the human cost of war they invariably respond to it with compassion and outrage. A few weeks ago the Aleppo Media Centre posted a video of a young boy rescued from a pile of rubble in Aleppo and the image quickly spread around the world. Oman Daqneesh, a 5-year-old child, sat in a chair covered in dust, with blood dripping down the left side of his face, bewildered. Millions of people watched the video and shared the photograph on social media, but their shock did little to help fundraising efforts for those affected by the Syrian war, nor did it increase the pressure for a political solution. That is why activists like Rami Jarrah have resorted to the use of such strong language when trying to redirect our attention to the devastation in Aleppo.
At the end of the day the blame for our indifference towards Syria, our collective failure to respond to its suffering, cannot be ascribed to the media or to politicians, it belongs with us. War reporting and striking images can only take us so far when we try to grasp the horrors over there. At a certain point basic sympathy for the pain of others, and a moral determination to do more to alleviate their suffering ought to do the rest.
