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While I don't agree with all the arguments in this piece, it has the
merit of being one of the few articles about the massive refugee tidal
wave in the Mediterranean that isn't full of depoliticised talk of some
abstract "war" (as it were a natural disaster) or lies that most people
are fleeing ISIS. As the fascist regime bombs its own country back into
the stone age, people who want to stay alive flee -- it's pretty
straightforward.
"Bashar Assad, the Iranian ayatollahs’ Syrian proxy, has been allowed to
persist in his relentless bombing of Syria’s cities and his dispatching
of Shabiha and Hezbollah death squads. Assad has been allowed to violate
Obama’s allegedly genius chemical-weapons pact as well, dozens of times.
It is the toll from Assad’s war, not ISIL’s atrocities, that is the
thing to notice: perhaps seven of every eight Syrian deaths (at least a
quarter of a million people so far), almost all of Syria’s seven million
“internally displaced” innocents, and the overwhelming majority of the
four million Syrian refugees who have fled the country."
MK
This is what it’s come to: Letting Syria die watching Syrians drown
Terry Glavin
http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/glavin-this-is-what-its-come-to-letting-syria-die-watching-syrians-drown
Published on: September 2, 2015 | Last Updated: September 2, 2015 4:58
PM EDT
Hundreds of mostly Syrian families walk the final few kilometers through
fields towards the Macedonian border to have their papers processed
before crossing on September 2, 2015 in Idomeni Greece. Several thousand
migrant people are expected to arrive at the border today hoping to head
North through Macedonia, after arriving in Athens in the previous few
days. Since the beginning of 2015 the number of migrants using the
so-called 'Balkans route' has exploded with migrants arriving in Greece
from Turkey and then travelling on through Macedonia and Serbia before
entering the EU via Hungary. The number of people leaving their homes in
war torn countries such as Syria, marks the largest migration of people
since World War II. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
“The worst part of it is the feeling that we don’t have any allies,”
Montreal’s Faisal Alazem, the tireless 32-year-old campaigner for the
Syrian-Canadian Council, told me the other day. “That is what people in
the Syrian community are feeling.”
There are feelings of deep gratitude for having been welcomed into
Canada, Alazem said. But with their homeland being reduced to an
apocalyptic nightmare – the barrel-bombing of Aleppo and Homs, the
beheadings of university professors, the demolition of Palmyra’s ancient
temples – among Syrian Canadians there is also an unquenchable sorrow.
Bashar Assad’s genocidal regime clings to power in Damascus and the
jihadist psychopaths of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)
are ascendant almost everywhere else. The one thing the democratic
opposition wanted from the world was a no-fly zone and air-patrolled
humanitarian corridors. Even that was too much to ask. There is no going
home now.
But among Syrian-Canadians, the worst thing of all, Alazem said, is a
suffocating feeling of solitude and betrayal. “In the western countries,
the civil society groups – it’s not just their inaction, they fight you
as well,” he said. “They are crying crocodile tears about refugees now,
but they have played the biggest role in throwing lifelines to the
regime. And so I have to say to them, this is the reality, this is the
result of all your anti-war activism, and now the people are drowning in
the sea.”
Drowning in the sea: a little boy in a red t-shirt and shorts, found
face-down in the surf. The boy was among 11 corpses that washed up on a
Turkish beach Tuesday. Last Friday, as many as 200 refugees drowned when
the fishing boat they were being smuggled in capsized off the Libyan
coast. At least 2,500 people, most of them Syrians, have drowned in this
way in the Mediterranean already this year.
A year ago this week, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry emerged from a
gathering on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Wales with commitments
from nine NATO countries, including Canada, to join in a military effort
to “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIL. A few days after that Sept. 4
2014 huddle, a half-dozen Arab states signed up. At least a dozen other
countries are now also contributing in one way or another.
To say the American-led coalition effort has failed to stop the war in
Syria would be true enough. It would also be disingenuous, for two
reasons. The first is that to have allowed ISIL to expand the scope of
its rampages would have meant war without precedent in 1,000 years of
the Middle East’s bloody history. The second and most important is that
the Obama administration never had any intention of stopping the war in
the first place.
Bashar Assad, the Iranian ayatollahs’ Syrian proxy, has been allowed to
persist in his relentless bombing of Syria’s cities and his dispatching
of Shabiha and Hezbollah death squads. Assad has been allowed to violate
Obama’s allegedly genius chemical-weapons pact as well, dozens of times.
It is the toll from Assad’s war, not ISIL’s atrocities, that is the
thing to notice: perhaps seven of every eight Syrian deaths (at least a
quarter of a million people so far), almost all of Syria’s seven million
“internally displaced” innocents, and the overwhelming majority of the
four million Syrian refugees who have fled the country.
The enormity of the Syrian catastrophe is at least partly what makes the
tragedy so difficult to comprehend, but in Canada there is an added
encumbrance. It is the delicate sensibilities of established opinion
that require diplomacy to be privileged as an unimpeachable virtue, and
further require the United Nations to be understood as the sole means by
which disasters of the Syrian kind are prevented, or at least resolved.
It makes no difference that no less an authority than António Guterres,
the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, attributes Syria’s agonies
primarily to a failure of diplomacy, or that the UN’s governing Security
Council is a hostage of Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping,
or that the UN’s refugee budget is running well below the half-way
mark – $5.6 billion – for Syrian refugees. Funding is already two-thirds
shy of anticipated refugee costs for 2015. The World Food Program has
been rolling back its refugee food allowances year after year, and in
the coming weeks more than 200,000 of the most desperate Syrian refugees
are having their aid cut off entirely.
In Geneva, the International Organization for Migration reckons that
about 237,000 people have set out across the Mediterranean in rickety
ships headed for Europe this year, a number already exceeding last year’s
total figure of 219,000. The main cohort consists of Syrian refugees,
the largest refugee population on earth. Europe is now facing a refugee
crisis unlike anything since the Second World War.
In a Canadian context, the only comparable event is Black September,
1847, the darkest hour of the Irish famine, when roughly 100,000 mostly
Irish refugees arrived in the Saint Lawrence River in dozens of coffin
ships. Roughly 17,500 Irish drowned that year, or died on board ship or
in the fever sheds on the quarantine island of Gross Isle. The Syrians
are the Famine Irish of 21st century.
There’s another illustrative comparison worth making. Canada has settled
roughly 20,000 Iraqi refugees since 2009, and last January the
Conservative government committed to taking in 10,000 Syrian refugees on
top of 1,300 welcomed in 2014. Last month Stephen Harper promised that
another 10,000 Syrians and Iraqis would be added to the mix. Here’s the
contrast: the kinder, gentler Barack Obama administration has allowed
only about 1,500 Syrian refugees to settle in the United States over the
past four years.
Stephen Harper is right when he says the New Democratic Party’s approach
to the Syrian catastrophe amounts to little more than “dropping aid on
dead people.” The NDP is right when it points out the inordinately
obtuse and incoherent accounting of just how many Syrian refugees have
actually arrived in Canada. The Liberals are right, too, in their call
to expedite family reunification visas, show more generosity and
cooperation in private-sponsorship efforts, reduce processing times, and
allow Syrians on temporary visas to extend their stays in Canada and
acquire citizenship.
But what we are all doing – Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats,
Americans, Canadians, and all the dominant elites of the United Nations
and the NATO countries that cleave to that sophisticated indifference
known in polite company as anti-interventionism – is a very
straightforward thing. We are watching Syria die. We are allowing it to
happen. And if you can comprehend that, you will know something of the
sorrow that afflicts Faisal Alazem and all those other Syrian-Canadians
these days.
Terry Glavin is an author and journalist.
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