7795th Security Council Meeting: Situation in Middle East

Senior United Nations humanitarian official pleaded with the Security Council to take the minimum action necessary to allow wide-spread humanitarian access and end the slaughter in Syria, at 7795th meeting.

• Categories: Meetings & Events / Security Council
• Video Length: 02:12:11
• Production Date: 26 October 2016
• Asset Language: Arabic; Chinese; English; French; Russian; Spanish
• Personal Subject: STEPHEN O'BRIEN
• Subject Topical: ARMED CONFLICTS; BOMBINGS; DESTABILIZATION; HEALTH SERVICES; HUMANITARIAN CRISIS; SYRIA SITUATION
• Geographic Subject: SYRIA
• MAMS Id: 1756933
• Parent Id: 1754363

Description

“While my job is to relay to you the facts, I cannot help but be incandescent with rage,” said Stephen O’Brien, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator. He was presenting the thirty-second monthly report on compliance with the Council’s demand for humanitarian access to civilians in Syria (document S/2016/873), covering the month of September.

“This Council has been charged with the responsibility for ending this horror,” he pointed out. The buck stops with you,” he added. “At the very minimum, I call upon all Council members who have operational military assets in Syria to take concrete steps to halt the aerial bombardment of civilian areas in order to deliver on your existing international obligations, and above all, to protect civilians and allow us to deliver humanitarian assistance to those in need.”

The monthly report highlights the large increase in the number of people in Syria cut off from aid — from 586,200 to 861,200 — due to the siege of eastern Aleppo, where hundreds of people were also killed by air strikes. It also brings to the fore “credible reports” of 30 attacks against medical facilities and surveys showing wide-spread lack of food. It describes the failure of the 9 September cessation-of-hostilities agreement, as well as a 19 September attack on a United Nations-Syrian Arab Red Crescent humanitarian aid convoy.

In today’s presentation, the Under-Secretary-General said eastern Aleppo was still besieged by the Government of Syria and no United Nations assistance had been able to enter in nearly four months. Drawing a vivid picture of families huddling in basements without food, he said the results of the offensive by Syrian and Russian military forces had produced horrific results. Since the report was issued, 400 more people had been killed and nearly 2,000 wounded there, many of them children, evoking the possibility of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Leaflets being dropped by Syrian and Russian aircraft were telling people to leave or “be annihilated”.

Glimmers of hope had been quickly extinguished, including agreements to allow the evacuation of the sick and injured, as well as other civilians from Aleppo, he continued. The United Nations had again been ready to launch humanitarian operations on Sunday, 23 October, but objections by two non-State armed opposition groups, Ahrar as Sham and Nureddin Zenki, had delayed operations, and the Syrian and Russian authorities had then refused to extend the pause in the bombing.

Meanwhile, relentless attacks on health workers and hospitals had left the handful of doctors still alive in eastern Aleppo unable to cope and with few ambulances and supplies, he said. The same types of actions had been seen in other cities and must not be accepted. “All parties and their sponsors must put an end to these medieval tactics,” he urged. Meanwhile, projectiles fired by non-State armed groups had continued to target civilian areas of western Aleppo during October, killing at least 100 people, including women and children.

Emphasizing that the violence was not limited to Aleppo, he cited the report’s references to developments in other parts of Syria, across which deliberate interference and restrictions by parties to the conflict, most notably the Government, continued to prevent the effective delivery of aid. Only six of 33 requested locations had been reached in September, he noted. At the same time, the Syrian authorities continued to remove life-saving medical supplies from aid deliveries, amounting to nearly 6 tons in the last few weeks alone. Such actions constituted violations of international law and Council resolutions, while inflicting greater suffering. In addition, more than 2 million children remained out of school, with many suffering emotional and physical trauma. “The international community cannot fail the children of Aleppo as it did in Srebrenica, Cambodia and Rwanda,” he stressed.

Following that briefing, Council members debated approaches to the humanitarian crisis, with the Russian Federation’s representative objecting that the Under-Secretary-General’s presentation had been more like a sermon than an objective report. The Russian Federation and the Government of Syria had been providing aid and trying to allow evacuation from Aleppo, he said. Humanitarian ceasefires had failed because of armed opposition groups that had failed to differentiate themselves from the Al-Nusra group.

He raised a particular objection to the fact that the Under-Secretary-General had omitted to mention the pause in the bombing ordered by his country and Syria, which had lasted more than a week. Alongside his counterpart from Syria and others, he underlined the complexity of fighting terrorism and asserted Syria’s right to sovereignty over its territory.

The representatives of the United States, the United Kingdom and others defended the Under-Secretary-General’s reporting and portrayal of the dire situation of civilians caught amid bombardment and siege. Condemning the shelling of civilian areas in western Aleppo by armed opposition groups, the representative of the United States noted that the Russian Federation could not condemn the systematic bombardment of eastern Aleppo because it was the one carrying it out. It wanted to be congratulated because it had refrained from committing war crimes for one week, she said.

New Zealand’s representative — who with Spain and Egypt had recently tabled a draft resolution on the crisis in Syria — said the urgent priority now was to ensure the delivery of humanitarian relief, but nothing would make a difference unless the bombs stopped falling. The continuing inability of the most powerful Council members to do something was nothing short of tragic, he added. Pledging to continue his efforts, he said the problem was not going away and neither was New Zealand.

Also speaking this afternoon were representatives of Uruguay, New Zealand, France, China, Venezuela, Ukraine, Angola, Japan, Malaysia and Senegal.

Taking the floor additional times were representatives of the Russian Federation and the United Kingdom.

The meeting began at 3:08 p.m. and ended at 5:20 p.m.