Originally published on the CGS blog on April 22, 2014.
On Friday reports surfaced that U.N. documents obtained by Foreign Policy show that the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria has been consistently cutting off food supplies to opposition-held areas in order to starve rebels and their supporters into submission. This is a clear-cut war crime under the Geneva Conventions and the UN Security Council needs to provide what evidence it has for this and other crimes against humanity in a referral to the International Criminal Court.
The basic evidence is this: as the World Food Programme has been implementing increased food aid under UN Security Council Resolution 2139, they have taken note of large population movements from opposition-controlled areas to government controlled areas. For months now, experts have been warning that the Assad regime is using hunger as a weapon of war: it cuts off food access to opposition-controlled areas, forcing rebels, supporters, and non-combatants to surrender or die an agonizing death from starvation. This is clearly a war crime: the fourth Geneva Convention explicitly protects the welfare of civilians in conflict.
War crimes demand response from the international community. Many war crimes, such as the use of chemical weapons, civilian targeting, or the use of powerful weapons of mass destruction, are blatant abuses of power and humanity that can often invite immediate reprobation from the international community, often escalating quickly into discussions of the extent to which response is required and how soon.
Intentional starvation of civilians, however, is not an easy issue for which to push for international action, whether diplomatic or military. There won’t be images of innocents suddenly dying for mysterious reasons as with last year’s viral photos and videos of civilians dying from nerve agents. No bombs will destroy historic cities like Aleppo in a hunger campaign, though the results will be even more brutal as tens of thousands of men, women, and children could fall ill and die as a result of starvation and malnutrition. And perhaps most importantly, it takes an extensive amount of evidence independently verified by international observers, journalists, and witnesses, perhaps over a period of months or years; there is no smoking missile trail.
And while food aid provided through NGOs and the World Food Programme is helping, if the actors with military control over regions are refusing to allow access, humanitarian action simply isn’t enough.
Rather than steeling resolve for violent action, or relying simply on humanitarian aid, these sorts of war crimes must resolve us to justice. Yes, the International Criminal Court as a tool for peace is a complicated proposition in Syria as it is in any ongoing conflict. But with the evidence now piling up over many months that hunger is being used as a weapon not only against soldiers, but against civilians, this crime against humanity is too large to ignore and also too important to allow to become a norm of future wars, whether the conflicts are within borders or between states. International criminal justice is the best route to ensure those responsible, both in the Assad regime and among any rebel groups blocking aid to their areas of control, are held to account and properly punished so that normal every day civilians on a massive scale do not become the targets of war.
The UN Security Council must refer the Syrian case to the International Criminal Court. The issues are becoming larger than that conflict and will soon be about whether the international community is willing to tolerate the starvation of civilians as an instrument of war.
