Originally published on the CGS blog on July 3, 2014.
The number of people needing humanitarian aid in Syria has reached nearly 11 million – half the country’s population. Yet with Syria’s ongoing civil war, the only way for aid to reach those in need is for the government of Bashar Assad to allow aid workers into affected areas.
To say the least, this is a poor system for ensuring the basic needs of millions of people. With the country in tatters, people must have unfettered access to food, water, medicine, and other necessities: life shouldn’t be held up by checkpoints and constant threats. With mounting evidence that Assad has used food and aid access as a weapon of war – to maintain and demand loyalty of Syrians wherever they might be – the international community has clearly needed some way to take control of humanitarian aid away from those who might use its access arbitrarily or maliciously.
In recent weeks world leaders have started work on plans to begin routing access around Assad and the rebels. The UN Security Council has been drafting a resolution in which aid workers, possibly with the legal protections of Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, would be able to cross into Syria without consulting the Syrian government. That way people would have access to the resources they need and neither Assad nor the opposition would be able to use access to aid as a weapon of war.
Assad has vehemently protested the news of this resolution, claiming that any such cross-border aid deliveries would be a violation of Syrian sovereignty and would amount to an attack on the Syrian state.
This brings up two important points.
First, Assad has long since lost any claim to legitimate sovereignty over the territory of Syria. From chemical weapons to barrel bombs, from starvation to civilian targeting, Assad’s regime isn’t about protecting the well-being of Syrians: it’s about perpetuating the regime of Assad. It doesn’t deserve the recognition of the United Nations, and it certainly doesn’t deserve its legal protection.
Second, the letter submitted on behalf of the Assad regime actually argues against itself by failing to recognize the difference between combatants and non-combatants. It speaks of “[i]mporting aid in coordination with terrorist organizations and without consultation with the Syrian state,” and claims that supporters of the resolution drafted by Jordan, Australia, and Luxembourg are saying that “the only way to protect civilians from terrorism is not to fight it, but to work with it.”
Such arguments treat the military goals of the Syrian government as taking precedence over the lives of non-combatants and that these lives continue at the sole discretion of the Syrian government; however, non-combatants have been protected in war for centuries, and are codified in the Geneva Conventions as a specially protected class. That Assad can’t recognize this even in legal correspondence is in itself an argument for further action against him and his state.
The UN Security Council is coming to an important crossroads in its Syria policy. The ISIS faction attacking Iraq has carved out a substantial portion of Syria as well and recognizes no border between the two countries; in fact, this border is so blurry that Syria recently began attacking opposition camps in Iraq. With refugees fleeing to various countries, armed groups ignoring national boundaries, and Syria violating other states’ sovereignty, the UN should recognize that state sovereignty is more fluid than Assad is making it out to be. Instead, it’s time to find a solution, any solution, to get aid to these people; to preserve their lives and to preserve the opportunity for a Syrian culture once this war finally ends.
