Vladimir Putin’s appeal for what he calls a “daily humanitarian pause” in the fighting in Syria’s eastern Ghouta has in a span of 24 hours ~ between Tuesday and Wednesday ~ been reduced to a fizzle. In the context of the conservative estimate of 500 deaths till last Sunday, the Russian President’s plea for a truce has been advanced horribly late in the day.
Eastern Ghouta, the besieged opposition enclave, showcases the failure of the comity of nations to restore peace in the face of mounting deaths. Aside from Putin’s, it has been a failure pre-eminently of the United Nations, whose call for a cease-fire has been ignored by the regime in Damascus and almost wilfully so. It is a war without end, one that could turn out to be more brutal than what Aleppo had witnessed barely six months ago.
A tenuous truce is less than a humanitarian intervention worth the name; the massacres call for an international essay towards peace. The drift of international relations might just suit the agenda of the likes of Bashar al-Assad whose withers remain unwrung despite the gut-churning sight of children, bloodied and maimed, children pulled from the rubble, children who have lost their father, mother or siblings.
There is a pregnant connotation, therefore, to the ‘blank statement” that has been issued by Unicef. The failure has been overwhelming as must be the escalation of the conflict in eastern Ghouta, which suffered a chemical attack ~ the use of Sarin gas, more accurately ~ in 2013.
Rightly has it been commented by observers that this siege and bombardment do not constitute a war crime… but war crime upon war crime upon war crime. Fears that the rejection of the UN appeal for cease-fire might lead to an escalation of the war are not wholly unfounded.
The response of the West against the presidential palace in Damascus and the Kremlin’s adventurism scarcely matches the enormity of the tragedy. Small wonder that a section of the medical fraternity in Syria has drawn a parallel between eastern Ghouta and Srebrenica, which in the 1990s had pressed the international community to promise that it would never happen again.
While that appeal had been greeted with a positive response in the Balkans, no one is even making such promises now. It is hard not to wonder whether the praxis of international relations has, within two decades, been transformed to a remarkably insensitive degree.The conflict between the government and opposition in Syria has been perpetuated beyond measure.
Seven years after the first stirrings of the Arab Spring, the commemorative epithet can be as stark as that. The unwieldy coalition created by the battle against ISIS has collapsed with the disintegration of its Caliphate; its fighters will remain a danger in Syria and further afield. War has its own logic, as the Greek historian Thucydides had once observed. Eastern Ghouta fully bears out that observation.