Sir, – Your editorial “The Irish Times view on the response to the earthquake: slow and inadequate” (February 13th) rightly condemned the slow response to the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria but the role of the United Nations was especially disastrous in relation to rebel-controlled northwestern Syria and which was confirmed by the apology from UN itself in the words of emergency relief coordinator Martin Griffiths: “We have so far failed the people in northwest Syria. They rightly feel abandoned. Looking for international help that hasn’t arrived.”
However, as an apology by the UN it quickly looked hollow when it was discovered he tweeted that from the Turkish side of the border and was stopped from crossing that border to assess the dire humanitarian needs for himself by the office of secretary general António Guterres. Deference apparently to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who does not control the area, and his veto-wielding ally in the UN Security Council Vladimir Putin, who has weaponised aid deliveries, and through that veto power reduced the once four border aid corridors to only one, which is part of the reason the aid response was so slow.
Even worse, the UN secretary general lost precious days as thousands died under the rubble in northwestern Syria because he refused to reopen border crossings from Turkey. Instead he wasted time seeking the Syrian dictator’s permission to reopen these aid corridors from Turkey when he had the legal power to do so, and all the more bizarre, as noted, when Assad does not control that area!
The body of legal opinion he could draw on to justify his immediate reopening of these aid corridors is overwhelming. His failure is all the more indefensible because he wasted time with a leader responsible for literally destroying that region with Putin, even mercilessly bombing hospitals, the latter a crime against humanity.
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The secretary general had ordered the coordinates of the hospitals to be passed to the Russians through the UN Security Council, ostensibly to avoid them being bombed, but then Putin with Assad used these co-ordinates when they received them as a target list which helps to explain why the health service there was so vulnerable even before the earthquakes struck. Against that background it is even harder to understand why the secretary general did not reopen the border crossings or aid corridors himself. Even harder still to understand when prior to the quakes conditions for the more than four million living there were already a humanitarian crisis, with over 90 per cent of the population dependent on humanitarian aid.
The secretary general’s failure seems all the more inexplicable when leading international lawyers offered many persuasive arguments to justify immediately reopening these border crossings, like this from an open letter by lawyers including former judges of the International Criminal Court: “. . . the International Court of Justice, the UN’s principal legal organ, has authoritatively confirmed that ‘there can be no doubt that the provision of strictly humanitarian aid to persons or forces in another country, whatever their political affiliations or objectives, cannot be regarded as unlawful intervention, or as in any other way contrary to international law’.” – Yours, etc,
RONAN L TYNAN,
(Director – Bringing
Assad To Justice),
Esperanza Productions,
Dublin 3.