In All Humanity...
"We are witnessing the silent death of hundreds of patients who are being treated for cancer, diabetes or hypertension or are undergoing dialysis or have premature babies or are pregnant ... as much as 95 percent of everything that is sent to Syrian Red Crescent headquarters in Damascus goes to support the Syrian regime"
Tawfik Chamas, Syrian doctor, spokesman for Union of Syrian Medical Relief Organizations, Geneva
In war situations, the vulnerable suffer. The most vulnerable are civilian populations. The elderly, children, women, people with chronic health conditions, those with emergency health priorities, those who become injured as victims living in conflict areas. It has ever been thus. War conditions impose horrible hardships on civilians.
The charge is that President Bashar al-Assad's forces are confiscating medical aid meant to be distributed by the Syrian Arab Red Crescent in Damascus. That aid is doubtless meant to be distributed to all in need of medical attention. It is not, evidently the Arab Red Crescent that is bringing attention to this situation, but rather the Syrian medical aid group of which Dr. Chamas is a part.
And he contends that the confiscated medicines are going to injured supporters of the government. As the only aid organization permitted to operate at present in Syria, where Syrian Arab Red Crescent volunteers are involved in aid such as helping to deliver food, setting up mobile health units and providing safe drinking water in schools, it seems that aid is indeed going to those in need.
And perhaps it's just as well to remember that whether those in need of basic amenities and those in need of medical attention are supporters of the regime, or of the rebels, they are still people in need. That the regime chooses to render aid and medicines to those who support them is fully explicable, given the vengeance with which he has struck out at those supporting the rebels.
The rebels would do precisely as Assad has done; support the needs of those who back their assaults against the Alawite regime. For this speedily became a tribal, sectarian war of exceeding cruelty on each side meted out to their opposites. And it is hardly surprising given the endemic violence and insecurity that is now current in the country that conditions are dreadful for all concerned.
That those volunteers with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent are doing their utmost to provide assistance while they are themselves confronted by danger "sometimes in life-threatening conditions to provide urgent assistance to people affected", according to a spokeswoman in Beirut representing the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies is hardly surprising.
But it is the international mandate of such aid agencies to be completely neutral in such situations.
Without that spirit of neutrality in actual practise, the humanitarian assistance they deliver would be be deleteriously impacted as they would always be suspected by antagonists of representing the interests of the other. They cannot, as humanitarian agencies, afford to be thus compromised.
Whether medical supplies end up with one faction or the other in support of aiding the needy and the injured is therefore fairly irrelevant.
Labels: Chaos, Charity, Culture, Drugs, Health, Human Relations, Syria
posted by Pieface @ Friday, November 09, 2012
<< Home