Daily Times

As the Syrian conflict enters into its eighth year — there appears no let-up in violence. Indeed, the Syrian people are getting it from all sides. From ISIS, the NATO war machine, the Russians, the Turks; from the regime itself; as well as the rebels.

Ankara launched the ironically named Operation Olive Branchlast month in Arfin, in the north. Fighting alongside it to take out armed Kurdish groups as well as ISIS is the Free Syrian Army. Many experts on the ground believe that Moscow opened up Syrian airspace to allow the military offensive. After all, Putin has one eye firmly on next month’s elections that he hopes will return him to the Kremlin. And ever on the lookout to be seen as the man who can, he has been raining down on bombs on Idlib province in the northwest of the country; the last rebel stronghold. The UN has said that some 100,000 civilians have been displaced from the area.

Yet it’s against this background that Europe is said to be pushing Syrian refugees to return home. As are the US and regional nations such as Jordan and Lebanon. Does this mean that the international community has forever lost its moral compass? Or is much of it pursuing a punitive geo-political agenda aimed at leaving Putin to finish what he dared to meddle in? For us, the above amounts to one and the same thing.

This is nothing less than a blight on our collective humanity.

Especially considering that a multilateral aid agency report published last year — involving, among others, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), Save the Children and CARE International — found that “there were three newly displaced Syrians for each of the 721,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) and refugees who returned home”. The report also warns that hundreds of thousands more are being coerced into going home.

The international community must do more to factor in the huge human cost of warmongering; especially in cases where it has no business being there in the first place. And never more so than when it conducts military aggression under the false banner of humanitarian intervention. That President Assad is here to stay is now understood. The Syrian people have been subjected to chemical weapons attacks — regardless of whether at the hands of the regime or al-Nusra Front. Last week there was another report of a chlorine gas attack; the second in as many weeks.

As aid agencies point out, international law stipulates that refugees’ return must be voluntarily and conducted in a safe, dignified and informed manner. Yet at the very beginning of this aggression — host countries ought to have done everything possible to make living in transit as easy as possible. Meaning that provisions should have been made to accord refugees work permits. For no one wants to live in degradation. Moreover, this would have helped, to a certain extent, quash right-wing media propaganda that paints refugees from the MENA region as being perpetually on the rob; that is, when their menfolk are not out and about raping European women.

We have said it before and we say it again. There is no point in taking in a people and then robbing them of their dignity. No one deserves such cold shelter.  *

Published in Daily Times, February 6^th 2018.