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Thursday 20 June 2019

Rukban camp: A case study in reviewing the UK’s protection of civilians strategy



Dr Kate Ferguson

Excerpted from Preventing While Protecting: The UK’s Protection of Civilians Strategy in review, a report by Protection Approaches.

Rukban camp, Southern Syria

Rukban is a camp of tens of thousands of displaced Syrians who have fled violence elsewhere in the country but have been prevented from crossing over the nearby border into Jordan. The camp lies next to the Tanf US military base and falls within a 55 kilometre radius ‘de-confliction zone’ controlled by the Global Coalition against Daesh. The UK helps to defend the Tanf zone. While the UK may not consider itself singularly responsible for Rukban, those inside the de-confliction zone nonetheless fall within the care of the UK’s broader protection of civilian commitments.

The deteriorating humanitarian situation inside Rukban has led to growing concerns about the safety and well-being of Syrians within the camp, as well as those who have now left for temporary regime-run shelters in Homs via ‘humanitarian corridors’ set up by Russian forces in February 2019. Assad’s forces and allies are deliberately blocking food and medical aid from reaching Rukban, effectively forcing thousands of vulnerable people—including women and children—to leave the camp. There are reports that some of these civilians face conscription, arrest, torture, or death once entering regime-controlled territory.

Rukban is a civilian protection crisis for the international community. The level of humanitarian suffering experienced by those remaining within the camp, and the fate of many of the thousands that have left, illustrate the limits of current protection frameworks. Even when vulnerable populations reach the apparent safety of the Coalition zone of military control, there is a singular lack of clarity about the extent to which these forces and their partners are able or willing to uphold their responsibilities to protect civilians from identity-based violence, torture, and direct or indirect forced displacement.

The UK’s commitments to the people in Rukban, and the Syrian people more broadly, cut across its stated responsibilities to help protect populations from mass atrocities and to protect civilians in armed conflict. Given the widespread, systematic, and deliberate nature of the targeting of civilians throughout the crisis, any POC activities which the UK engage in require the additional analytical framework of atrocity prevention.

If the UK were to integrate the concept of ‘preventing while protecting’ into its analytical and decision-making framework in Rukban, it would at the very least assist UK POC actors in ‘doing no harm’ and inadvertently leaving Rukban populations vulnerable to future atrocities.

Immediate prevention could include: Prioritising the direct delivery of aid by UK and international Coalition forces and/or Jordan to alleviate the desperate conditions that force many back to territory where atrocities are ongoing.

Mitigation prevention could include: Investing in medium-term safeguarding of Rukban camp against further possible incursions by Syrian and Russian forces, and working with Jordan to facilitate asylum and resettlement in order to prevent de facto refoulement.

Long term prevention could include: Supporting community and capacity-building within the camps and Jordanian communities at the border including peace education, trauma support, and other safeguarding.

Download the full report from Protection Approaches.

Friday 14 June 2019

Come to the Freedom Across Borders conference, 6 July in London



Freedom Across Borders is a conference on 6 July in London being organised by Syria Solidarity UK with Amnesty International UK, the Syrian Legal Development Programme, Dawlaty, Migrants Organise and others.

We’re going to be talking about refugee experiences in the UK, in Europe, and in the countries neighbouring Syria.

We’ll be talking about surviving trauma, and seeking justice.

We’ll be looking to connect Syrians’ experiences with others in the UK who have been forced to cross borders in their search for freedom.

Rouba Mhaissen of Sawa for Development and Aid will tell of their work with refugees in Lebanon. Reem Assil of Common Purpose will talk about their diaspora leaders programmes, including with Syrians, and Zrinka Bralo will talk about bringing her experiences as a Bosnian refugee to her work with Migrants Organise.

In our Survivor Strategies workshops, we’ll be talking to people from Freedom From Torture and Art Refuge UK about surviving trauma, and we’ll have a discussion on security challenges for activists.

We will be talking about preserving Syrian memory, about Dawlaty’s work archiving Syrian oral history and about Qisetna’s work with Syrians on telling personal stories, and about Positive Negatives’ work with survivors of several conflicts, presenting personal testimony in the form of comics.

Syrian refugees who reach the UK are survivors of perhaps the biggest crime scene this century, so we are working together with the Syrian Legal Development Programme on legal accountability issues. Women Now for Development will talk about justice and accountability from a feminist perspective. Airwars will be explaining their work on reporting casualties from international military interventions in Syria.

To see the latest on Freedom Across Borders, visit the website.

To join us on 6 July in London, register via Eventbrite.

Below: From Khalid’s Story, one of a trilogy of short comics collectively titled A Perilous Journey, illustrated by Lindsay Pollock for Positive Negatives in 2015.