Westminster Hall debate on the humanitarian situation in Syria

There were some nine thousand words spoken in yesterday’s Westminster Hall debate on the humanitarian situation in Syria, but it seemed hard to find one word that was new, despite this being the first Commons debate on Syria since February.

Read a transcript of the debate.

Watch a video of the debate.

All of the contributors tried to paint vivid pictures of the horror and despair. While these were accurate as far as they went, they were not new and not very helpful. Despair with no remedy will not move people to action.

What remedies were discussed? Alison McGovern echoed the late Jo Cox’s call for the UK’s diplomatic, defence and development strategies to be united in aiming to protect civilians, but didn’t propose specific actions.

Tom Tugendhat called for the UK to work with allies in the region, even where those allies are problematic. That is of course already happening, but in what way and to what end is not always clear.

Wera Hobhouse focused on the Turkish invasion of Afrin, northwest Syria, and the displacement of very many Kurdish people from there, as raised with her by Kurdish constituents. Wera Hobhouse had the date of the invasion confused—it was not at the start of this year but the start of 2018. The beginning of this year saw Turkey prominent in a different role, helping defend Syrians in Idlib against the Assad regime.

Turkey is one of the problematic allies that Tom Tugendhat alluded to earlier. It has backed unaccountable armed groups that have carried out atrocities, notably against Kurdish people, but it has also given limited protection to millions of Syrians displaced to Idlib by the Assad regime’s deliberate campaign of killing and displacement.

Arguably a major factor in how bad the Syrian situation has become has been the division between Turkey and its NATO allies. The fault for this does not lie on one side alone. In the Coalition war against ISIS, because of the desire by the US government to avoid direct conflict with the Assad regime, the US and UK gave military support to the PYD, an offshoot of the PKK which is an enemy of the Turkish government. This was done under the umbrella of the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF.

The remedy to having problematic allies must include greater engagement focused on increasing accountability for all forces on the ground: Turkish-backed forces, the SDF, US and UK forces. This is essential for any sustainable outcome in those areas still outside Assad regime control. In light of this need, it is unfortunate that at the same time as a few MPs were debating Syria in Westminster Hall, the UK Government was pushing forward the Overseas Operations Bill in the House of Commons to limit accountability for UK forces.

In his contribution to the debate, Anthony Mangnall talked about sexual violence, and the need for accountability. For these and all the other crimes of this war, accountability must ultimately mean accountability to those directly impacted, not just limited accountability to foreign or international courts.

Rushanara Ali and Jim Shannon both talked about refugees, one about refugees in the region, and the other about refugees resettled in the UK. Both also talked about the coronavirus threat to people inside Syria and to refugees in the region. Jim Shannon made a practical suggestion to send some of the unused ventilators in the UK to areas of Syria that are in great need.

David Linden focused on how UK anti-immigration policies make it dangerous and deadly for refugees to reach safety, even when they have family in the UK. And Anna McMorrin lamented the drop in UK aid to Syria this year, and called for it to be maintained.

When you look at UK aid policy alongside the UK’s often brutal immigration policy, it can look as though the UK’s aim in giving aid is less about alleviating suffering and more about containment.

Anna McMorrin questioned the effectiveness of sanctions in deterring Assad regime and Russian forces from bombing hospitals, schools, and markets. In fact, there have been no UK sanctions imposed on Russian individuals for crimes in Syria.

The UK currently implements EU sanctions on Syria, and James Cleverly repeated the Government’s undertaking that they will implement their own sanctions regime after the Brexit transition period.

Last month Human Rights Watch published a report on Syrian and Russian Strikes on Civilian infrastructure in Idlib. They named several Russian officers as well as Syrian officers with command responsibility for targeting civilians. The Human Rights Watch list overlaps with names that Syria Solidarity UK published last year. The UK Government should now sanction these individuals without further delay:

• General of the Army Sergei Shoigu
• General of the Army Valery Gerasimov
• Col.-Gen. Sergei Rudskoy
• Col.-Gen. Sergei Vladimirovich Surovikin
• Col.-Gen. Andrei Nikolaevich Serdyukov
• Lt-Gen. Alexander Yuryevich Chaiko.

It was disappointing that in the nine thousand words of debate yesterday, there was little on the UK’s military role, or the particular humanitarian responsibilities that flow from it. In our Twitter thread prior to the debate, we pointed to two areas of responsibility: Rukban camp and Raqqa.

We would have liked MPs to ask why the Coalition military strategy in the Tanf zone in southeast Syria leaves out the humanitarian component, failing for years now to fulfil legal duties to civilians in Rukban camp under Geneva Convention IV Article 55.

We would have liked MPs to ask why civilian victims of the Coalition strategy in Raqqa—a strategy that bottled them up with ISIS and then pulverised the city street by street—why those civilian victims can’t get the most basic compensation, and still live in ruins?

Atrocity prevention needs to be at the centre of UK strategy

The UK Government is currently carrying out an Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy. Read more about the review, and how to submit evidence, here. The deadline for submissions is Friday 11 September 2020.

Syria Solidarity UK was pleased to contribute to a joint submission to the review by members of the Atrocity Prevention Working Group. Read the full submission (PDF).

Why should UK national strategy focus on atrocity prevention?

The core aim of UK defence and security strategy is to preserve the security and prosperity of the population of the UK and its citizens abroad. An effective defence and security strategy requires that atrocity prevention be included at its centre as an essential part of achieving this aim.

States and non state groups that enable, foment, or carry out mass atrocities are leading threats to UK security and prosperity. Their actions are not contained by borders. Not only do mass atrocities drive mass forced displacement, but attacks on personal security, social cohesion and rule of law in one state repeatedly come to undermine personal security, social cohesion, and rule of law internationally. States and non state groups involved in mass atrocities have an interest in undermining rule of law worldwide in order to maintain impunity and power, whether through attacks on international institutions by such states or through terror acts by such non state groups. The deliberate exporting of disinformation and the strategic exporting of corrupt practices are other aspects of this dynamic, threatening UK economic and political well being as well as the personal security of UK residents and citizens.

Acting consistently to prevent further mass atrocities and to tackle ongoing mass atrocities should therefore be a strategic imperative for the UK. This requires a review not just of how positive action by the UK can be timely and effective, but also of how current UK policies and actions contribute to enabling atrocities by allowing impunity for perpetrators.

How the UK fails to prevent atrocities in Syria

From the start of the current war in Syria, the UK has failed to put atrocity prevention at the centre of its response. Instead, the UK and its allies have focused on preventing WMD proliferation, focused on counter-terrorism, and focused on containing the effects of the conflict within the region but without actively protecting civilians or stopping large scale violence. The last nine years have seen failures in all these areas, failures that could have been limited or even prevented had the UK focused from the start on atrocity prevention.

Most UK military action in Syria is defined as collective defence of the state of Iraq against ISIS, not as humanitarian intervention, and civilian protection has been a secondary consideration to the primary goal of defeating ISIS. The UK military is tasked with avoiding civilian harm in Syria rather than with actively preventing civilian harm.

Humanitarian intervention was invoked by the UK Government only in 2018 to bomb chemical weapons facilities, but given the far greater number of civilian casualties inflicted by the Assad regime’s use of high explosive than its use of chemical weapons, this intervention was clearly less an act of civilian protection than of counter proliferation. The helicopters and jets used by the Assad regime for both chemical and conventional bombing of civilians were all left untouched by the UK’s 2018 action.

At the same time as UK aircraft were in Syrian airspace to fight ISIS, the UK failed to act in 2016-2018 to airdrop aid to Syrian civilians besieged by the Assad regime. In that same period, DFID was funding the use of humanitarian drones for medical supplies in African countries, and UN agencies were carrying out airdrops to regime held Deir Ezzor using JPADS remote guided parachutes. These technologies could have been used to at the very least bring medical aid to civilians suffering under Assad’s starvation sieges. Detailed viable proposals for large scale airdrops of food aid using drone aircraft were also put forward and rejected by the UK Government.

The UK’s failure is ongoing. As we have repeatedly highlighted, the UK-US Coalition and UK ally Jordan have been complicit in the forced displacement of civilians from Rukban camp, located in an area under Coalition military control.

The UK has failed to bring to trial British-born individuals accused of complicity in atrocities, some of whom are currently imprisoned by UK ally the SDF, a non-state armed group. The UK has failed to investigate and charge British-born Asma Assad for complicity in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and financial crimes where the UK has jurisdiction over UK nationals abroad. The UK has failed to impose sanctions on Russian individuals with command responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Syria.

UK-US Coalition forces have failed to make themselves accountable to civilian survivors of the Coalition’s military campaign in Raqqa and elsewhere, thereby worsening the normalisation of mass violence in Syria, and reinforcing an expectation of impunity for perpetrators on all sides.

The consequences of failure

Today ISIS no longer controls significant territory in Syria, but the Assad regime’s reign of terror continues, with mass detention and torture of civilians, secret executions, and the forcible displacement of half the country’s population. Assad’s military is still carrying out attacks on civilian homes in a last pocket of opposition controlled Syria in the northwest. And the regime’s deliberate targeting of civilians, of homes, schools, and hospitals, has driven millions of people to flee across borders.

As long as the regime remains in power, and as long as the various military forces in Syria can act with impunity, the vast majority of Syrian refugees won’t willingly return. Yet here in the UK, we find members of the same government that failed to prevent atrocities in Syria now making political attacks on refugees who try to find safety in the UK.

Political attacks on refugees are damaging to refugees themselves, damaging to their prospects of integration in the UK, and damaging to the UK’s wider social cohesion. Ultimately this dehumanising rhetoric risks setting conditions for future atrocities here in the UK.

Precedents set in Syria have normalised mass violence by states, normalised the dehumanising of survivors and the deliberate fracturing of societies. Today, no continent is safe, and we see a very real prospect of worse to come.

For a safe and secure future, the UK needs to protect people from mass atrocities.

The UK needs to make accountable those responsible for atrocities, and UK forces and agencies need to be accountable to affected populations.

And the UK needs to work to prevent future atrocities, at home as well as abroad.