- The current situation in Syria is far too serious for anyone to ignore and the smallest effort can make a difference
Gulf News
Francis Matthew
One frozen moment amongst millions of other horrors. Last week, a small boy, barely old enough to walk, sat in an orange ambulance seat, covered with dust, with blood pouring down his head. His shocked and terrified face stared out into the night where his home in Aleppo had just been destroyed by bombs.
Last year, another small boy drowned in the Mediterranean Sea and his cold body in a red tee-shirt and blue shorts was washed ashore onto a beach, where he had the terrible fate to lie like any other piece of debris that came in from the sea.
In their short lives, Omar Daqneesh and Aylan Kurdi knew nothing other than violence and war. They had the terrible misfortune to be born into a time and place where disease, war, famine and death stalked the land, and they were too young to understand that humanity should be able to offer them something better.
Aylan is dead and will never know about peace, art, beauty and love. He only found terror, destruction and grinding starvation. Omar survived this attack, however shattered. Apparently he was so shocked that he has still not spoken, and it is to be hoped that he may survive. But hospitals have been attacked in the Syrian war, and it is all too possible that he may be killed later, as will thousands of others as the war grinds on.
The shocking waste of life and destruction of society, the devastation of people’s hopes and continual cycle of violence have created a hell from which many will never emerge. This is why it is so important that those of us who are outside that terrifying war-zone make every effort to help mitigate the suffering and also bring an end to the wars that create these disasters in the first place.
The great Irish statesman, Edmund Burke, was a prominent member of the British parliament in the early 1800s and he made the fundamental point that “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”. It is vital that we do not accept the temporary triumph of evil and search our conscience to check if indeed we are doing anything, however small.
Burke later added a further comment when he said that “nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little”. The situation in Syria is far too serious for anyone to just pass by and ignore what is happening.
Even a small effort makes a difference, but it also helps to tell the Syrians that they have not been forgotten. In ten or 20 years’ time, when we meet a Syrian in our daily lives, or when we travel to a new Syria, we will need to have an honourable answer to the Syrians’ question: ‘Why did we have to suffer for so long?’ It will be devastating to getting Syria (or Iraq, or Libya, or Afghanistan, or anywhere else wracked by violence today) back into the community of nations if our answer is ‘We didn’t care’, or ‘We were too busy with our own lives’.
Stuck in the middle of war
This is why the money going to the refugee camps makes a difference. Hundreds of thousands of children like Omar or Aylan need to have a chance to start their education so that despite their fate to be stuck in the middle of a war, and thanks to the fortune of those still alive unlike so many others, they can start to build their lives. The millions of Syrians who have fled for their lives cannot just sit in tents and wait for decades till their country finds new hope. That is why those refugee camps need education, health facilities, job training and economic opportunity. That is why those trying to get into more prosperous and stable countries to find a new future need help and support and should be welcomed rather than treated as criminals.
More than 400,000 Syrians have been killed since the war started and more than 11 million individuals have been forced out of their homes in a war that has steadily increased in destructive power since it started with peaceful protests in 2011.
This is the largest human tragedy of our lifetimes and we cannot sit still and wait for more small boys to have their agony caught on camera to prick our conscience. We need to help those in trouble, but we also need those trying to find a way to end the root cause of the refugees, which is to build peace in Syria and end the war. This can be in all forums, and even the luckless Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria, deserves our support rather than derision. He is desperately trying to continue with the formal process of the UN plan for Syria, and at least he is doing something.
