Syria's Tragic Milestone: Six Years of Atrocities
March 15, 2017 marks the 6th anniversary of the civil war in Syria, a conflict which has cost more than 400,000 lives and forced half a nation to flee.
March 15, 2017 marks the 6th anniversary of the civil war in Syria, a conflict which has cost more than 400,000 lives and forced half a nation to flee.
Holocaust survivor and Museum volunteer Margit Meissner urged listeners to transcend politics and create an effective response to the crisis in Syria.
The fourth anniversary of the Syrian civil war is this week, and the statistics showing the human toll of the conflict are bleak. Nine children are killed in Syria every day. 6-percent of the population has been killed, maimed, or wounded. Life expectancy has fallen by 27-percent, from 75.9 years to 55.7 years. And 3.3 million Syrians have fled and are living as refugees in neighboring countries; 7.6 million people are internally displaced.
On the fourth anniversary of the uprising in Syria, the Museum calls for effective and sustained efforts to end the horrific suffering of the Syrian people, who are in the midst of the largest humanitarian crisis since World War II and facing the threat of genocide.
In a recent post, I noted that 2013 had distinguished itself in a dismal way, by producing more new episodes of mass killing than any other year since the early 1990s. Now let’s talk about why. Each of these mass killings surely involves some unique and specific local processes, and people who study in depth the societies where mass killings are occurring can say much better than I what those are. As someone who believes local politics is always embedded in a global system, however, I don’t think we can fully understand these situations by considering only those idiosyncratic features, either. Sometimes we see “clusters” where they aren’t, but evidence that we live in a global system leads me to think that isn’t what’s happening here.
It’s hard to see how the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) would not apply in the case of Syria, where more than 100,000 people have been killed, five million displaced from their homes, two million refugees sent fleeing, and numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity committed, including with chemical weapons, according to independent human rights monitors and the UN. Yet there is one person who has studiously avoided invoking R2P: President Obama.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum today expressed deep alarm over the reports of a major chemical weapons attack on civilians in the outskirts of Damascus this week.
The UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, Adama Dieng, is urging religious and political leaders in the Middle East and North Africa to refrain from rhetoric that could exacerbate the violence in Syria and incite crimes against civilians.
Today, June 20, marks World Refugee Day 2013, an annual United Nations-designated opportunity to raise awareness of the plight of those displaced due to war, conflict, or persecution throughout the world.
On June 13, the White House issued a statement confirming the Assad regime has used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent sarin, against the opposition.