Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
UN demands humanitarian aid for all of Syria
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The U.N. Security Council united for the first time on a resolution on Syria’s humanitarian crisis Saturday, demanding that President Bashar Assad’s government and the opposition provide immediate access everywhere in the country to deliver aid to millions of people in desperate need.
The fate of the Western and Arab-backed resolution rested with Russia, Syria’s closest ally, and China, another supporter.
After two weeks of negotiations and a watering-down of the original text, they decided to join the rest of the 15-member council in sending a strong message, especially to the Assad government, that food, medicine and other essentials must not be blocked to civilians caught in the threeyear conflict.
“Today the council has finally shown that whatever its political differences over Syria, it was not entirely indifferent to the devastating humanitarian crisis,” Britain’s U.N. Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant said after the vote.
According to the United Nations, 9.3 million Syrians are in need of humanitarian assistance and 6.8 million have fled their homes but remain in the country.
The resolution does not threaten sanctions — Russia insisted that this reference be dropped from the original text. Instead, it asks SecretaryGeneral Ban Ki-moon to report to the council every 30 days on implementation and expresses the council’s intention to take “further steps” if the resolution’s demands aren’t fulfilled.
All Security Council resolutions are legally binding, but what remains to be seen is whether this resolution has an impact on the ground, especially since it doesn’t have real “teeth.”
U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos expressed hope in a statement that it “will facilitate the delivery of aid to people in desperate need in Syria.”
Calling the resolution a “long overdue” measure “to alleviate the worst humanitarian crisis of this generation,” U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power said that as hard as it was to win council approval, the harder issue is imple- mentation.
“The world now needs to stand united on behalf of implementation so that there are no more broken promises, no more delays, no more coupling minor concessions with cruel and shameless attacks on civilians,” Power said.
France’s U.N. Ambassador Gerard Araud said implementation “depends on the goodwill of the Syrian regime and the opposition.”
If the resolution’s demands aren’t fulfilled, he said, France will propose “further measures.”
The resolution demands that all parties, especially the Syrian government, “promptly allow rapid, safe and unhindered access ... across conflict lines and across borders” for humanitarian aid, and it calls on both sides “to immediately lift the sieges of populated areas.”
It demands that all parties “cease depriving civilians of food and medicine indispensable to their survival.” It also demands a halt to all attacks against civilians, including indiscriminate shelling and aerial attacks using barrel bombs in populated areas.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the council immediately after the vote that the resolution “should not have been necessary” because “humanitarian assistance is not something to be negotiated 1990s, Shahian said she crossed the border illegally to reunite with him and filed her residency application.
Since then, the 42-yearold from Encino, Calif., has been unable to take her U.S.-born children to visit family in Guatemala or accept a job outside her home. After waiting nearly two years to get an immigration court date in Los Angeles in October, she now has to wait until August because of the shutdown.
“Every time I go to that court, I come out broken, in tears,” said Shahian, who has been married for two decades and helps run her husband’s clothing design business.
Immigration judges — it is something to be allowed by virtue of international law.”
“Half the country’s people need urgent assistance,” he said. “Host countries need support in caring for more than 2.5 million refugees.”
The U.N. chief said it is “profoundly shocking ... that both sides are besieging civilians as a tactic of war.”
“Some 200,000 people are under siege in government-controlled areas — and 45,000 in oppositioncontrolled areas,” Ban said.
Russia and China had vetoed three previous resolutions backed by Western nations that would have pressured Assad to end the conflict, which according to activists has killed more than 136,000 people.
Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said Moscow supported the humanitarian resolution because “many Russian considerations were borne in mind, and as a result the document took on a balanced nature.”
He accused the resolution’s sponsors — Australia, Luxembourg and Jordan — and its supporters of raising the humanitarian crisis in the council “only after it became clear that attempts to use a deterioration of this humanitarian situation in order to carry out a regime change was unsuccessful.”
Churkin also insisted that efforts to get humanitarian access in Syria “although not as quickly as we would have liked is getting positive, concrete results.” can grant asylum, green cards or other forms of relief — or order someone deported for breaking the country’s immigration laws. About half of immigrants were given deportation orders in immigration court rulings handed down since October, according to a report by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
The courts overseen by the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review nearly always have long wait times for hearings. As of January, more than 360,000 immigration court cases were pending for an average of 573 days, according to TRAC.
Oscar, who came to the country as a 17-yearold last year from El Salvador, has been waiting for a decision on whether he can continue to live with his sister in Los Angeles - or be sent back and face street gangs that killed his mother and threatened to kill him if he didn’t join their ranks. His lawyer requested that his last name not be used out of fear for his safety if he is deported.
Oscar is seeking legal status through a program that helps foreign children in the United States who have been abused or abandoned. A hearing on his case was supposed to happen in October, but now has been delayed until June or later, leaving him to worry about his future.
“I’m afraid they’re going to send me back,” he said.
Immigration Judge Dana Leigh Marks said she doesn’t have two weeks open on her calendar in San Francisco’s immigration court for merit hearings until June 2017. And she can’t just bump people with court dates this year, because they’ve also been waiting for their day in court.
“You have this very delicately balanced system. Now we have this added dysfunction to cope with on top of that,” she said. “I just think the ripple effect is going to be continuing for a while.”