We saw Aleppo’s horror and still turned away
It is the end of the revolution. Yet, as Aleppo falls, what has truly been laid bare is who we in the West have become, argues Terry Glavin in today’s Citizen.
There has been mass murder by chlorine gas. There have been massacres of innocents. Hospitals and clinics have been deliberately targeted. There are 31,000 dead.
Yet somehow, none of it seemed to matter to us, nor to our lofty principles, Glavin writes.
And there is no excuse, not the drooling bigotries of the isolationist Right nor the clever platitudes of the “anti-imperialist” Left.
It was all there for us to see if we had wanted to see it, on Instagram, on YouTube and on Twitter. The revolution was televised and more, but somehow it did not matter. Not enough.
English teacher, reporter and activist Abdulkafi Al-Hamdo used his cellphone camera to upload a farewell using the video-streaming service Periscope on Monday night.
“What I want to say is, don’t believe anymore in the United Nations. Don’t believe anymore in the international community,” he said.
“Russia doesn’t want us to go out alive. They want us dead. Assad is the same ... but at least we know that we were a free people.
“We wanted freedom. We didn’t want anything else but freedom. You know, this world doesn’t like freedom, it seems.”
So ends the Battle of Aleppo.
Aleppo has fallen. The last and sturdiest bastion of the Syrian uprising is gone. The Battle of Aleppo is over, the revolution is finished, and the Syrian mass murderer Bashar Assad has won.
Russia has won. Iran has won. Hezbollah has won. The United States has lost. The United Nations has lost, and the bloody war in Syria, already having taken nearly half a million lives, goes on.
Aleppo mattered, it should go without saying, but it’s worthwhile enumerating what did not matter. You can start with Aleppo’s 31,000 dead and proceed from there through each and every statutory war crime codified by the International Criminal Court.
Mass murder by chlorine gas. Massacres of innocents. Bombardments by Russian jet fighters.
The deliberate targeting of hospitals and clinics. The firing of mortar rounds into crowded neighbourhoods. The terror of barrel bombs dropped from Syrian army helicopters.
The starvation siege that followed the city’s encirclement by Shia death squads and Assadist militias on Sept. 8.
None of that mattered, not the hourly imagery on Instagram and YouTube and Twitter of corpsestrewn streets and decapitated infants, and not the gut-wrenching final goodbyes uploaded to mobile phones or sent by text from the survivors in the rebel-held ruins of the Old City, the al-Shaar district, and the back streets of Sheikh Saeed.
Leaning against a wall, his tattered Adidas hoodie drawn against the rain, the young English teacher, reporter and activist Abdulkafi AlHamdo managed to use his cellphone camera to upload his goodbye to the video-streaming service Periscope on Monday night.
“What I want to say is, don’t believe anymore in the United Nations. Don’t believe anymore in the international community. Don’t think that they are not satisfied with what’s going on. They are satisfied that we are being killed, that we are facing one of the most difficult, or the most serious, or the most horrible massacres that is in our history.
“Russia doesn’t want us to go out alive. They want us dead. Assad is the same … but at least we know that we were a free people. We wanted freedom. We didn’t want anything else but freedom. You know, this world doesn’t like freedom, it seems.”
There is no plausible defence any of us can mount against AlHamdo’s plain-spoken indictment.
In the world’s citadels of democracy, there are no popular constituencies sufficient to the task of commanding our elected leaders to put their backs into the emancipation of the Syrian people from their tormentors. After all, you know, quagmire and all that.
Broach the subject of NATO enforcing a modicum of order in the Syrian abattoir by means of, say, a no-fly zone, and you’ll be denounced as a warmonger in the mould of the archvillains George W. Bush and Tony Blair.
The truth of it is we’d just rather not take the trouble.
We aren’t prepared to suffer the sacrifices demanded of the commitments to universal rights we profess, so we absolve ourselves by talking about “the Muslim world” as though it were a distant planet.
We talk about Arabs as though they were a different species. It’s easier on the conscience that way.
Between the drooling bigotries of the isolationist right and the clever platitudes of the “anti-imperialist” left, the only place left to address the solemn obligations we owe one another as human beings is in negotiations over the codicils of international trade agreements, or in the rituals of deliberately unenforceable resolutions entertained by the United Nations General Assembly.
Just last Friday, Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion and his diplomats conducted just such a ceremony in sponsoring a non-binding General Assembly resolution demanding an immediate cessation of hostilities in Syria, humanitarian aid access, and an end to the siege of Aleppo. It passed, 122 to 13. This is what counts these days as a diplomatic coup.
Canadian Ambassador to the UN Marc-André Blanchard was pleased to claim that the resolution was already having an effect even before it was voted on, because the day before, Russia announced it was temporarily halting its bombing of Aleppo and had even offered to open corridors to allow civilians to flee. This is what counts these days as a diplomatic triumph.
The UN human rights office later announced that it had received credible reports that hundreds of men who crossed into Aleppo’s regime-controlled districts had gone missing. Young men were being pulled out of the line at the corridor checkpoints. The Consultative Council in the Levant Front, one of Aleppo’s main rebel groups, reported that the men had been taken to “warehouses that look more like internment camps.”
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reckons that 60,000 Syrians have been starved to death, tortured to death or executed in Assad’s prisons since the non-violent democratic uprising began in February 2011. Relying on regime defectors and insiders, the Observatory has verified 14,446 deaths at a single facility, Sednaya prison, near Damascus.
And now Aleppo is undergoing what UN humanitarian spokesman Jens Laerke calls “a complete meltdown of humanity.”
Regime militias are carrying out mass executions of civilians. In one case, 11 women and 13 children were shot “on the spot.” Women are committing suicide rather than face the prospect of rape and murder.
A planned evacuation of perhaps 100,000 civilians and rebel fighters from eastern Aleppo was heralded as a breakthrough on Tuesday, following the abject surrender by all of Aleppo’s remaining rebels — hard-line Islamists and democratic patriots alike.
By Wednesday morning, the Russian-Turkish understanding had fallen through, the glimmer of hope had flickered out, the barrel bombs and mortar shells were raining down on Aleppo again, and from the people, those gut-wrenching final goodbyes — “Pray for us,” “I hope you can remember us” — were going out to the world again.
“Save us, people. Save us, people, world, anyone who has even a bit of humanity. We beg you, we beg you,” a doctor pleaded. “The dead and wounded are in the streets and people’s homes have collapsed on top of them. Save us. Save us.”
But that young English teacher, Abdulkafi Al-Hamdo, knows better. He doesn’t believe anymore in the United Nations. He doesn’t believe anymore in the international community.
Perhaps Allah will look down in his mercy upon Aleppo, because no help is coming from us. None. This is what we have become. This the depravity to which we have all sunk.
Aleppo has fallen.