The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Plea for ‘humanity’ over Syria
IRC chief David Miliband urging world to do more, as conflict begins seventh year
David Miliband has urged the world to “put the humanity back” into the pursuit of peace in Syria, as the conflict enters its seventh year.
The former foreign secretary, who heads up the International Rescue Committee (IRC), said too many civilians had lost their lives through the “extraordinary abuse of international law” during the bitter struggle.
He said: “The message for the sixth anniversary is that 25 million refugees (worldwide) are 25 million people, and the great danger is that the statistics dehumanise the refugee population.
“These are doctors and dentists and business people and housewives and househusbands and people who are really trying to keep their lives together in the way that you or I do, but trying to do so in appalling circumstances.
“And I think that the message on the sixth anniversary of the Syria crisis is that 500,000 lives have been lost. That’s not a statistic, that’s 500,000 people whose families have been grotesquely affected by this.
“The sixth anniversary is a day to put the humanity back into the conduct of the war and into the pursuit of peace.”
On March 15 2011 protests erupted in Damascus’s Old City and the southern city of Daraa over security forces’ detention of a group of boys accused of painting anti-government graffiti on their school walls – a day widely regarded as the start of the uprising.
Since then, more than half of Syria’s pre-war population of 22 million citizens has been uprooted. The majority of the 4.9 million Syrian refugees registered by the UN are overwhelmingly staying in neighbouring countries, including Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon.
Charities including Oxfam have criticised the international community for its “increasingly restrictive” policies against Syrian refugees who are “seeing doors slammed in their faces”.
US President Donald Trump recently issued an updated travel order banning travellers from six predominantly Muslim countries, including Syria, while the UK Government said the Dubs scheme offering legal routes to lone child refugees will end after 350 children have been brought to Britain.
Mr Miliband said the president’s ban “threatens to be a historic assault on a very successful American refugee resettlement programme”.