Ashdown: Britain must guarantee UN air-drop to starving Syrians
BRITAIN must ensure that emergency supplies are air-dropped to starving Syrian civilians, Lord Ashdown said yesterday, amid signs that the United Nations is retreating from a promise to begin deliveries this week.
An international plan to provide desperately needed aid drops by tomorrow was thrown into doubt when Staffan de Mistura, the UN special envoy to Syria, said this would be too dangerous with- out the approval of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
The Syrian government has previously allowed air drops to Deir Ezzor – one of three areas under its control which are surrounded by rebels. Another 49 areas, with a total population of over a million, are under siege by Mr Assad’s forces, placing their inhabitants at risk of starvation.
The regime has shown no willingness to allow air drops to these locations. Lord Ashdown, the former Liberal Democrat leader, said that Britain must ensure that emergency deliveries go ahead anyway, in accordance with the plan. “The UK helped secure this important agreement, setting a 1st June deadline for aid getting to people living under medieval-style sieges in Syria,” he said.
“The UK has to see that this international commitment to the people in desperate need is fulfilled.”
Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, had described the agreement, reached on May 17, as an “important step forward” that would save “countless thousands of lives”.
The most extreme effects of Syria’s sieges have been felt in Madaya, an rebel-held town near the Lebanese border, where scores of people have starved to death.
Air drops are seen as a tactic of last resort because they are fraught with technical and logistical difficulties. But their advocates point to the failure of alternative options.
Earlier this month, the people of Darayya, a rebel-held area of Damascus two miles from the aid warehouses in the city centre, were promised their first relief convoy for almost four years. Although the UN secured the regime’s permission to make the journey, the convoy was turned away and Darayya was immediately shelled, killing a father and son as they waited for the aid which never arrived.
Lord Malloch Brown, a former deputy secretary general of the UN, said the Syrian government had made a “mockery” of agreement that life-saving food and medicine must be allowed into besieged areas.