Hauser Lecture 2014: What can be done in Syria?
10 Mar 2014 – Remarks delivered by IRC President and CEO David Miliband at the New York University School of Law.
David Miliband characterizes the Syrian situation as a “war without law, characterizes how IRC has engaged the humanitarian challenges that continue, and proposes seven priorities to enable “a step change in the level of engagement” among all parties.

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…I have been asked to address one of the most pressing topics in international politics today: the war in Syria, its impact on the Middle East, and the role of humanitarian organizations like IRC.  UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres has called the war “a disgraceful humanitarian calamity with suffering and displacement unparalleled in recent history”.  It deserves more attention than it is getting, so I welcome your interest tonight.

There is a lot of commentary that this seems to be a war without end.  Also that it is a war without limit.  My theme tonight is that what is happening in Syria is an example of a war without law, and the question I address is what if anything can be done.

A bit of history first.  The IRC worked in Syria from 2007 to 2009.  Our work focused on helping the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees who had fled the internecine strife in their home country. We were ordered to leave abruptly by the Syrian government, for reasons that remain unclear.

Since 2011, we have pivoted the organization’s attention towards cross-border work into Syria from its neighbors, and work on behalf of refugees and host communities in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq. Through brave work with Syrian partners, we think half a million Syrians inside the country have received medical aid from us, and another half a million benefited from non-medical help, from winterization kits to help families get through the winter to education for displaced children. In the neighboring countries, we are working to provide post trauma support to women who have suffered sexual and domestic violence; health care to refugees and host communities; and cash support and cash for work programs, again for refugees and host communities.  This fiscal year, help for the victims of the Syrian war will become our biggest program, exceeding the $70m we spent in DRC in 2013.

I am immensely proud of the work IRC has done over the last three years.  We are expanding, innovating, delivering every week.  Lives have been saved and improved.  But equally I am in no doubt about the growing gap that exists between need and help.

In the same way that failure to prevent slaughter in Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s defined the humanitarian agenda for a generation which came of age in the 1990s, so the failure to meet humanitarian need with appropriate humanitarian action is the collective failure of this decade.  The parallels are quite striking: the failure to address the drivers of the crisis, to halt the crisis, and to mount a humanitarian effort proportionate to the scale of the crisis are common elements….

  …The threat from this war without law is not just to the well-being of millions of Syrians, but also to the progress that has been made since the second world war in establishing laws and norms for the conduct of war.  As this audience knows well, the laws of war represent  the hard-headed learning from some of the most brutal and deadly conflicts of the past two centuries. War will always be bloody and destructive – but there are laws and norms that act to minimize its impact on civilians.  And there is a further dimension.

Despite the inevitable hatred engendered by bloodshed, the laws and norms of war increase the potential for durable peace-making by trying to reduce the emotional, social, human and physical costs on a country and its people.

   In Syria, we see grave and systematic breaches of the laws of war. Civilians are not just caught in the crossfire – they are targeted by barrel bombs, artillery bombardments, snipers, massacres, chemical weapons attacks.  All have rained down on previously quiet residential neighborhoods. And all except chemical weapon attacks continue to rain down after the passage of the recent UN resolution.

Critical civilian infrastructure such as hospitals, clinics, schools and water supplies are bombed without warning. Access to the most basic, life-saving food and medical aid is being denied. Aid workers themselves are in the cross-hairs: 50 have died thus far and others have been kidnapped.

   In a war without law, where the international community seems paralyzed, the road we are currently on leads not to a Dayton or Geneva but to a Vanni, where, in 2009, 350,000 people were bottled up in the few square kilometers of a sandy peninsular, caught between the Tamil Tigers and a Sri Lankan army bent on their eradication.  UN and other independent inquiries have revealed gross abuse of humanitarian law.  The parallels between the end game in Sri Lanka and that in Syria, where major cities such as Aleppo, Homs, Hama and Deir ez-Zor are likewise encircled, seems clear….

..There is one other point that is relevant. This war has been noteworthy for the strong sense among the western public that the best western nations can do is to keep well away.  This has been most evidently the case in respect of the debate about military intervention.  But it has also infected the humanitarian effort.  IRC raised more money from the public in a matter of weeks for the victims of the Philippines disaster than we have raised for the Syrian effort in three years.

These factors have left humanitarian organizations like IRC with challenging dilemmas.  About the safety of our staff; about our interaction with rebel groups as well as the government; about our engagement with the UN on cross-border questions; about where to make our effort amidst the plethora of competing priorities.

We have been guided by the humanitarian values established in 1864: humanity, independence, neutrality, impartiality and universality.  But in truth we have also found tension – even clash – between those values…

Full text: http://www.rescue.org/press-releases/syria-what-can-be-done-18480