Syria: The suffering of internally displaced people of Idlib

The suffering of people displaced by war never ends. Neither does our seeming indifference to it.

The UN Security Council on Friday failed to agree on a measure that would’ve allowed a land route, leading from the Turkish border into the Syrian province of Idlib, to remain open, a route through which critically-needed humanitarian aid had — for the previous eight years — reached roughly two million internally displaced persons (IDP), folks whose lives had been shattered during the civil war by violence, dispersal and deprivation and sought refuge there.

The UN-sponsored effort, considered by far the largest humanitarian operation in the world, was shut down on Sunday. Aid workers warn that a human catastrophe of gargantuan proportions will soon unfold.

So, who cares? Well, we do. Those of us, who are troubled by the diffusion of human suffering, wherever it is found and by whoever it is endured, do care. Those of us, who know that in the afterlife, where we will meet our Maker and be asked whether we had been, by our direct silence or, worse, our callous detachment from the pain of others, complicit in the cause of that suffering, do care.

Imagine the strain that the influx of two million uninvited guests has had on the landscape and infrastructure of a relatively small, fairly underdeveloped province like Idlib, now dubbed by the Western media as Syria’s “last rebel stronghold”.

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And, finally, those of us, like this columnist, who as a Palestinian had spent his childhood and early teens in a refugee camp and knows of the unspeakable grief experienced by displaced peoples, do care.

Consider this: Of the 3.4 million civilians living in Idlib province, including the roughly two million IDPs, approximately 75 per cent had since 2014 depended on the UN to meet their needs for potable water, food and medicine. Absent these and other supplies, a disaster beyond all rational understanding looms ahead.

But it is the plight of the IDPs — folks especially vulnerable, given the fact that, unlike refugees, they had not crossed international borders and found asylum there — that is most pressing. You find these unfortunates — whom Frantz Fanon would most assuredly have called les damnes de la terre, or the wretched of the earth — everywhere in Idlib, a province to which they had fled from other provinces around the country to escape being caught in the crossfire between the competing forces in the civil war.

Some had arrived there on trucks piled high with bedding and packed full of children, while others arrived on foot, with few possessions and the clothes on the backs. Soon after their arrival, many found themselves sheltered, in tents, in the refugee camps that the UN and other aid agencies had built for them. Many more, however, squatted in soccer stadiums or in abandoned buildings, where they spent their days and nights in damaged units with no doors or windows. Quite a few lived in fields under trees, by the wayside of roads. Those among us who had followed these people’s odyssey will not, cannot, forget the searing images of the travails of these people, a people who would soon find themselves trapped in murky limbo.

No escape for Syria’s internally displaced people

Imagine the strain that the influx of two million uninvited guests has had on the landscape and infrastructure of a relatively small, fairly underdeveloped province like Idlib, now dubbed by the Western media as Syria’s “last rebel stronghold”.

In an article filed from the region on August 6 last year, New York Times correspondent Ben Hubbard wrote: “That influx has transformed a pastoral strip of farming villages into a conglomeration of makeshift settlements with strained infrastructure and displaced families crammed into every available space”.

For these IDPs, there is now no escape. No way around, through or out of the place, trapped as they are in a Sartrean huis clos. They are prevented by a wall from crossing the border into Turkey — not that the country, which already hosts, albeit under duress, 3.7 million Syrian refugees, will entertain the prospect welcoming them with open arms — and afraid to cross over into government-controlled territory for fear of retribution by the authorities.

So say a prayer to the wretched of the earth in Idlib whom we watch as they suffer alone.

Look, you will agree with me, no doubt, that the suffering we sometimes find ourselves having to endure is a profound — perhaps the most profound — human experience in our lives. But that kind of suffering, willed on us by the Deity in order to propel us towards a more enriched understanding of our human spirit, is of a different order from the senseless, predatory evil inherent in the suffering inflicted on human beings by human beings. (Lest we forget, we are told in our Holy Text, the Hadith, that “the evil of men is the work of men”.)

That kind of gratuitous suffering, I say, when taken to its extreme, as we are promised it will be taken in Idlib in coming months, does no less than destroy what there is of man in man and restore in him what there had been in primordial times of beast.

Last year, Mark Cutts, the United Nations deputy regional humanitarian director, asked the Security Council, and not altogether rhetorically, this question: “What is the future for these people [in Idlib]?”

And last Friday the response effectively was this: “Let them eat cake”.

Meanwhile the suffering of these displaced people has not ended, nor has, unforgivably, our seeming indifference.

— Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.