In the Arab world you don’t usually think people starve, and starve to death. But here on our very own doorstep, and in front of our eyes, people are dying from extreme hunger and we can’t do anything about it. It’s cataclysmic, but this is the nature of the politics we are dealing with, it’s intractable and confusing and not to our liking, their liking or whoever. People die and other people watch helplessly.
Madaya is besieged, encircled, harangued, victimised and now mutilated and distorted by forces and those aligned with the Syrian government, who sadly, at one time, you thought were true patriots to national causes. Now they blatantly push a grim sectarian and chauvinistic agenda for an outlandish purpose and turn the compass upside down.
As the world watches on and uneasily twiddles its thumbs, and tries to figure out what is going on and what to do next, the siege bites and becomes more deadly. While the politics of hunger reaches new heights via Hezbollah, the Bashar Al Assad regime and the facetious and motley opposition groups such as the Syrian Free Army, Al Qaida, Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) and other self-seekers turning at each other’s throats, we must lower our heads and bow down to the victims who are being carved out of their mind and souls.
Through their bodies, and no fault of their own, as innocent bystanders with an evidently cheap tag on their heads, they are paying the hard political price of competing and war-tearing guerrillas, rebel groups and government forces, ignited by outside actors like Iran and Russia who are fuelling the cascading battlefields right across Syria in a fratricidal war that no longer knows brothers, sisters, relatives and friends. In Syria today everyone is becoming fair game to shoot, hassle and bomb to smithereens and tiny pieces of human flesh. It’s as if these different communities have never lived together all these centuries and years.
The fact that people are dying in Madaya — and indeed there are sieges at 15 other locations in the country from conflicting sides and armed groups bringing havoc and destruction to over 400,000 helpless civilians — is being seen as no more than a fact of life, a fait accompli to the ongoing fratricidal five-year civil war that has resulted in the deaths of at least 250,000 civilians and over five million made into stateless refugees scattering all over the Middle East and Europe.Madaya, a real tragedy unwinding into the horrors of death and mirror-reflections of what is going on in the rest of the country, speaks of the baseness of human nature and how low people can stoop to safeguard their dogged political interests, distorted ideologies and thinking, regardless of how much they trample on other people and wreck lives for parochial objectives and misunderstood quirk and pernicious ends. To say that starvation is used as a tool of war or famine a military tactic or an outrageous war crime becomes perfectly acceptable because of the vicious psychology that takes over and is then spit out against a people and country.
The trials and tribulations of a once-sought-after Arab Spring have crumbled and viciously so; in Madaya Sunnis are being squeezed out in a ruthless race to tip the balance of sectarian rulers who believe in their divine right to power. They are holding the sectarian card, dilly-dallying against their countrymen, a once-proud, industrious people turned into shadows of their former selves as skeletons, spectres and ghosts reduced to scrounging in garbage heaps, to boiling grass and leaves and culling cats, dogs and insects to fill their bellies with morsels to survive and rebuild their new skeletal frames. If they do, there will be many psychological barriers they have to cross before they could return to a semblance of normality, even if that ever existed in our lives.
Although in the biting cold and snow, one wonders how many of that town, with a population of around 40,000 will be left, as children, the old and infirm and even able-bodied people have been ticked off each day in an unholy siege at Madaya since last July but started biting in August and up to today. To give the international community credit, food aid was delivered last October, but that was all. Today, shop shelves lie empty in a once bustling tourist border town nudged in before the Lebanese border and less than 40 kilometres from Damascus.
It’s mind-boggling, but a kilo of flour, if you can get it and afford it, is being sold for a whacking $120 and a litre of milk for $300. In conflict there is a war economy and there is starvation.
Today no one is allowed to enter or leave the town boundary. They are “hermetically sealed”. Madaya’s people must answer to so-called Hezbollah patriots who long posed themselves as supporters of the Al Assad government. Though there are no official statistics, it is said there are between 6,000 and 8,000, and probably much more who entered Syria to shore up the regime. In an ironic twist of history, Hezbollah guards now control the checkpoints and, through the barrel of their guns, are turning people back.
Whoever tries to cross or make a run for it, risks being shot at, or having to face the mine bombs sprinkled over the surrounding area. They are the new hostages and today’s wretched of the earth.
Of course the siege of Madaya is cynically manipulated and part of a political game played by the government supporters and the opposition groups to divide and carve up Syria into little provinces and areas. Up north near Idlib, Foah and Kefraya, Shiite villages have been under siege by Jaish Al Fateh, another Islamist group, since March 2015. They are suffering the same fate as that of Madaya. It’s a tit-for-tat action, you control and I control with people caught in the middle as pawns in a political game.
While United Nations aid has arrived in Madaya, questions remain as to whether the sieges will ever be lifted, how long can they continue, when will this dismal situation end and will agencies like the UN have to keep coming back on an adhoc basis and at the mercy of governments to alleviate situations for more human disasters continue? It’s a nightmare that may never end.
Marwan Asmar is a commentator based in Amman. He has long worked in journalism and has a PhD in political science from Leeds University in the UK.
