Mick Hartley

What's the point of the UN? Nobody knows. Certainly not the Syrians. From the Times [£]:

Doctors in Aleppo have accused the United Nations of overseeing five years of failure in Syria — and even of aiding and abetting the siege and slaughter tactics of President Assad.

As the most intense bombing campaign of the war entered its seventh day, dozens of civilians were reported killed and injured. Ceasefire talks at the UN headquarters in New York again failed to produce a breakthrough.

For a group of doctors in one Aleppo hospital, the culprit was clear. Grim-faced, they held up a UN flag smeared with blood from the hallways of the hospital and announced: “The pure blood that is being shed in Aleppo is the responsibility of this flag. Save Aleppo.”…

The UN has become reviled in the city as a symbol of international impotence. Syrians traded cartoons on social media mocking the organisation. One showed a peacekeeper’s helmet with a Syrian tank lurking beneath it. Another played on the Arabic word for “united” to recast the UN as a prostitute working for the Syrian regime….

Doctors in Aleppo said that they had lost all faith in the UN. “The truce came after a green light from the UN, it was ended by a green light from the UN and now Assad and Russia were given the green light to do whatever they want in Aleppo,” Abu Rajab, who led the flag protest, said. “We could bear hunger but this shelling has been unbearable. The UN has done nothing for us — they couldn’t even cancel the Syrian regime’s membership. The UN is completely deactivated.”

He added: “Not only the UN bears responsibility for what’s happening in Aleppo, rather the entire world. The UN has been established to protect the peoples’ rights, the security council is called “security” to provide it to people. What have they done to Aleppo? Nothing.”…

Disquiet over the role of the UN in Syria has been growing for years. In part it has been seen by Syrians as an emblem of the wider international failure to halt the war.

More recently it has been accused of complicity with the regime because of its role in the delivery of aid. UN convoys are routinely prevented from entering besieged areas by the Assad regime unless the inhabitants offer concessions as part of a regime strategy dubbed “kneel or starve”….

The UN has given contracts for the delivery of aid worth tens of millions of dollars to business associates of the Assad regime.