Expendable Populations

The evil that a handful of men are capable of constructing, altering the lives of millions is demonstrated time and again throughout history. Megalomaniacs, totalitarian tyrants, malicious dictators whose least consideration is the impact that their desires will extend harm well beyond their immediate contacts are simply disinterested as well as oblivious to the needs of other people. Their own need to control, to remain dominant is all that matters to them.

When the world became fully aware of the dread results of Nazi Germany's campaign to eliminate Jews from all the territories they controlled during World War II, as the sheerest, ultimate expression of anti-Semitism, the photographs of concentration camp survivors, the stilled chimneys of the death camps, the piles of corpses and the bewildered eyes of those children who miraculously survived, stirred mass guilt, and an impassioned vow never to permit such an atrocity to be repeated.

But ethnic cleansing, tribalism, religious intolerance, hatred and mass slaughter continue regardless. Regardless of the fact that the United Nations was instituted for the specific purpose of ensuring through its global reach and its membership signing on to a declaration of human rights. Regardless of the later adoption of the 'Responsibility to Protect', when a tyrant launched a vicious war against his own population, restively opposing their prolonged state of persecution.

Cambodia with its killing fields happened anyway. And so did Rwanda, and Darfur. And a whole host of lesser, in the sense of smaller events in which merely tens of thousands were killed in weapons-of-mass-destruction assaults like Iraq's Saddam Hussein launching chemical gas attacks on nuisance portions of his population. And now we have the ancient cities of Syria flattened, millions of its people seeking refuge in camps within its borders and flooding refugee camps in neighbour countries.

A government that uses food, water, medical supplies as a weapon of mass attrition. A government that does not hesitate to mount night-time deadly sarin gas attacks on its people. A government that uses helicopter gunships and sharpshooters to fire on people waiting in bread lines. A country whose allies, like Iran and Hezbollah have already ruined two countries' human rights hopes. A country where the horrified world looks in at a safe geographic remove, helplessly.

UNRWA

Residents wait to receive food aid distributed at the besieged al-Yarmouk camp, south of Damascus on January 31, 2014.

Syria, where Sunni Syrians' lives are in danger from barrel bombs dropped on their enclaves. They are being punished for being Sunni, and not Shia, complicit and content with the Alawite regime of President Bashar al-Assad. The population is gaunt and exhausted. All around them is the devastated remnants of a place they once called home. Where the suburbs of the two largest, most populous cities of the country are regularly bombed and strafed.

And in Yarmouk, the Palestinian refugee camp just outside Damascus the old and the young, the still-fit and the frail queue for food parcels at a United Nations relief agency distribution point. There are 160,000 people living in Yarmouk and they have in common that they are ravishingly hungry. They have been under constant bombardment. They live now in the rubble of the civil infrastructure that was their home. 

They have become accustomed to surviving on very little. Whatever scraps of anything edible that comes their way, and barely survivable amounts of clean water. In January, when this photograph above was taken, 7,000 food parcels were permitted entry into the area by the Syrian regime, in a brief and doubtless extremely reluctant lapse into fitful generosity.  The head of the UN agency has called on all sides in the conflict to allow "safe and unhindered humanitarian access" to Yarmouk.

Bashar al-Assad shrugs. His conscience doesn't bother him, because he has none. His immediate concern is expunging the irritating nuisance of challenges to his government, to his control of Syria. He can thank, in order of helpfulness, Iran, Hezbollah, Russia, and a world paralyzed with indignation for his good fortune in not encountering any challenges himself to his unending atrocities committed against the people of Syria.