Everybody's war : the politics of aid in the Syria crisis / edited by Jehan Bseiso, Michiel Hofman, and Jonathan Whittall ; with a foreword by Amani Ballour.
"In February 2012, in its first public position on the unfolding armed conflict in Syria, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) published a series of testimonies gathered from Syrian doctors working in the country. The testimonies described the challenges and horrors facing doctors trying to treat wou...
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| Other Authors: | , , |
| Format: | Ebook |
| Language: | English |
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New York, NY :
Oxford University Press,
[2021]
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Oxford Scholarship Online |
| Summary: | "In February 2012, in its first public position on the unfolding armed conflict in Syria, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) published a series of testimonies gathered from Syrian doctors working in the country. The testimonies described the challenges and horrors facing doctors trying to treat wounded patients and protesters injured by Syrian authorities (MSF 2012). In its report, MSF denounced the use of "medicine as a weapon of persecution" in Syria and called on the government to "re-establish the neutrality of healthcare facilities" (Ibid.) In a press release published a year later, MSF further decried that aid was not being distributed "equally" between government- and opposition-controlled areas and argued that "areas under government control receive nearly all international aid, while opposition-held zones receive only a tiny share." (MSF 2013) In an opinion piece, two MSF staff members criticized humanitarian actors working with the authorization of the Syrian government and called on those aid agencies to recognise "the de-facto partitioning of the state" (Weissman and Rodrigue 2013). Such calls from humanitarian actors, which on other occasions claimed neutrality, played into the polarization of the Syrian conflict. The Syrian government actively controlled aid delivery and distribution from Damascus, with the support of Russia and Iran. Aid from Damascus was distributed by the United Nations, the Syrian Arab Red Crescent society, and a handful of other organizations working in government-controlled areas. Meanwhile, aid was delivered across the borders from neighboring countries by opposition groups, civil society activists, and Western humanitarian actors"-- |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xviii, 220 pages) : illustrations, maps |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 0197514642 0197514669 0197514677 9780197514641 9780197514665 9780197514672 |