The Guardian view on Assad’s use of chemical weapons: our silence is shaming
Friday 12 August 2016 18.38 BST
for the 1.5 million civilians still surviving in Aleppo, the tragedy that has befallen their ancient and once-beautiful city must have made it a hell on earth. After five years of civil war, of barrel bombs dropped from helicopters, indiscriminate shelling and street-by-street fighting, it now seems beyond doubt that the Assad regime is
using chemical weapons against the civilian population of what was once Syria’s second city. On Thursday, the day when the first of a series of three-hour ceasefires was supposed to come into effect to allow some humanitarian aid to get through, doctors reported seeing victims suffering from what they diagnosed as chlorine inhalation.
The New York Times
reported that four people had been killed in the attack, on the district of Zubdiya. A few days earlier, gas bombs apparently filled with chlorine
left four dead and dozens fighting for breath in Saraqeb in Idlib, in the area where a Russian helicopter had recently been
shot down, killing all five crewmen on board.
There has been evidence of
the use of chlorine in chemical weapons, most commonly by the Assad regime but also by Islamic State forces,
for at least two years. It is a common, naturally occurring compound that is too valuable in everyday life as a water purifier and as a disinfectant (ironically, particularly in hospitals) to be banned. It is not, for example, included in the Chemical Weapons Convention that Syria signed up to after the Ghouta chemical attack, in which sarin gas may have killed as many as 1,000 residents of an outer suburb of Damascus in August 2013. It was after that that the Assad regime destroyed its stockpile of outlawed chemical and biological weapons.
Last year, in response to the growing number of reports, the UN security council set up
the joint investigative mission to gather evidence and witness accounts of the chlorine attacks. Although the use of chlorine is hard to verify, any evidence of it being used to cause indiscriminate harm to civilians could be the basis of a prosecution for war crimes.
Chemical weapons – even chlorine, which lacks the immediate and often catastrophic impact of high explosive – serve two purposes that conventional weapons do not. For their victims, their silence and the uncertainty of their extent and nature amplify the terror of the attack. And the virtual silence of the international community in the face of a blatant breach of UN-backed, globally recognised conventional law merely underlines the powerlessness of the rest of the world and the sense of impunity with which the regime is operating.
It is nearly 100 years since the use of chemical weapons was outlawed by the international community. Then it was the League of Nations’
Geneva protocol, a practical response to the horror of the use of chlorine and mustard gas by all sides in the first world war which had left millions of ex-combatants either blind or with lungs so damaged that they were semi-invalids. The protocol never quite lapsed, but during the cold war it was widely ignored. Only in the 1990s was a new treaty drawn up, which unlike the original one outlawed the production and stockpiling of chemical weapons as well as their use. Now backed by more than 160 countries, it is monitored by the Hague-based Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Yet,
as one doctor in Aleppo observed bitterly, using chemical agents without accountability is the new normal in Syria.
Ever since the crossing of President Obama’s red line by the sarin attack in Damascus three years ago, the Assad regime has appeared increasingly confident that it can attack with chemical weapons without fear of reprisal. The UN’s monitors are due to report by November. But the taboo has already been broken, and many hundreds of people are likely to suffer the consequences of this new failure by the international community.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/12/the-guardian-view-on-assads-use-of-chemical-weapons-our-silence-is-shaming