Jonathan Freedland - The slaughter in Syria should outrage us. Yet still we just shrug
Almost anything is more interesting than the massacre of civilians in Syria.
Just look at today’s front pages. The Guardian leads on the slaughter
of unarmed residents in the Damascus suburb of eastern Ghouta, but for
the rest it’s a mix of continuing
scandals in international aid charities, the tax record of
a newly appointed financial regulator, and Brendan off Strictly having an unauthorised
waltz with Camilla.
Against all that, the
bloodbath in eastern Ghouta is deemed too dull to compete. Sure, the government
of Bashar
al-Assad may have pounded the rebel-held area so hard that it killed
194 people in 40 hours, many of them children. It may have targeted seven
hospitals in two days, repeatedly hitting medical workers as they sought to
rescue the injured and dying. And yes, this may signal the escalation of a
siege that has denied supplies to a population of 390,000 for months, squeezing
them between bombardment and starvation. All that may be meticulously
documented by the UN. But who, if we’re honest, gives a damn?
The Guardian has Syria on the front page
today, but there’s no moral high ground here for any of us. This bloodletting
has gone on for seven years now, and for most of that time most of us –
politicians, media, public – have looked the other way. I look back at some of
the things that have exercised me while this murder has continued day after day
– at Donald Trump’s tweets, say, or the twists and turns of Brexit – and I know
I’m part of this global shrug in the face of atrocity.
We should not kid
ourselves. This silence of ours is complicity. The absence of noisy outrage has
been a signal to Assad: keep on doing what you’re doing – no one’s going to
stop you. If I were him, an occasional uptick in condemnation – with an
enlightened Scandinavian denouncing me on the radio, or Unicef issuing a blank statement because
“we no longer have the words to describe children’s suffering” – would be just
fine. Because I would know that this brief flurry of concern would pass, and I
would soon be allowed to return to the killing, just so long as I kept the
daily numbers at a level everyone could safely ignore.
I would have learned
that lesson in April last year, when I crossed the line by using chemical
weapons against the civilians of Idlib province, gassing children, and the only
consequence was a
limited US cruise missile strike on a Syrian airfield. So long as I
wasn’t too blatant, and kept the murder within agreed limits, I would be left
alone.What explains this
global indifference?
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