16 SEPTEMBER 2024
A selection from our latest issue:
- Opportunities for justice
With a new Government in Westminster, Syrians are hoping for a renewal of engagement on justice and accountability. - The atrocity investigator
We talk to Yasmine Nahlawi, head of the Syrian British Consortium’s investigations team. - The problem with containment
Sawsan Abou Zainedin talks about Madaniya, a platform for Syrian civil society organisations. - Speaking from experience
We talk to Waad and Hamza al-Kateab about Action for Sama’s response to collective trauma. - To live in safety
Kinan of Life Seekers Aid, a charity established by asylum seekers and refugees, already sees changes under the new Government.
A responsibility for everyone
Letter from the Editors
Writing in Foreign Affairs last April, David Lammy declared that the failure to enforce a red line against chemical weapons attacks in Syria had “not only entrenched Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s monstrous regime, it also emboldened Russian President Vladimir Putin.”
And the wider failure to protect Syrian civilians — from torture, murder and bombing, starvation sieges and massive forced displacement — all this has contributed to a dangerous and violent radicalisation of politics beyond Syria, of which the recent riots in the UK are just one manifestation.
In our latest issue, we include a discussion on the need for the UK to take action on accountability for war crimes in Syria. Legal cases on Assad regime crimes have been brought in Germany and France, but none in Britain.
The need for a human rights centred approach is fundamental, Yasmine Nahlawi believes. She leads an investigations team reporting on Syrian regime crimes. “Syrian civil society argued from day one for the UK to take a civilian protection approach, but that is not what we saw,” she tells us.
The UK and its allies have followed a strategy of containment towards Syria, explains Sawsan Abou Zainedin of the civil society platform Madaniya. “I really think the Gaza scenario works best to illustrate how dangerous it is to have a containment policy only,” she says.
And containment doesn’t work — people are still fleeing. Kinan, a Syrian refugee, works with the asylum seekers’ charity Life Seekers Aid, and he meets many Syrians amongst the new arrivals. Unless action is taken to make Syrians safe inside Syria, they will keep coming, he tells us.
“Syria is a responsibility for everyone, because what’s going on there doesn’t just affect Syria,” documentary filmmaker Waad al-Kateab says, when we ask her what MPs in the new Parliament need to hear.
“If it’s not in the media anymore, that doesn’t mean it’s not happening,” Dr Hamza Al-Kateab adds. “The same dictatorship, responsible for the same massacres, the same war crimes, it is still there, unaccountable. Accountability has to start somewhere to prevent such war crimes from happening again and again.”
While we all continue to struggle with consequences of the horrors unleashed against Syrians since 2011, the time is well overdue for tackling causes.