Appeals against the Embargo, a Weapon that is Killing the People

texts translated into English by Alessandra Nucci

An Appeal from Syria : “Please circulate this message so that the world many know what the consequences of the embargo are on my people”.

The embargo imposed on Syria by the United States and Europe to the purpose of ousting its government is plunging the Syrian people, already debilitated by 8 years of war, into a never ending agony. By preventing any fuel from entering this martyred country the West is perilously damaging the daily life of the Syrian people. Buses, taxis and cars are paralyzed to the point that not even students can go to school or college.

The chronically ill, e.g. cancer patients, who come from small towns to get their free treatment in the state-run hospitals of Damascus, miss their appointments because they are unable to arrive due to the paralysis of transportation, due to the lack of fuel (se for example what happened to Fadi’s mother, who was supposed to get treated 4 days ago now).

Syria’s tens of thousands of taxi drivers can no longer support their families; the lack of fuel has even stopped the ambulances, as in the case of Homs.

The “scorched earth” strategy adopted by the United States and by the countries of the European Union against Syria and its people is only increasing the suffering of a people who have been undergoing martyrdom for 8 years now.

A few European newspapers have clearly seen the dire consequences for the Syrian people of the West’s resolve to reinforce the embargo on Syria. The Washington Post has reported the decision of the U.S. Treasury Department to impose sanctions on whatever ship should go to Syria, no matter what its cargo and whatever country it hails from. The upshot is that no one can get anything at all over to us!

Even if medicine and hospitals are not explicitly mentioned in the embargo, these do not reach us anyway because banks in every country are forbidden from doing business with Syrian banks.

Hospitals work at a minimum, there is a scarcity of medicine, chronic patients can no longer be treated, hospital machinery is unusable due to the lack of spare parts, etc ...

According to Britain’s newspaper, The Independent, not even the humanitarian aid associations are able to supply food or medical aid.

Now you can imagine how the Syrians are suffering!

The European Commission for Foreign Affairs believes that the West’s scorched earth strategy is hitting out at random civilians and that the embargo imposed on Syria, to put pressure on the government to get it to change its policies and adopt the ones of the West is wrong-headed because it actually harms the weakest and poorest, and is undeniably destructive and inhuman.

From the outset all the Western media, in the United States and in the European Union, have boasted of having the interests of the Syrian people at heart and of wanting to protect the people’s rights and give them a better life: this has been revealed to be a grandiose and shameful lie, as the reality confronting us is quite the opposite! It is their own policies that are starving the population, made up of innocent and pacific civilians, and are suffocating them more and more as the days go by.

  original article: https://oraprosiria.blogspot.com/2019/04/appello-contro-lembargo-arma-che-uccide.html

AN INTERVIEW WITH THE LATIN BISHOP OF ALEPPO

Msgr Abu Khazen asks for Prayers: “Please pray that the sanctions on Syria be lifted and we be given back our right to live in peace”

   interview by Gian Micalessin

Msgr George Abu Khazen has been Latin bishop of Aleppo since 2014. There he has lived out the most difficult moments of the war together with his flock. Yet – as he explains in this interview with Gian Micalessin, for Sputnik Italia – today the situation is almost worse than when the rebel jihadis and Isis encircled the town.

“The war may be over, or be about to end, but here in Aleppo and in the rest of Syria the weight of the sanctions is becoming unbearable. We lack everything. We Christians, like all Syrians, are living in impossible conditions. Everything, even the most essential things, is rationed. Gas cylinders can be refilled only once every twenty days. Private cars have a right to twenty litres of gasoline every five days… taxi drivers can buy twenty liters every other day. Believe me, the repercussions of this rationing are appalling. Many means of public transport are no longer in circulation and school buses have almost all stopped, so many children, especially the ones that live on the outskirts or in poorer areas of town, are unable to go to class. If you add to all this the enormous rise in cost of living you will understand how difficult the situation is. For the first time in all this we are feeling the weight of the situation to be almost unbearable”.

 “The situation is almost worse than before, because we used to have hope and the will to react. Today instead there is only confusion. While the battle for Aleppo was ongoing, people were motivated, they had an energy within that led them to put up with adversity. Today instead people are tired and depressed… they are losing hope…. They no longer know how things are going to end up”.

- Is it just a matter of sanctions?

Yes, the sanctions are the main obstacle to a return to normal. Syria could be self-sufficient thanks to its oil and gas pits, but these resources are in the North East and that is where the Kurds and the Americans are. The Americans are the main advocates for the economic blockade. They prevent us not only from using our oil and our gas, but also from receiving fuel from other countries. The intervention of Americans and Turks makes everything very confusing, we really don’t know where this is all going to end up.

– But at least there is no more shooting …

 That’s not true either….. around Aleppo the fighting has started up again. There are no big battles but there is shooting going on. Once again we are hearing the bombs, the machine guns, the missiles, every night. At this point the rebels of Jabhat Al Nusra, Syria’s version of Al Qaida, control the entire province of Idlib. So they are practically at the gates of Aleppo. Turkey says it wants to cooperate to send them away, but the truth of the matter is that Turkey is actually their main ally. And since we know the Turks and we know that they are in the habit of promising one thing and then doing something else we are very concerned.

– Has the Christian community come home now that the siege is over?

 No, unfortunately! The Christians who have come home to Aleppo are very few. But what is most worrying is the malaise of the ones who have stayed on. For the first time I am hearing them say “it was a mistake to stay here”. During the war no one ever said anything like that. Now, instead, many are saying so. And not just among the Christians. This is a very bad sign.

– Is there a risk that the presence of Christians never return to be what it was?

We have never lost hope. Not even in the darkest moments of the war have we ever lost hope. To hope is part and parcel of our faith….. so I can’t entertain the thought that Christians may no longer be present here. Our destiny is not in the hands of men but of God. He is our only savior and therefore hope can never and must never be lost.

– Do you feel supported by the Vatican?

We are grateful to the institutions of the Church that help us and to all our benefactors. It is only thanks to them that we manage to support the Christians and many other Syrian brothers and sisters.

– And what about Europe and its countries? Do you get the impression that they have forgotten you?

I actually wish they would forget about us…. Unfortunately they remember us only when they want to strike out at us by imposing the sanctions. Except for Hungary and Poland all the other European countries seem to be bent on hurting us.

– What about Italy?

 Italy should reflect on the consequences of the economic blockade imposed on Syria. Please understand that the sanctions do no hurt the leaders and those high in command in the State, and they don’t halt the importation of arms either. The sanctions only hurt the poor. We Christians don’t care at all about arms. What we care about are the dire straits of the people. What are millions of families with their elderly, their ill and their children to care for guilty of? Why should they suffer? You Italians should realize that the war may be over, but the sanctions willed by the Americans make our life more and more difficult. Our message to the Italians is one alone “Pray that the sanctions be lifted and that we be given back our right to live in peace”.

– But surely there must be someone helping you?

Russia alone has always helped us out. It is only thanks to Moscow that the jihadis have not taken over all of Syria. Only thanks to Russia are there peace talks going on.

FROM THE TRAPPIST NUNS OF AZEIR- SYRIA:

"I also wanted to tell you a little bit about the sanctions now that we are once again approaching a new vote on whether or not to renew the sanctions. I would like to let you know how hard they bear down on us, because it is the first time in all these years that we are seeing people really dejected. The renewed sanctions really hurt. There is no methane gas, no gasoline, no diesel fuel, and in our region, which is mainly  farmland, after the people grow their crops they find to their dismay that they have no means of taking them to Damascus or to market. Everything is  paralyzed, all our little activities. Many things  even today  are preserved thanks to ice, but those who produce ice can't make any because there is no electricity to run the freezers on nor gasoline to take the blocks of ice to customers. 

It's all like this. ..... Same thing with bread. Bread is rationed because ovens run on diesel .... As I said, the situation is really appalling and people are truly discouraged. Never until today had we heard people saying "we wish we had left!"

These voices are not listened to in the upper spheres.

What war was unable to obtain is now being obtained by wearing people out: I think we should react, because everything is getting so difficult, there is  no gas....

Here we are able to cook because we've got solar panels, which run our electric burner and the women of the village come over to cook at our place on our electric burner, but how can the country ever start up again, under such heavy harassment? There are drafted army recruits in Homs who can't come home in between shifts because there are no buses. People who have to go and get something can't find a car, or even if they can, the gasoline is so expensive that they give up on the idea of moving anywhere. This way work too becomes harder and more costly. Merchandise triples in price. Truly the situation is unbearable."  

     

 By Sister Martha

 original article: https://oraprosiria.blogspot.com/2019/04/monsignor-abu-khazen-agli-italiani.html

Christian voices speak from Aleppo

Thank you to Catholic World Report for this excellent article, which manages to clear up what is going on.Just one remark: to be precise, the looting of Aleppo’s factories is not attested to only by the government but also by the people, and first and foremost by the manufacturers of Aleppo, whose equipment eventually turned up in Turkey.   OraproSiria

CWR,  September 08, 2016 
Alessandra Nucci 

The war in Syria is in its fifth year and is now almost entirely focused on once-beautiful Aleppo, the country’s biggest city, and—before the war—also the biggest manufacturing center of the Middle East.  According to Aid to the Church in Need, before the war there were well over a million Christians in Syria. Today they are about 400,000. These survivors tell ACN that their towns, homes, and churches have been destroyed by ISIS.

Targeted from the very outset by opposition forces as a key area to take over in order to cripple the Syrian economy and hasten the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad, Aleppo’s factories were looted early on and emptied of their machinery, which was sent to Turkey, never to be seen again, according to the Syrian government.

In Aleppo, Syria’s mini-world war by proxy may at last be in its final stage, as the Syrian army, which holds the west of the city, is fighting to root out the last bastion of the opposition formations entrenched in the eastern part of the city.

At least, this is the picture one gets from Catholic and Christian Syrians. 

One enormous problem lies in the identity of the insurgents, which Western powers and media continue to lump together as “rebel groups,” despite the fact that even the US State Department has admitted that al-Nusra (the name that al-Qaeda goes by in Syria) “is present among the fighters in Aleppo,” where “there is an intermingling of the groups.” Over the years this “intermingling” of the rebel factions with cutthroat formations that are officially termed terrorists by both the US and by the UN has radically changed the make-up of the insurgency.

A recent report in the Financial Times regarding the weeks-long siege on Aleppo adds another complicating element. “The offensive against President Bashar al-Assad’s troops may have had more foreign help than it appears,” the report states. “Activists and rebels say opposition forces were replenished with new weapons, cash and other supplies,” ferried in for weeks by regional backers, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, across Turkey’s border with Syria.

“This assistance occurred in spite of the fact that the rebel offensive—dubbed ‘the great Aleppo battle’—has been led and organized by Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, a jihadi group formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra.  Some rebels claim that US officials supporting moderate rebel forces intentionally turned a blind eye to Fatah al-Sham’s participation in the offensive to ensure that the opposition maintains a foothold in Aleppo.”

According to Dr. Nabil Antaki, a Syrian Marist missionary working as a physician at St. Luke’s Hospital in West Aleppo, only a small percentage of the rebel forces are “the democratic opposition”; the majority, he claims, are now “terrorist groups intent on establishing an Islamic state.”

“In the course of time these [moderate] groups have been absorbed by the terrorist groups, which currently represent over 95 percent of the hundreds of armed opposition groups present in Syria,” Dr. Antaki says. “Therefore the [West-supported] Free Syrian Army and the opposition—which are not terrorists, but are nonetheless armed—represent a mere 5 percent of the armed groups, the rest all being terrorists.”

Dr. Antaki believes that some of the rebel groups not currently classified as terrorists by the international community do, in fact, match the definition of terrorist groups. “The main [terrorist groups]—Daesh [ISIS] and al-Nusra—have been added to the official list of ‘terrorists’ by the United States and by Russia, so that everyone has the right to target them from the air. However, there are also other groups that come from al-Nusra and are not yet classified as terrorists; among them are three main groups, Jaish al Islam [Army of Islam], Ahrar al Sham, and Jaish al Fatah [Army of Conquest]. These three have been created by al-Nusra itself, in order to wriggle out of the list of terrorists,” Dr. Antaki says.

In the context of the battle for Aleppo, this translates into reports that the Syrian army is “setting siege to Aleppo,” reports that often disregard the fact that civilians in large numbers have fled to West Aleppo, which is controlled by the Syrian regime and which is home to 1.5 million people, and away from East Aleppo, the inhabitants of which have been reduced to only a fifth of that number while under rebel control.

In the words of Dr. Antaki: “A few months ago the Syrian army went on the offensive to bring some relief to Aleppo, which has been surrounded and besieged for the past three years. But according to the Western media, it was the Syrian army that was setting siege to the Syrian people in Aleppo, while in fact the opposite was true—the Syrian army was trying to put a halt to the three years of terrorist siege of the city. The people are not afraid of the Syrian army, they are afraid of the terrorists.”

“When we cry out for help for Aleppo,” he explains, “it gets transformed into a cry for East Aleppo. So when the media announced that the last pediatrician of Aleppo had been killed, well, it’s not true, because in West Aleppo there are about 100 pediatricians. Perhaps that was the last pediatrician in the other area, I have no idea, I have no information, but what I do know is that the inhabitants of the Eastern section live under the control of the terrorists.”

For many inside Aleppo, the international coalition of 60 countries that President Obama vowed would “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS appears to be dragging its feet. According to the US Department of Defense, as of July 26, 2016, the international coalition had carried out 14,093 air strikes since September 2014, which amounts to an average of a little over 21 airstrikes per day. Russia’s intervention in support of the Syrian government, starting on September 30, 2015, registered in its first 107 days 5,662 raids and the launch of 97 missiles against ISIS and other jihadi targets.

“When it was the Americans who were doing the bombing, the Islamic State kept expanding, eventually occupying up to 50 percent of the territory,” Msgr. Georges Abou Khazen, apostolic vicar of Aleppo, said in a recent interview with Italy’s Il Giornale. “It was only when the Russians stepped in and started bombing that ISIS finally started to withdraw. Let me say it …One can have serious doubts about the role played by the Americans.” 

“Before the Russians stepped in to help the Syrian government, the rebel bombs rained on the city of Aleppo,” Msgr. Khazen continued. “We lacked running water for two months, and electricity for six. Today, instead, everything is at last going back to normal. Who would you expect us to support? The Al- Nusra rebels and their ISIS allies, or the Russians?”.

Another Catholic voice out of Aleppo is Sister Maria de Guadalupe, a missionary sister of the Argentinian Institute of the Word Incarnate, an order accustomed to bringing the word of God to some of the most dangerous places in the world. During a brief visit to Chile last December she reported that “in these last few months, with the Russian intervention in the war in support of the Syrian national army, there has been positive progress in Aleppo, because for the first time we witnessed the Islamic State withdraw and cities being recovered.” Although the situation is still dramatic, “in the last few weeks we’ve seen the army succeed in reconquering some very important neighborhoods, and above all the Christian ones, which in the past few months had been ridden by gun fire,” Sister Maria continued. “This success has led ISIS to intensify its attacks and guerrilla warfare. In the same way, every military advance of the army is accompanied by an intensification of the rebel attacks.”

A recent controversy regarding the city and its inhabitants centers around the UN’s demand in August for a few hours’ ceasefire to allow the passage of food and medical aid to the area under the control of the terrorists. Father Ibrahim Alsabagh, a Franciscan pastor and keeper of the Latin parish of St. Francis in Aleppo, was interviewed on Italian radio about the truce. Asked whether the ceasefire was being respected, Father Ibrahim, whose parish is in the part of town safeguarded by the Syrian army, responded: “What we hear is that this truce works in one area, where there is respect and the foodstuffs have been brought in. But there is another problem…. Just as along with real refugees to Europe there are many in disguise who enter with the intention of killing people and triggering explosions among the civilians, so too our fear is that along with these food supplies may come new weapons for the militias that hide among the civilians.”

“Our experience,” Father Ibrahim continued, “is that every time they open ‘humanitarian corridors’ from the east to the west, along come people with bombs who blow themselves up in areas which had become safe. So on the one hand there is a need to get the necessities of life to the civilians trapped on the other side, but it must be made clear to all involved that they must not use the suffering of innocent people as a banner to speak of peace, when they actually mean to work for the opposite. What we need is a real peace agreement, not a three or forty-eight hour truce.” 

http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Blog/5038/christian_voices_speak_from_aleppo.aspx

A candid look at Syria, the land of Saint Paul, today

The Arab Springtime is a Nightmare for Syrian Christians

the ancient Sanctuary of St. Elias devastated

CWR - July 23, 2013

di Alessandra Nucci 

Middle Eastern Christians decry how Western media misrepresent the increasingly violent events in Syria

After two years of “Arab Spring” rebellion, the 2,000-year-old community of Assyrian Christians—some of whom still pray in Jesus’ Aramaic tongue—is facing extinction, and the international media is complicit.

Now that Syria is in shambles—with an estimated 93,000 dead, 1.5 million refugees, and 4.5 million internally displaced; ancient churches torched, destroyed, or vandalized; Christians targeted for murder and kidnapping and even used as human shields—now the mainstream media is starting to admit that, yes, the rebel forces appear to include quite a few Islamist guerrillas .....
  Please read: 
http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/2440/the_arab_springtime_is_a_nightmare_for_syrian_christians.aspx#.UfAZsNLwkRI 

Quello che sostengono controcorrente le comunità religiose presenti nel paese

Se vincono i rivoltosi per i cristiani ci sarà solo la fuga

di Alessandra Nucci

Il popolo siriano è con Assad, l'esercito non massacra i civili bensì li difende dalle bande armate e a soffiare sul fuoco sono i grandi media stranieri, arabi e occidentali, che falsificano i dati. Questa lettura alla rovescia della crisi siriana viene da fonti laiche, come la Rete Voltaire”,  ma anche da religiosi cristiani all’interno del Paese.

“L’80 per cento della popolazione è con il governo, come lo sono tutti i cristiani,” stima il vescovo caldeo di Aleppo, Mons Antoine Audo, gesuita, che ha accusato senza mezzi termini i grandi media, fra cui  la BBC e Al-Jazeera, di reportage non obiettivi e critiche ingiuste al regime di Assad.

Anche madre Agnès-Mariam de la Croix, superiora delle carmelitane del Monastero di Saint Jacques le Sulcis, che si trova in un villaggio a 90 km da Homs, sottolinea il divario fra la realtà sperimentata dalla popolazione e quella sposata dai grossi media internazionali. Questi presentano come una insurrezione popolare quello che i siriani e le televisioni locali conoscono come un tentativo di sovversione istigato da forze in gran parte estranee al paese. 

La religiosa ha fornito una serie di cronache dettagliate, a partire dall’aprile 2011 che sono state tradotte in inglese, arabo e italiano, ospitate su siti web di Francia, Italia, Belgio, Svizzera, Libano, Stati Uniti, Canada, Palestina, Syria, Israele e Africa del Nord.

“Qualsiasi cosa viene offerta su questo mercato derisorio dell’informazione,” ha scritto madre Agnès. Un esempio fra i tanti, il video realizzato da giovani siriani per promuovere una canzone araba. Vi appare una banda di giovani vestiti di nero che viaggiano armati su delle vetture decapottabili stile agenti di security. “Con nostro grande stupore lo stesso video è comparso su al-Jazeerah come prova dell’arroganza dei servizi segreti siriani.”

La fonte delle accuse a senso unico è una sola, concordano cattolici e Rete Voltaire: si chiama “Osservatorio siriano dei diritti dell’uomo”, e ha sede a Londra. Per stabilire chi ha ragione si chiamano in causa i testimoni oculari. Rete Voltaire ricorda le manifestazioni alla presenza degli osservatori inviati dalla Lega araba: in tutto, secondo i giornali locali, a Homs sono scesi in piazza 3500 persone  per protestare contro il regime,  mentre oltre 100.000 si sono attivati a sostegno del Presidente al-Assad. E secondo l’Osservatorio di Londra? Nessuno a favore di Assad, 250.000 contro.

In questa situazione i siriani sul terreno hanno fatto vari tentativi per farsi prendere in considerazione dai grandi media, escludendo la possibilità di uno scambio di numeri. Fra questi una manifestazione in giugno in cui centinaia di migliaia di persone (secondo le fonti governative) tenevano per i bordi una bandiera siriana larga 18 metri e lunga oltre due chilometri (2.300 metri).

La Siria rimane uno dei Paesi del vicino Oriente in cui la libertà, compresa quella  religiosa, è relativamente bene assicurata. Quello che inquieta l’Occidente è che a Damasco hanno sede Hezbollah, che coltiva legami stretti con l’Iran, e l’ufficio politico di Hamas. Tuttavia, sostiene Madre Agnès, le grandi potenze giocano sul fondamentalismo religioso per mettere in risalto le differenze che separano, mentre i punti che uniscono sono molto più numerosi. “Per noi è uno spaesamento surreale la posizione di certi paesi: non siamo abituati a una Francia bellicosa, che favorisca l’estremismo e risusciti i vecchi demoni delle divisioni confessionali. La stessa sorpresa dagli Stati Uniti. Non hanno invaso l’Afghanistan per disfarsi di Al Qaeda ? Come possiamo vedere i fondamentalisti più feroci sollecitare l’aiuto degli USA? È il mondo all’incontrario.”

“Che cosa cerca l’Occidente? – si domanda la religiosa - La libertà o il fondamentalismo islamico? Oppure la libertà del fondamentalismo?”

Dopo il veto posto in Consiglio di Sicurezza da Russia e Cina a una risoluzione di condanna verso Damasco,  il Segretario Generale dell’ONU, Ban Ki Moon, ha annunciato che ritorneranno gli osservatori della Lega araba.

Italia Oggi Numero 036 pag. 13 del 11/2/2012