Remarks by Ambassador Samantha Power at a UN Security Council Emergency Session on Aleppo

Thank you, Special Envoy de Mistura, Under-Secretary-General O’Brien, Mr. Cappelaere, for your appropriately grim briefings. Like my British colleague, I’d like to respond to Under-Secretary-General O’Brien’s question, which he said is posed to him wherever he goes, whether in Syria or in the region, or meeting with citizens or politicians: why can the Security Council not come together to find a solution? I have to say, we grapple with a lot of really difficult questions; that is not one of them. It is very straightforward and very unfortunate fact that the Security Council does not come together to answer the cries of the civilians that we have heard about again today, because Russia – a permanent member – doesn’t want to. That’s it. It’s very straightforward.

The words we are hearing out of eastern Aleppo now are as dark as any that we’ve heard in our lifetimes. “A death trip.” That is what civilians are calling their journey to flee eastern Aleppo, according to a teacher who – as of yesterday – had decided to stay there.

According to the Red Cross, 20,000 people have fled eastern Aleppo just since Saturday. Twenty thousand people in four days – on a “death trip.”
One fleeing woman was seen pushing along a wheelchair with her dead mother in it. She told a reporter, “My mother died of hunger,” and said that they had almost nothing to eat for five months.

In another part of the city, amateur footage showed stray body parts scattered among debris, where an airstrike had reportedly just killed at least 20 people. Survivors wept over the remains.

Planes – Syrian government planes – take brief breaks from bombing runs to blanket eastern Aleppo with leaflets. We’ve talked about leaflets here before, but one of the leaflets dropped a few days ago reportedly read: “Don’t be dumb, think about yourselves and your families. Victory is coming for the Syrian Arab Army, think quickly because time is passing and it’s not on your side.”

We all know time is not on the side of the civilians trapped in eastern Aleppo. The longer the bombing raids go on and the greater their intensity, the higher the odds that they or someone they love will be maimed or killed. But leaving carries extraordinary risks, such as being detained or disappeared by regime soldiers, or killed on the “death trip” itself, where snipers are having a field day, it seems.

I would ask Council members and all citizens of the world to just force yourself to a take a break from your day and watch the images from eastern Aleppo. Parents cradling their children in agony, civilians on foot mowed down literally carrying their suitcases, which then lay beside their lifeless bodies. You will likely hear from the representatives of Syria and the Russian Federation today that these images are made up, that they are propaganda. This has been an argument we’ve been hearing at the last few sessions. Now, I have to acknowledge that both the Syrian government and the Russian government have significant expertise in making things up. They are great authorities, in general, on propaganda. But we have to recognize they have an interest in trying to create a post-truth world, where all facts are contested. Where there is no truth, just one man’s claim or one country’s claim or one party’s claim against another.

Syria and Russia, as they lie and as they kill civilians in Syria, count on there being no referee; no referee who will adjudicate facts – truth – on the one hand, from lies and falsehoods and fiction on the other. That is their gamble. But we have referees. The UN briefers we just heard from are our referees. They have no interest in doing anything other than calling it as it is. They are independent, they are humanitarians. The carnage is a fact, it is a truth, and it is now. The 14,000 terrified civilians, some completely hysterical, who have been driven into government-held territory – under gunfire, under airstrike attack – are also our referees. Endless numbers of authenticated photos and videos of man-made slaughter are our referees. There is no denying the truth and the facts, not even in “upside-down land,” which the perpetrators of this slaughter inhabit.

For months since the siege of eastern Aleppo began, we’ve met in this Council to demand the basics: we’ve called for the Assad regime and Russia to allow unfettered humanitarian access to the Syrians in the city, for them to stop systematically bombing the city’s hospitals, schools, markets, and the bases of the first responders. These are appeals that the Security Council should not even have to request, should not ever have to request. The Council should not have to demand compliance with international humanitarian laws or our prior resolutions. Yet here we are, urging two Member States of the United Nations – one of which holds a permanent seat on this Council – to abide by these basic standards, to stop ripping up the rule books, which is going to have effects way beyond Syria, for our children and our grandchildren.

When it seemed impossible to imagine a more horrific situation, in fact, the crisis got worse. The past five days have witnessed one of the most extreme bombardments of civilian areas in the entire life of the conflict, ravaging what was left in the once majestic eastern part of Aleppo. The objective is simple: to take eastern Aleppo by force, with no regard for the consequences it may have for innocent civilians. We are all in the “broken record club.” We are all broken records on this Council, including those who are actively involved in carrying out the siege of Aleppo, in saying that there is no military solution to this brutal conflict and that the only way out is a political solution. But this is pabulum. The regime and Russia believe the opposite, they are pursuing their approach. They are strategic, they are following a blueprint. They believe in a military solution. The choice they are giving civilians is explicit – the same choice they included in a previous leaflet: leave or be annihilated.

For those who choose to leave, the regime and its Russian allies have promised residents of eastern Aleppo passage through so-called “safe” routes. We will, I’m sure, hear more about these routes today. And if Syrian and Russian propaganda is any predictor – we may hear how civilians, upon escaping, are embracing regime forces as liberators. Do they really expect us to believe that civilians who have been starved and not received a morsel of food since July, barrel-bombed, mortared, picked off by snipers, and threatened with annihilation are likely to meet the people responsible for these horrors as their saviors? Is that how it works? Is that how any of us would feel, would act?

The reason people are fleeing by the thousands is not because they trust a regime that has killed hundreds of thousands of its own people, and systematically tortured tens of thousands more Syrians in its gulags, tagging the bodies of those it kills with serial numbers. No. It is because they know there is a good chance they will be pulverized if they stay where they are.

As we all know, and as others have already argued here persuasively already today, Egypt, Spain, and New Zealand have introduced a resolution that would require an immediate halt to military action in Aleppo for a minimum of 10 days. If implemented, this would give the civilians of eastern Aleppo a brief break from the relentless bombardment. It would allow some aid to reach people who are surviving by digging through the trash for scraps and by eating weeds. It would allow orderly departure facilitated by the UN. It would also get at least some medicine to doctors who have been compelled to operate on patients without anesthetics, sometimes in the middle of the street alongside their bombed out hospitals and clinics. This resolution should be brought to a vote without delay. And it should be adopted with the Council’s unanimous support. This is a no brainer. Anyone who tells you otherwise does not have the survival of Syrian civilians at heart.

But let us also be real. While any pause in the butchery that we are witnessing in eastern Aleppo would be welcome – and we are for it – a brief pause to get a bit of food and medicine in before the savage bombing resumes is not a solution. It is barely even a band-aid. And it is a sign, in some ways, of just how low our bar has become.

Russia may again use its veto to prevent this Council from offering help to the desperate civilians in eastern Aleppo – as it did in October. If it does so, placing its military aims over the survival of Syrian men, women, and children, Member States must swiftly consider the other tools we can employ at the UN – including through the General Assembly – to apply more effective pressure.

Let me conclude. Umm Leen is a mother of seven kids in eastern Aleppo. She has already lost one child during the war – her 12-year-old boy – who was killed when his heart was pierced by shrapnel. In the midst of the siege now, she worries she will lose more. Her daughter is beset with an awful cough, but there is nowhere to take her since the children’s hospital was bombed. But her sickest is her youngest child – a baby she had during the siege, who is now just three months old. The baby has been dogged by serious health problems since he was born prematurely; he is grossly underweight and routinely has difficulty breathing. Without access to baby formula, Umm Leen has taken to feeding him ground up rice.

When parents in Aleppo have a new baby, Umm Leen said, “Some believe they are making up for the children they have lost. But for me, in these conditions, I think it’s a huge mistake. After I gave birth to him, I felt so sad. Did I give birth to him to see a life like this?”

This is what it is to be a parent in eastern Aleppo – where mothers and fathers live in perpetual fear that their children will be taken from them – whether by the flash of a barrel bomb, or the slow, gnawing attrition of illness and starvation – man-made illness and starvation.

This Council must not stand by as more and more children like Umm Leen’s hang in the balance. A pause is the absolute least we can do, but we can and must do better than a pause. We must continue to work to end to this conflict. An end not by the devastating military means that the Assad regime and Russia are intent on pursuing, which will only prolong and deepen the suffering we are now witnessing. I thank you.

###