The devastating, current day conflict in Syria and the violent siege of the Yugoslav wars from the 1990s, sadly, have a lot in common.
Aleppo, Syria, is about to enter the expanding global dictionary of shame. The Syrian city and its population are on the brink of becoming an annihilated ruin. One of Aleppo’s greatest casualties will be the foreign-policy reputation of the Obama presidency.
It’s not merely that the United States government has done so little directly to help the Syrian rebels. The more fundamental failure is that Mr. Obama has refused to permit the arming of people who are willing to fight on their own behalf against a dictator committed to the mass slaughter of innocent civilians.
Aleppo has become a classic siege. The city, and everything living or standing inside of it, has been under indiscriminate bombardment since late 2015 by missiles and barrel bombs dropped on neighborhoods.
All this has been rained down on Aleppo by the Syrian air force of Bashar Hafez al-Assad, the current President of Syria, in synchronization with President Vladimir Putin’s Russian bombers. With supply lines from Turkey cut off, Aleppo has been in a state of siege since the Syrian war began back in 2011, unable to receive food or medical supplies. Most of Aleppo’s hospitals have been bombed to ruins, and not many doctors remain. Three of its four main water-pumping stations are destroyed.
The Syrian conflict has killed nearly a half-million people and created 4.8 million refugees, but the number is still rising.
The civilized world, which might be defined as people who aren’t living daily with aerial bombardments, passed through this moral hell as recently as the early 1990s. The U.S. president was Bill Clinton.
The names of the two besieged cities that transfixed the world then were Dubrovnik (Croatia) and Sarajevo (Bosnia & Herzegovina), both in the former Yugoslavia. The mass murderer directing their destruction was Slobodan Milosevic, the nationalist president of Serbia.
Things being what they are now, most millennial voters likely don’t recall much about these haunted places in the Balkans. Still, their history is worth telling.
The siege and shelling of Dubrovnik, a beautiful and historic city in Croatia on the Dalmatian coast, ran from October 1991 to the following June. The siege of Sarajevo lasted four years until 1996. Both sieges resulted in the deaths of 140,000 people.
It is hard to overstate how the sieges of Dubrovnik and Sarajevo transfixed the world—in part because electronic media put their flames and rubble on view constantly but mainly because no Western nation was doing a thing to stop it. That war’s entry into the dictionary of shame was “ethnic cleansing.”
The fall of Yugoslavia, the sieges of Dubrovnik and Sarajevo isolated its inhabitants from the rest of the world which made people lose hope that anyone was coming to save them.
They felt abandoned, just like the people of Aleppo.
Now, with the world watching Aleppo burn, Daraya fall, and Idlib and other Syrian cities suffer so brutally, Pope Francis’s description of Syria as “abandoned and beloved” rings chillingly accurate. After Bosnia, everyone was sure the international community would never again stand by and watch in silence as hundreds of thousands of people were bombed relentlessly, starved, beaten, traumatized, and denied the most basic human rights, including education and medical facilities. But we were all wrong.
But, to stay on the more positive side, former Yugoslavia and the countries that belonged to it, repaired themselves, the wounds are still there but they are healing, just like Aleppo would. But the Syria they knew will never be again, and their homes will be impossible to find. Like Yugoslavia, it was so much easier to rip the country apart than it will be to put it back together. The beloved, abandoned country can now only live on hope.
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