Syrian Aid Workers Break with UN Relief Effort Over its Assad Ties

"Scores of Syrian non-government humanitarian agencies working in the battered country have suspended their coordination with the United Nations, whose relief efforts, they charge, are controlled by the brutal Bashar Al-Assad regime.

They have also called for an investigation into, among other things, the 'political influence of the Syrian government on humanitarian actors in Damascus,' and creation of a new monitoring body that includes their participation 'to ensure that all Syrians have sufficient and sustained access to aid and that international law is respected.'...

[T]he move is ... an additional embarrassment to the U.N., which has been criticized with increasingly severity for several years for its compliant relationship with the Damascus government. Even an internal U.N. evaluation published earlier this year declared that its Damascus operations are badly fragmented and excessively concerned with its relationship with the regime's....

At bottom, the protest points once again to the essence of the U.N.'s humanitarian challenge in Syria, which is that the world organization's overall approach to relief efforts, while publicly neutral, has been to coordinate first and foremost with the host government-in this case the Assad regime.

As a result, U.N. efforts to provide aid to areas outside regime control have been pallid and intermittent, and usually stymied in Damascus even after the U.N. Security Council passed resolutions mandating cross border shipments to some of the most desperate besieged communities. Permission for those convoys still comes from Damascus, and has been rarely given and often revoked, despite growing international indignation...

The minutes of a U.N. humanitarian coordination meeting earlier this week, obtained by Fox News, show that the Syrian government removed more than 10 tons of medical supplies, including lifesaving equipment intended for children, from two U.N. relief convoys. In one convoy, only 440 pounds of medical supplies, out of 5.3 tons, were allowed through..."