Press Release: Doctors Without Borders on Siege and Starvation in Madaya

[Google map image showing Madaya with respect to Damascus as well as border with Lebanon] [Google map image showing Madaya with respect to Damascus as well as border with Lebanon]

Press Release: Doctors Without Borders on Siege and Starvation in Madaya

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following press release on the seige of Madaya, Syria was issued by Doctors Without Borders on 7 January 2016 and updated on 8 January 2016]

Syria: Seige and Starvation in Madaya

8 January Update:

The MSF-supported medics in Madaya have identified 250 people with severe acute malnutrition, including 10 patients who are in immediate need of lifesaving hospitalization.

The number of people in need of medical care is growing. If a safe medical evacuation procedure can be agreed, such as the rare UN- or ICRC-brokered deals that have occasionally been achieved in other besieged areas, MSF will be prepared to facilitate the identification of patients in need of evacuation at that time.

7 January Press Release

BRUSSELS—Syrian government forces have laid siege for months to the town of Madaya, in Syria’s Rural Damascus Governorate, depriving roughly 20,000 residents of food and medicine and causing death by starvation, the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said today, calling for an immediate delivery of lifesaving medicine and medical evacuations, in addition to food supplies.

Since a single food distribution on October 18, the siege has tightened into a complete stranglehold. Twenty-three patients have died of starvation at an MSF-supported health center in Madaya since December 1.

"Madaya is now effectively an open-air prison for an estimated 20,000 people, including infants, children, and elderly,” said Brice de le Vingne, MSF director of operations. "The medics we support report injuries and deaths by bullets and landmines among people that tried to leave Madaya. The desperation is so acute that yesterday people rioted trying to seize the last food available at an MSF-supported distribution point, which was intended to provide for the most vulnerable."

Six of those who died of starvation at the MSF-supported center were infants under one year old, and five were adults over 60 years old. Eighteen were male and five were female. MSF is extremely alarmed for the patients currently under treatment, and for the 20,000 residents who have had little to eat for months.

"This is a clear example of the consequences of using siege as a military strategy," de le Vingne said. "Now that the siege has tightened, the doctors we support have empty pharmacy shelves and increasing lines of starving and sick patients to treat. Medics are even resorting to feeding severely malnourished children with medical syrups, as they are the only source of sugar and energy, thereby accelerating the consumption of the few remaining medical supplies."

The situation in Madaya is an extreme example of sieges that are in place in many parts of Syria, enforced by both the Syrian government and by armed opposition groups.

MSF has been supporting a medical facility and a food distribution point in Madaya since August 2015, when the siege started tightening around the town. Although difficult, at first it was still possible to supply food and medicines, but it has since become totally impossible to get anything through the siege lines.

Below-freezing temperatures in this mountainous area are increasing the suffering, particularly for sick patients. Heating fuel must be included in aid to Madaya, as people trying to collect firewood are at risk of landmines and gunfire.

While there are reports that the Syrian government will now allow food supplies into the area, medical needs are also critical. Local medical staff are working under unbearable conditions, which are now exacerbated by food insecurity. MSF calls for an immediate medical evacuation of sick patients to a safe place for treatment and for immediate and sustained access to lifesaving medical supplies for the civilian population in Madaya. 

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412