West's silence over Syria is 'unacceptable'

By Olivier Bonnel - Beirut

"Let us not forget Syria, a country that has suffered so much from war for so long.”

Those were Pope Francis’ words this Sunday, March 17, at the end of his weekly Angelus prayer.

For almost thirteen years now, Syria has been sinking into poverty, forgotten by the international community. Since 2011 and the Arab Spring uprising, the country has experienced government repression, a terrible civil war, and ISIS terrorism, to which was added the deadly earthquake of February 2023.

The country, governed with an iron fist by the Assad regime, has, over the years, been shunned by the international community. Economic sanctions targeting Damascus, imposed by Western countries, have only exacerbated poverty in the country, which also faces a massive exodus of the youth.

Today, explained Vincent Gélot, Lebanon-Syria director of L'Œuvre d'Orient, in an interview with Vatican News in Beirut, Syrians are exhausted and left with a bitter feeling of being forgotten.

Vincent Gélot in l'Œuvre d'Orient's offices in Beirut

Vincent Gélot, Lebanon-Syria director of L'Œuvre d'Orient:

The situation in Syria is absolutely catastrophic and unacceptable. I have been going there regularly for eight years, and the situation on the ground evokes feelings of sadness, injustice, and revolt because it is a country that is devastated, materially destroyed. Entire metropolises have been reduced to rubble: Raqqa, Deir Ezzor, Aleppo, Homs...

It's a country where there is no reconstruction even though the fighting has sometimes been over for ten years, as is the case in Homs, for example. And the population remains amidst the ruins. 95% of the Syrian population now lives below the poverty line. A large part of this population now lives outside its borders as refugees, while another part is internally displaced.

Syria also lives under sanctions from the United States and the European Union, and people live under a state that is a dictatorship; they are thus crushed by this weight and completely forgotten by their authorities and by the international community.

In this landscape, Christians, like others, have suffered from this war. The Christian minority—because here we are really talking about a minority—has dwindled, and we believe that the Christian community is in danger for decades to come, which worries us enormously.

We are hurt because Syria is the land of Saint Paul, it is Damascus; it is the land of the Incarnation. But also because Christians play an essential role in this country and in other communities as well. And we believe that even if their numbers have dramatically decreased, they paradoxically have an even more important role to play today, a role of openness, a role of reconstruction, not only material reconstruction but also reconciliation.

Hearts must be rebuilt after this fratricidal war that has struck Syria. We see this concretely at L'Œuvre d'Orient, in the projects we support—for instance, the work of the JRS (Jesuit Refugee Service) in certain neighborhoods of Aleppo, which has allowed us, beyond the humanitarian aid provided, to rebuild bridges between people who were on both sides of the front line.

We also see it in the work of the little Sisters of the Sacred Heart, who work in neighborhoods of eastern Ghouta in Damascus, neighborhoods also very affected by the war. There is wonderful work being done. I truly admire all these young Syrians, both young men and young women, who have grown up in war and in appalling conditions.

Q: Do we need to change the way we look at Syria and Syrians today?

I believe that we have forgotten, in all this, the people of Syria. We have thought a lot about politics, about the government, but not about the people who are in the middle of all this and suffering from this situation. Regarding international sanctions, we ask—and we are not alone—that the relevance of sanctions on Syria be reassessed.

We see very well that these sanctions, even if we are told that they are targeted, have an indirect impact on the population. In any city in Syria, you see shortages of bread, gas, and fuel oil; people are forced to queue to access these goods.

Even if poverty is not caused only by these sanctions, we see very well that recent history shows that sanctions on countries do not work: we saw it with Cuba, we saw it with Iraq under Saddam Hussein, we saw it with Iran. It does not work, and it harms populations.

We also see that Syria is, for political reasons, deliberately kept out of humanitarian aid and reconstruction. Most countries do not want to hear about reconstruction in Syria or development, which is absolutely unacceptable and unfair to the population.

We recently saw funds allocated at the time of the earthquake that struck Türkiye but also Syria. We saw the 'double standard' for purely political reasons. A person is vulnerable from a humanitarian point of view, no matter what side of the border they live on. The silence that has settled around Syria is unacceptable, what is happening in Syria is a real blot on our humanity, on our history.

Q: What do the Syrians you meet, Christians or not, say about Westerners?

Syrians, Christians of Syria, but also Syrians in general, have a huge feeling of abandonment. And what is terrible is that today their eyes are turned outward. They see no light at the end of the tunnel. They have nothing: they cannot relate to their state or to any political party.

They have the Church, certainly, but the years of wars that have struck the Middle East since the beginning of the Arab Spring have destabilized the local Eastern Churches. There is also a lack of vision among these Churches themselves; they no longer know what to do to keep all these young people from leaving, nor do they know what to offer them.

That is why we, at L'Œuvre d'Orient, advocate for a rethinking, in a way, of the place and mission that these Christian communities occupy in a Middle East that has experienced an earthquake since the last apostolic exhortation on the Middle East by Benedict XVI.