00:00 Shahnawaz Khan: I'm Dr Abbas Khan's younger brother. The reason why I'm mainly here today is [that] my brother's plight kind of encapsulates the worsening situation in terms of humanitarian assistance to Syria.
00:00 For those who don't know, Abbas travelled to Syria first in August 2012, and he returned after two weeks from the Turkish–Syrian border. And he saw the harrowing pictures of children with limbs amputated, with basic assistance not available to them. And contrary to what many people think, there are resources over there; there simply isn't the manpower to deliver it, or the expertise.
00:32 And when he returned he decided to try and democratise the knowledge that he had, by translating trauma manuals into Arabic, getting together a lot of medical equipment and roadside medical assistance — I don't know if any of you have seen the videos that he had outlining exactly what was in those medical kits.
01:05 He then travelled in November 2012 back to Turkey, and he was working in some of the refugee camps. And the main hospital [in Aleppo] [?] was bombed, and a lot of the refugees were streaming across the border, and they were recounting these tragic events of innocent individuals with relatively simple conditions dying in the streets.
01:36 To give you a statistic: there were close to two thousand general surgeons in Aleppo, the second city of Syria, at the start of the crisis. And when my brother travelled there, there were about fifteen — for the second biggest city. That's the amount they usually get in one hospital here in London.
02:07 He reached Aleppo on the 20th of November and was operating there in different field hospitals for about forty-eight hours, at which point he was detained at a security checkpoint by the Syrian regime, and then transported to Damascus, where we were unaware of his location for about eight months. It's come to light now that he was subjected to significant torture through the whole period of time, without trial or due process.
02:37 The only charges that they were willing to levy on him were, one, that it was illegal entry; and two, mending the bones of civilians in rebel-held areas. So this was made a crime. This only came to light, though, because my mother managed to travel to Syria in July — straight [after, in] August [?] — she managed to track him down, and found him emaciated and obviously subject to significant brutality during his detention.
03:10 The reason why his plight is important is because we had managed, against the assistance of the British government, to arrange his release, and some politicians were going to travel from here to go and get him [?]. And there was a decision taken, at the end of December last year, for whatever reason, within the Syrian government, that my brother be summarily executed. And he was found hanged in his cell on December the 18th.
03:40 But what it really represents — and why the tragedy extends beyond him himself — is [that] from the start of the crisis to where we are now, giving humanitarian assistance has been made a crime. Aid workers have been protected in the Geneva Conventions since 1949; those were changed and adopted again in the late 1970s. In 2003 the UN made it a war crime for any individual found [involved] in the killing or murder of aid workers.
04:12 The policies of the Syrian government have been to criminalise humanitarian assistance, and the message that's sending out is that the individuals afflicted by the conflict do not have the right to that basic assistance. They have been dehumanised in effect. By allowing corridors of humanitarian access you acknowledge the fundamental right of those individuals to exist, to have access to health care, food, sanitation and so forth. By denying that you effectively send out a message saying these people have no rights whatsoever, and until they conform with whatever policy or viewpoint that we hold, we will withhold their humanity.
05:14 And since I've been involved in my brother's case over the last thirteen months, we've come in touch with many individuals who were actually part of the rebel movement in Syria — and the regime in Syria is releasing those individuals, which seems rather bizarre, and they're holding the professionals: the engineers, the doctors, the lay people who are offering assistance. And that seems somewhat counterintuitive.
05:45 The reason why they're doing that is [that] some of the resistance movements have lost a lot of their support and momentum, and so, in internal bickering, they're taking care of themselves. The people that shore up that resistance are the professionals — so the people in this room, and those individuals like my brother who take it upon themselves to travel up to Syria and support [the] cause. They become pillars. And when you scare individuals from doing such activities, when you make their death public [?], then that sends out a shock wave throughout the system [and] those pillars start to fall. So it's not just the death of my brother that's important here; it's the reverberations that's having across the region.
06:48 The other thing that makes it extremely important is that it sets a very dangerous precedent: that if this regime is able to exist by adopting such policies, then it's not a far step of imagination that other leaders around the world who choose to rule their countries through brutalising the population will adopt the same position.
07:20 And therefore — aid workers historically have been able not only to give assistance but have also been able to broker a peace, and certainly a ceasefire. What we found when we were trying to get my brother released [was] — we approached every aid organisation possible in Syria, and my mother went to Damascus herself and met the head of the International Red Cross there; she met with Lakhdar Brahimi, who's the UN mediator. And what was startling was that these individuals had no power. The International Red Cross has to work through inconspicuous means, because they simply weren't safe. Médecins Sans Frontières were working in a similar fashion, and they weren't really able to offer any assistance because they couldn't guarantee the safety of their own individuals, let alone anyone else.
07:52 If you look at the report that was released by *The Guardian* and was commissioned by the Qatari government, on the torture of individuals — a number of those that were documented there were journalists who were reporting the tragedy in Syria, doctors, lawyers. These were individuals who weren't particularly involved in the fighting; they were just trying to make the world aware of the devastating situation going on there, and they were held.
08:22 And my brother was held in a place called Far' Falastin [?], which is a notorious prison in Syria. It's where the American government has rendered individuals to. It's a particularly dark and dank [?] place. And these weren't individuals involved in the fighting.
08:54 The other problem is that — so, when I came back from Geneva — backing from nations such as ourselves and the Western powers is starting to dwindle, and they're unsure of who to back in the crisis. And as a number of individuals in this room start to become more and more frightened by the situation that's unfolding in Syria, then that dithering would increase, because people don't know where to put their support.
09:26 We have a particularly hawkish government at the moment, and certain individuals who have gone across have not been allowed to come back to this country as British citizens, which is an astounding state of affairs. Certainly when we were approaching the British government ourselves, my brother's bona fides were immediately questioned: was he genuinely there for humanitarian assistance?
09:59 So we have a situation whereby the Syrians have criminalised humanitarian assistance, and where the Western powers, who the Syrians are looking to for assistance, are questioning those individuals delivering the care. Now that is a deep, dark place. You're [between] a rock and a very hard place. And how you get out of that is through meetings such as this.
10:30 We've taken it upon ourselves — and we're just a simple family — that we will try and get my brother justice, because it shows the people of Syria that, as the previous speaker just mentioned, the laws that we have and hold dear, and that have been fought for over the last hundred years, are not just words on a piece of paper; and [that] those individuals that seek to transgress those laws will be held to account.
11:01 So in my brother's case I went to find out, from members of the regime, who was involved in his detention. Unfortunately we do not have much assistance coming from our own government or the Western powers in getting that. Once that is established, then a war crime is noted, and my brother's case can be a test case for taking other individuals within the Syrian regime to the International Criminal Court. And that has to happen. The world has to see that you cannot go around brutalising vast swathes of your population and get away with it, because it sends out the wrong type of message.
11:33 [If] the world is willing to stand by and watch while millions of innocent individuals starve to death — and certainly my mother, who's been here since she was seventeen, in London, and never really left the country: when she went to Damascus she found people dying in the street from hunger, not because there was a shortage of bread, simply because the government would not allow that bread to be given out. So they were dying while seeing the bread in front of their eyes. This is a horrific state of affairs for the times that we live in.
12:05 So I'm really here just to show an example of the policies being adopted by the regime, and [of how] by the somewhat laissez-faire attitude that's been adopted by the Western powers, any momentum behind this revolution is being lost. And it's not just Syria that it affects: sooner or later it will land on our doorsteps, and it will spread across that region and have more significant global effects.
12:38 I don't know how many of you have been reading, but World War One is across the news recently, and there's a postmodernist view on the reasons why the First World War started and how every power was eventually dragged in. Well, these flashpoints — Syria — function like that, like the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. You think nothing of it at the time, but their wider scope can quickly snowball and have implications for us all.
13:08 So we can't stay still where we are. We must support those individuals and those aid organisations working in Syria, and we have to help the populations there. And really we have to show them that justice, or the recourse to justice, exists. Thank you.
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