Decluttering the European toolbox
Humanitarian exemptions and Early Recovery

The European Council’s decision to extend humanitarian exemptions issued in response to the February earthquake has raised uncomfortable questions. If sanctions are designed not to impair the humanitarian response, why are exemptions needed? Moreover, if the special circumstances of the earthquake disaster justified unusual means, isn’t the permanent state of humanitarian suffering in Syria reason enough to make the exemptions permanent? 

The decision to extend the exemptions for only a limited period of six months is a half-hearted response that fails to incentivise banks to change their de-risking policies and provides little in the way of long-term assurances for aid organisations. From the perspective of humanitarians, extensive and open-ended exemptions should be provided, or sanctions should be lifted altogether. The political perspective is more intricate, however, and includes factors that humanitarians conveniently overlook in their supposedly apolitical stance. After all, sanctions are part of the EU’s official tool kit that is based on the three no’s, and which aims to deal with a major crime of this still-young century. If one element crumbles, the established consensus might erode, greatly assisting the Syrian dictator to re-consolidate power unconditionally. That will only lead to more instability. 

That said, sanctions in their current form have not been a powerful tool of European leverage able to change the Assad regime’s behaviour. The US, meanwhile, maintains the toughest sanctions but does not use them as leverage to advance conflict management and resolution. Every good toolbox needs to be decluttered from time to time; and perhaps it is time to modify the sanctions to reflect the conflict realities of 2023. This is also an ethical matter: in effect, sanctions are merely being used to maintain a status quo that involves hardship for the most vulnerable civilians.

In any event, a solo European effort in modifying debatable sanctions such as sectoral ones would not be worth the costs and risks of unintended consequences given that EU sanctions have little impact compared with those of the US. In light of the bipartisan support it enjoys in Congress, the Caesar Act will continue to dictate wider sanctions policy. 

A reasonable path for Europeans might therefore be to give the recent humanitarian exemptions an unlimited timeframe to ensure that life-saving assistance can be provided as effectively as possible. This should by no means be understood as a free concession, but rather as a prelude to an overhaul of the entire humanitarian response. Such an overhaul might concede on life-saving assistance but strengthen the line on everything else. 

Getting aid priorities right 
Aid that goes beyond life-saving – fancily termed “Early Recovery” (ER) – is all the rage right now. But what its advocates seem to overlook is that the war persists with an intensity that makes “recovery” perhaps too strong a word to describe what realistically can be achieved. Should donors open their wallets to an expansion of ER funding, under the current circumstances, the UN would likely take the lead in coordinating with the Assad regime’s ministries and favoured GONGOs such as Asma al-Assad’s Syria Trust for Development. Humanitarians demand that the West “depoliticise” its assistance and eases restrictions on ER; but they have no answer on how to deal with large-scale manipulation of ER assistance by the regime. Aid diversion, profiteering and embezzlement are regularly excused by humanitarians as the price of doing business in a conflict zone, losing sight of their commitment to Do No Harm. Without doubt, the regime will use ER assistance as a weapon by diverting funds and prioritising the rehabilitation of loyalist areas at the expense of others. As long as the UN is unwilling and unable to operate in the north west and north east without regime interference, donors and the UN will become complicit in supporting a party to the conflict that has committed the most heinous war crimes. That cannot be justified on any ground. 

It is disconcerting that after a decade in which billions of euros have been pumped into the humanitarian response, and during which the heavy meddling of the Assad regime has been normalised, humanitarian principles seem to apply more to donors than to the recipient authorities. Aid – and especially ER – is not “neutral” in Syria. Counter intuitively, a European overhaul of humanitarian policy might seek actively to politicise everything beyond life-saving assistance. That would not be a renunciation of humanitarian principles but a last ditch effort to save them. USAID’s June decision to suspend food assistance in Ethiopia after discovering systematic diversion shows that withdrawing even life-saving assistance is not necessarily a red line. That line hasn’t yet been crossed in Syria; but it must be acknowledged that every euro allocated to ER means less money for life-saving assistance. The arguments of hardcore humanitarians that ER is more cost-effective and supports local community resilience may only hold true in theory. In reality, rehabilitation projects of the scale needed to have substantial impact demand significant budgets, time-frames, and political will that are simply not available right now. Presently, Western donor money is insufficient both to maintain life-saving assistance and increase ER funding. Communities faced with a reduction in health services, food-baskets and cash assistance are highly unlikely to develop increased resilience; rather, they will seek salvation beyond Syria’s borders. 

Indefinitely extending humanitarian exemptions while actively politicising ER would be strategically smart – both ethically and politically. Today’s ER definition includes everything from the rehabilitation of sewers to building power plants – and must be done in coordination with regime institutions. Humanitarians have failed to define where humanitarian aid ends and development assistance begins. Politicians must now step in. Life-saving assistance is a humanitarian imperative; but to justify budgets and activities beyond that, a political price is required in the shape of movement on implementation of UNSCR 2254. That might not be what hardcore humanitarians want to hear, but it might be the only way for donor governments to proceed with any sort of coherence and credibility.