Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Aleppo was once a symbol of the democratic resistance to the Assad dictatorship in Syria. I visited Aleppo in 2011, just before the revolution began and before a very nasty civil war and proxy war by many regimes broke out. In the souk in that beautiful city, I met members of the Palestinian community and of the gay community, young people who were very brave, impressive, happy and hopeful for the future. Today, Aleppo is buried under rubble and in a pool of blood and Assad's troops are going house to house butchering anyone who is left alive. The only way Assad could succeed in this butchery, torture and abominable war was with the help of Russian military intervention. We live in a world where the great powers increase conflict to divide the world between them for their own influence, and for monetary and economic greed. Saudi Arabia and Qatar funded various jihadist groups throughout Syria to increase their influence and the USA tried to find moderate opposition groups so that it too could gain leverage in the region and over the country. Russia is an alliance with Iran and sought to shore up its own influence and turned this conflict into a dreadful sectarian war, a brutal war that has been fuelled by various imperial powers. Aleppo is a warning to everyone that barbarism will rise when imperialist powers try to carve up the world between them and this may indeed happen again.

Western powers do not have clean hands. All across Europe, arms have been traded into Syria in a very serious way. Calls for western intervention do nothing to lessen the harm or the horror. We know this because we have the recent legacy of Iraq. What is happening in Aleppo today would remind one of what happened in cities such as Falluja. Western intervention is not the solution.

A total of €1. 2 billion worth of arms trade goes from Europe into the Middle East. It is amazing to see the statistics and graphs on this. The biggest recipient of those arms is Saudi Arabia, which is totally engaged in the conflict in Syria, a country that has received approximately €829 million worth of arms in the past two years. The weaponry is horrific. We are talking here about weapons that can kill by shooting, bombs, tanks and planes that can drop horrible explosives on communities. How do we respond to this? We can sit here and cry - I sometimes do feel like crying when I think of those young people - but that will not achieve anything. The European Union should shut down the arms trade and that €1.2 billion worth of arms to the Middle East should end immediately. Instead of investing €5 billion in a fund for more arms, weaponry and hardware in an EU defence fund, we should put that money into opening the borders and bringing into Europe the 2.3 million people stuck in camps on the Turkish border as a result of the dreadful deal the European Union did with Turkey. We should tear up that deal Immediately and open the borders, not just for the people in the camps in Turkey who are cold and desperate as winter marches on but also for the tens of thousands now fleeing Aleppo and the surrounding areas. If we do anything at all, we have to think about how to deal with refugees. Instead of turning the Mediterranean into a graveyard and dealing a historic blow to human rights, we need to reverse the process. Turkey has broken international law by sending refugees back to Syria. There is evidence of the latter. The deal to which I refer should be torn up Immediately.

If we do not do as I suggest, we are saying "Happy Christmas Syria", "Happy Christmas Aleppo" in the most cruel and inconsiderate way. We in the European Union are in breach of human rights law if we do not open our borders. I wonder where those young men and women are now. Are the at the bottom of the Mediterranean? Are they locked up in torture chambers? Are they in the grave or under a pile of rubble? Millions like them are being neglected by Europe, which remains the wealthiest region on the planet. Shame on Europe. We have a lot for which to answer.

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