UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Saturday said that the world had responded with “disturbing paralysis” to conflicts around the globe and their devastating effect on civilians.
Ban joined International Committee of the Red Cross president Peter Maurer to issue “an unprecedented joint warning” on lassitude in confronting suffering.
“In the face of blatant inhumanity, the world has responded with disturbing paralysis,” Ban said in a statement.
Without greater international commitment to maintaining peace and security, “we can expect only greater chaos and suffering,” he told journalists. “The continued failure to act is a disgrace.”
Maurer said the world had entered “an era of protracted armed conflicts, which add up to a world at war” in which the international community too often accepts the harm inflicted on people.
As evidence of the horrific toll of conflict on civilians, Ban cited missile attacks launched on Friday by Syrian government forces on the town of Douma, a rebel-held suburb of Damascus, which reportedly killed dozens of people, and airstrikes on other populated areas.
Those attacks came as US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov joined diplomats of 17 countries in Vienna to try to accelerate efforts to broker a political solution to Syria’s nearly five-year-old war.
After seven hours of sometimes heated discussion, they agreed to explore ways of achieving a nationwide ceasefire, but remained sharply divided on what measures to take regarding Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Commending their initiative, Ban said the future of al-Assad should not be allowed to hold up efforts to end the war, and urged a nationwide ceasefire to allow the delivery of humanitarian assistance.
However, he and Maurer kept the focus of their comments on the widespread and brutal disregard for laws of war that sees daily attacks on civilians and medical staff, and pointed to airstrikes on hospitals run by the charity Doctors Without Borders in Afghanistan and Yemen.
“That’s a crime against humanity,” Ban said of such attacks.
The US military and the Afghan government have begun investigations of the airstrike early last month by US aircraft on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in the northern Afghan town of Kunduz, which killed 13 of the organization’s staff members and 10 patients, as well as seven other people whom it has not been possible to identify.
Ban acknowledged those investigations, but urged the US to allow for an independent inquiry, a demand made by Doctors Without Borders that US authorities have yet to accept.
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