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1 United Nations Nations Unies Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs UNDER-SECRETARY-GENERAL FOR HUMANITARIAN AFFAIRS AND EMERGENCY RELIEF COORDINATOR, STEPHEN O’BRIEN Statement to the Security Council on Syria New York, 30 August 2017 As delivered Thank you, Mr President, and Eid Mubark to you all, distinguished representatives of the Security Council. I also thank Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura for his determination and skill in seeking to find a way forward, above all, for the Syrian people, who have suffered for so long. In this violent, brutal, chaotic world we live in today, it is a sad, tragic, blunt truth that on this, my last appearance in this role before you, the Security Council of the United Nations, the highest body in the world charged with preventing and resolving wars, conflicts and the desperate human death, pain and suffering directly caused, I am still urging you, in the name of our common humanity, to find a way to stop the Syrian people from paying the price of political failure. Syria is a conflict with an atrocious and incalculable human cost – one that has forced us to see the very worst of human behaviour – and a conflict that, as a consequence, has consumed all of us without respite for seven bloody years; and when you pause to think, even for a moment, that I say this knowing the sheer scale of needless man-made, violent, deliberate humanitarian horror that is 21 million Yemenis’ sad lot today, or with Somalia, South Sudan and north-eastern Nigeria, desperately with humanitarian workers’ brave help, trying to avert famine for 20 million of our fellow global citizens, let alone the others within the 142 million people in 40 countries who need us tonight. The fact that month after month it is the unremitting, fearful plight of the Syrian people which sears into our hearts and outrages and torments our minds – I am bound to reflect: surely we can do better? Twenty-seven reports of the Secretary-General on the Syrian crisis have been submitted to you since I took up this office in June 2015; and countless briefings presented both in this open chamber and in private consultations, in 27 months, a record 55 to be accurate, 30 on Syria alone. This Council is fully on notice and has heard in minute detail as the deadliest years of the Syrian conflict unfolded. We are all witnesses to the destruction of a country, its people, its children, its future. We have endured the sight of people dying of starvation, or a child drowning and washed up on a beach in his family’s desperate, dangerous bid to escape the scandalous ravages of Syria then, and continuing today. Pictures of emaciated, starving children in the besieged town of Madaya. Harrowing images of bombs and mortars raining down on schools, medical facilities, on internally displaced settlements (which are meant to be sanctuaries), public markets, and, yes, o