Siege Soup

This campaign was pulled together the day before Syrian peace talks in Geneva on 29 January 2016. We wanted to remind politicians and policymakers that, as they debated how to end the violence in Syria, people were living and dying under siege across the country.

In collaboration with activists from Planet Syria, a network of Syria’s leading civil society groups, we staged a tableau outside the talks in which people wearing masks of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, then-US President Barack Obama, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and then-UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon made siege soup. This refers to the food starving people under siege were forced to eat—essentially water with whatever they could find to add to it, sometimes just grass and leaves. We also made a Facebook event to help promote the action that 82 people clicked “attending” to. 

We had permission to stage the stunt but it was still last minute. Despite this, it received a lot of media coverage, including in ABC News, Al Arabiya, Agence France Presse, the Guardian, the LA Times, the Middle East Eye, Newsweek, the New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. It also made the front page of the Daily Star Lebanon, the Middle East’s leading English-language daily. One likely reason for this was that the talks were held behind closed doors and so journalists were desperate for something to report on. Another is that the stunt, especially the use of oversized masks, was very photographable.

The event was also tweeted about by prominent figures including the BBC’s Lyse Doucet, the New York Times’ Somini Sengupta, and Amnesty’s Kristyan Benedict. Photos were also shared by the UK government and the Syrian opposition coalition at the United Nations.