Some Background Information,
a Timeline and Various Considerations on the Situation in Syria and the
International Community’s Response.
Some
background: Bashar Hafez al-Assad is the President
of Syria and
General Secretary of the Ba'ath Party.
He has served as President since 2000, when he succeeded his father, Hafez al-Assad, who led Syria for 30 years until
his death. The party has dominated the Syrian parliament since 1963. The party
leads the National Progressive Front, and in all elections has obtained the majority of the 167
parliamentary seats reserved for the Front. In the 2003 parliamentary election,
the party secured 135 of the seats. The al-Assad regime is a dictatorship which
has a long history or repression of opposition groups, brutality, human rights
abuse and massacres (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hama_massacre
)
The differences between
Alawites and Sunnis in Syria are important and have sharpened dangerously since
the beginning of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, whose family
is Alawite. The reason for tension is primarily political, rather than
religious: top positions in Assad’s army are held by Alawite officers, while
most of the rebels from the Free Syrian Army come from Syria’s Sunni majority. Alawites
are a Muslim minority group that accounts for around 12% of Syria’s population,
with a few small pockets in Lebanon and Turkey. Around 70% of Syrians belong to
Sunni Islam, as do almost 90% of all Muslims in the world). Alawites follow the
Shiite interpretation of Islam with some special features of their own, which
make them a highly suspect sect in the eyes of many orthodox Sunnis and some Shiites
too.
The
evolution of the conflict: Protests
against the regime began in January 2011 in the wake of the demonstrations and
uprisings of the Arab Spring in other countries. By March the demonstrations
had escalated into a civil uprising and the government had responded with large
scale police repression and killings. The crack-down continued and large-scale
protests led to the government besieging the towns which were the site of the
protests. As the repression continued, opponents of the regime began to resist
and organize themselves. Opposition activists established a “National Council”
to “lead the Syrian revolution” in June and protests spread to Damascus. In
July the formation of the “Free Syrian Army”, composed mainly of defectors from
the regimes army, was announced. However, the opposition groups, moderates and
extremists, were and remain extremely divided both politically and militarily,
and above all in terms of the kind of post-Assad state they would like to
create.
The second half of 2011 saw the
uprising take on many of the characteristics of a civil war, according to
several outside observers, including the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, as armed elements became better organized and began carrying out
successful attacks in retaliation for the ongoing crackdown by the Syrian
government on demonstrators and defectors.
During the first months of 2012 an
Arab League monitoring mission ended in failure as Syrian troops and anti-government militants continued to do battle across the country. A United Nations-backed ceasefire brokered by special envoy Kofi Annan met a similar fate, with unarmed UN peacekeepers'
movements tightly controlled by the government and fighting, as well as acts of
violence described as "terrorism" by the Syrian government, continuing despite both parties' nominal
agreement to end the violence.
On 12 February the leader
of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, released a video where he urged
all Muslims to support the Syrian rebels. On the 16th Ban-ki Moon,
the UN Secretary-General, said that crimes against humanity had been carried
out by government forces. The United Nations General Assembly approved a non-
binding resolution with 137 YES votes, 12 NO votes and 17 abstentions. The
resolution called for the resignation of Bashar al Assad and a halt to the
violence in the country.
On the 24th February the ‘Friends
of Syria’ meeting took place in Tunis, where 70 Western and Arab Nations
gathered to discuss and act on the ongoing events in Syria. It announced the
recognition of the SNC as the "legitimate representative of the Syrian
people", a step below recognition as the sole legitimate government, and
requested that any other opposition groups in Syria rally behind the SNC. The
meeting also called for the UN and Arab league to establish a peacekeeping
force on the ground in Syria.
Allegedly, military support
for the Assad regime has come from Hezbollah and Iran, while Saudi Arabia and
the Gulf states have provided arms and money for the rebels.
Over the summer of 2012 the
civil war deepened with the military opposition becoming more radical, according to some more Islamist, and,
like the regime, accused of having committed atrocities. The Syrian government
began to use its air-force more widely in support of its ground forces while
rebel forces continued to grow in strength. On 3 December, U.S. President
Barack Obama said that there would be consequences if the Syrian government
decides to use chemical weapons.
2013 saw the continuation
and deepening of the conflict with neither side able to win and the
international community unable to broker an agreement, halt the violence or
agree on an effective collective response.
On 24th
July 2013, the United Nations put out an
estimate of over 100,000 people who had died in the war since the beginning of
the protests.
Over this period there has
been a growing humanitarian crisis as ordinary Syrians, faced with blackouts,
food and water shortages, a collapse of medical services, were forced to flee
becoming IDPs (estimated at 4.5 million) http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/07/201371784449311867.html
or refugees (now more than 2 million) http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/syria.php
This is an emergency that
international aid organizations are struggling to deal with and that Syria’s
neighbors cannot handle. It has also led to growing tensions between Syria and
its neighbors and fears that its civil war will spread across its borders.
Some
commentators warn that the ‘moderates’ are precisely those who chose to flee
and are now refugees. Those rebels who remain to fight are hard-liners perhaps
not interested in creating a western style democracy.
In fact, in October 2013 Human Rights Watch
said that civilians had been massacred by radical militant rebel forces, some
linked to al-Qaida, and argued that countries providing them with military aid
could find themselves legally responsible for assisting crimes against
humanity.
Majority opinion in the
West, in the Arab world and in the UN General Assembly has been generally against
the Assad regime and its treatment of its citizens. However, there has been no
widespread support for military
intervention by the international community, and no authorization for action by
the UN Security Council, as both Russia and China argue that the conflict is an
internal affair and any resolution of the conflict must be negotiated and
involve both sides.
Legal and practical considerations regarding military
intervention for humanitarian purposes: A well-established and basic UN principle is that
countries should not intervene in the internal affairs of another state.
However, in Kosovo in 1999 Bill Clinton won NATO support for the need to
protect large numbers of endangered civilians to justify and launch air
strikes against Serbia. Since then the UN has formally adopted the principle of
‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) as an international norm that could justify
outside intervention in a country’s internal affairs if that state has failed
to protect its population from atrocities or perpetrated such atrocities (e.g.
failed states, Libya, Mali). R2P,
established in 2005, is strongly supported by human rights NGOs, campaigners
and activists and disliked by authoritarian regimes (including Russia and
China) which do not want to see the
principle applied to themselves (e.g. Russia and Chechnya). In fact, R2P
requires authorization from the UN Security Council to be legitimate. However,
there is a growing school of thought that says that when a principle is
generally accepted by the members of the international community, it becomes
part of what is called international customary law (a kind of international
common law based on growing precedent). In the eyes of many human rights
campaigners intervention in a country’s internal affairs could thus be
justified if there are persistent and large-scale human rights abuses and if
the majority of the international community (i.e. in the UN General Assembly)
agree that there is a need to intervene even when there is no mandate from the
Security Council (with the Kosovo case providing a precedent).
For the last 2
years there has been general consensus on the persistent and wide-scale human
rights abuses committed by the Assad regime. However, there has been little
appetite for intervention and involvement in a civil war that intervention is
unlikely to resolve.
On 21st
August 2013 an estimated 1,400 civilians were killed in Syria allegedly by a
chemical weapons attack on areas of eastern Damascus.
The Obama
administration argued that the international community has to respond to this
violation of the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention. Syria is not a signatory,
but did sign the 1925 Geneva Gas Protocol, and the ban on chemical weapons can
also be considered now a part of international customary law (both Russia and
the US have destroyed their chemical weapons). The US claims that it has worked
out plans for air-strikes, not to bring down the regime, but to prevent it from
carrying out further chemical weapons attacks. Unable to get authorization from
the UNSC it appealed for support to its allies and the wider international
community. However, apart from France most of its allies appeared unwilling to
become directly involved in the conflict (e.g. UK Parliament), and most Arab
League members (except for Saudi Arabia and the Gulf state) were also against US involvement. Meanwhile
Obama continued consultation in Congress with both House and Senate
representatives, but there seemed to be little support for intervention among
the US public. The international community
waited for the report from the UN inspectors sent to Syria to decide if
chemical weapons were used. The Russians argued that even if the report confirmed
the use of such weapons it could not establish who they were used by. The
Americans argued that the rebels do not have the capability and would be unlikely
to kill their own supporters. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/16/us-syria-crisis-un-idUSBRE98F0ED20130916
Many human rights activists argue that the use
of chemical weapons in Syria is not, and should not be, the main issue since
the vast majority of the victims of human rights violations (as well as IDPs
and refugees) are the victims of atrocities carried out using conventional
weapons. They argue that there is ample proof of such violations, enough to
justify and, indeed, require international intervention. Russia does not
dispute the human rights violations but insists that they have been committed
by both sides and that this invalidates an intervention specifically targeting
the Assad regime.
US attempts to
build international support and win domestic support for air strikes against
chemical weapons targets have so far had limited success. John Kerry, US
Secretary of State said in a press conference in London that the Syrian regime
could avoid US air strikes if it agreed to hand over all its chemical weapons
to international control. Russia immediately responded positively to this
proposal and so did Assad. Talks between Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister,
Sergey Lavrov, began in Geneva in order to work out the details of an agreement
under which Syria's chemical weapons would be destroyed or removed by mid-2014,
and which would be acceptable to all parties and could be approved by the UNSC.
Some claim this is a victory for Vladimir Putin, others that it has got
President Obama out a difficult situation (and may have been worked out between
Russia and the US at the G20 summit in Saint Petersburg 5-6th
September 2013). On
September 16th 2013 UN investigators said a sarin nerve agent had been used in the August 21 poison
gas attack outside the Syrian capital in a long-awaited report that the United
States, Britain and France said proved
government forces were responsible. Russia claimed that it has evidence that it
was the rebels who used the chemical weapons.
On 27th September 2013 the UN Security
Council agreed a draft resolution calling on the Syrian government to destroy
its chemical weapons, and stating that failure to comply would have
consequences. However, any action based on non-compliance would depend first on
findings of a technical inspection body and would then require a second UNSC resolution.
Human rights
campaigners continue to argue that the chemical weapons issue is a distraction
from the main issue, which remains the widespread human rights violations
committed by the Assad regime and to a lesser extent by the rebels, and the
need to halt the civil war and bring aid to the civilian population.
The timeline of the Syrian civil war, which
started in 2011, is
contained in the following articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Syrian_civil_war
see also the timeline of the Arab
Spring:
for the legality of intervention
see:
for recent developments see:
See also on my blog posts for:
lunedì 22 aprile 2013
What are
the main factors to be weighed when the international community is considering
military intervention in response to humanitarian crises?
venerdì 8 marzo 2013
Military Intervention for
Humanitarian Purposes
