domenica 22 settembre 2013

Timeline and Background for Events in Syria



 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

http://www.securitycouncilreport.org/chronology/syria.php

see also the timeline of the Arab Spring:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Arab_Spring

for the legality of intervention see:

http://ideas.time.com/2013/09/05/obamas-plan-for-intervention-in-syria-is-illegal/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-23847169

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_to_protect

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/26/united-nations-mandate-airstrikes-syria

http://www.theguardian.com/law/2013/aug/28/syria-intervention-force-lawful

http://www.france24.com/en/20130826-military-intervention-action-syria-without-un-violates-law-russia-lavrov

for recent developments see:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/10/us-syria-crisis-idUSBRE9880HY20130910

http://rt.com/news/syria-chemical-lavrov-kerry-730/

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/11/us-syria-crisis-russia-usa-idUSBRE98A0S520130911

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/10/syria-crisis-iran-backs-russia-chemical-weapons-plan-live

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?

http://youngdip.blogspot.it/2013/04/what-are-main-factors-to-be-weighed.html

venerdì 8 marzo 2013

Military Intervention for Humanitarian Purposes

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