25th September 2013
Professor Michael Kerr: We have heard repeatedly from Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN’s Special Envoy to Syria, that there is no military solution to its civil war. Brahimi would know, for he helped broker an end to Lebanon’s civil war in the late 1980s. The US and Russia now appear to agree with him. So we know what needs to happen in Syria, what we don’t know is just how to make it happen.
Bashar al-Assad’s regime is gaining ground militarily and holding its own in the propaganda war being played out in the international media. In his standoff with the West over the use of chemical weapons against civilians in Damascus, Assad exposed deep divisions in the US-UK camp concerning its commitment to military intervention in Syria. Whoever threw down the gauntlet by conducting those attacks took a major risk and most commentators suspect that Assad is guilty of this war crime.
By stalling US military action, the Russians bought Assad some time and he has committed to engage in a decommissioning process overseen by the UN. In terms of the international legitimacy this political process will bestow upon the Assad regime, this brazen tactic appears to have paid dividends. However, identifying, locating, securing and destroying Syria’s arsenal of chemical weapons will be a most unenviable task. We should recall here that it took the IRA a decade to destroy its guns and semtex during an at times-farcical decommissioning process in Northern Ireland. And they still haven’t entirely gone away you know.
The US-Russian diplomatic channel could eventually unlock other doors in Geneva. From this political process, a narrow window of opportunity through which negotiations over how the Syrian conflict could be brought to an end may eventually open. This is not likely but it is certainly possible. Thus Western leaders should now consider constructing a political process that seeks to bring about a new constitutional dispensation in Syria. Proposing the negotiation and implementation of power-sharing arrangements could become a viable policy option.
Using the old Lebanese maxim of ‘no victor, no vanquished’, a future Syrian government might include elements of the ruling Assad regime and some of those groups challenging it. At present, this idea will almost certainly be dismissed by the warring factions of Syria. None of them want to share power. But we should remember that it was exactly this method of conflict regulation that was proposed in the early years of the political violence that tore apart Lebanon and Northern Ireland in the 1970s and Bosnia in the 1990s. In all three cases there was not enough domestic and international support for the proposed power-sharing arrangements to succeed, yet in all three cases the conflict was ended through the establishment or reestablishment of power-sharing arrangements.
This solution is probably the least unattractive long-term development that could realistically be expected to occur in Syria over the next five to ten years. It would involve compromise – a great deal of compromise – but it might just prevent the worst of the horrors that await Syria should the state collapse and divide, events which would have extremely negative repercussions for the Middle East.
The idea of implementing power-sharing is fraught with difficulties and it will be dismissed by the Syrian National Council and manipulated by the Assad regime. It would also institutionalise a grim Syrian reality – the deep ethnic and religious divisions that are presently destroying the country. Much like its neighbours – Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Lebanon and Iraq – Syria is a deeply divided society comprised of ancient ethnicised communities who do not really want to live together.
For this idea to become a plausible policy option the US and its European allies must make a concerted effort to convince China, Russia and Iran that a prolonged civil war in Syria or its partition will damage their interests in the Middle East. Iran has significant interests in Syria, as does Russia, and a power sharing arrangement will not work without their blessing and positive input. So this option entails further backtracking on the part of the US and constructive diplomacy and compromise from Russia and Iran. Any power-sharing arrangement will require a major international commitment to Syria by its sponsors, for it is a country with no history or culture of democratic pluralism.
It would be far better for the West to raise this idea before the Syrian civil war worsens. Imposing power-sharing on a post-Assad Syria which is controlled by different militia factions that are sponsored by regional rivals would leave the country in much the same chaos as Iraq today or Lebanon in the 1980s. If this option is pursued, then some form of military intervention in Syria would ultimately be necessary. Ideally, this would take the form of a UN international peace-keeping force that had the backing of Russia and China on the UN Security Council.
Before dismissing this idea as too difficult or too unrealistic we should consider the alternatives to it. The Assad regime still believes it can win by crushing the rebels in Damascus, Hama, Homs and Allepo. These cities provide access to Lebanon and the coastal Alawite stronghold of Latakia. These are the parts of the state that the regime is fighting for, but it has a long way to go in consolidating its hegemonic rule there. The road to a regime victory is a long bloody civil war.
The disparate Syrian rebel forces and international jihadis, buoyed by some future Western military strikes and armed with the equipment needed to defeat a regular army and air force, may bring about regime collapse. This is an unlikely scenario and it is not something that any of the permanent members of the UN Security Council favour given the political vacuum and sectarian chaos that would ensue.
The civil war could worsen, the state could collapse and Syria could experience de facto partition (which happened in Lebanon during the 1980s). This is one of the reasons why the US and UK governments blinked first when a military confrontation with Assad seemed imminent. Exactly where President Obama’s ‘red line’ lies remains a rather grey area.
Yet for the Assad regime, partition is probably the least worst outcome to the conflict should it fail to win it. The humanitarian consequences of partition would be catastrophic and not just for Syrians. Lebanon and Jordan are already under great strain, and Israel is nervous. The chances of state collapse sparking a regional war are very high.
Internationally, the conflict over Syria is not just about Syria. It is about the projection of Iranian power in the Middle East. And as the Syrians continue fighting, Western clocks tick to the tune of Obama’s other red line – the one concerning Iran’s future nuclear capabilities. Yet a significant realignment in international relations concerning Syria has occurred in recent weeks, so perhaps now is the time to begin thinking about this third way.
*Dr Qassim Mazraani: I would like to thank the hosts and Professor Michael. Syria is my country and it is as a country at the moment in the intensive care unit of war politics. When I say war politics Syria is in a very difficult situation due to the interference of outside powers.
In 1982 the West gave us only 15 days to put down the revolt of the Muslim brothers at this time. But now they have given us many months and the regime seems to be unable to put an end to the current crisis. That is because of many external factors and many power brokers have put their weight behind the Syrian rebels. I am not saying the Syrian revolution because I don’t want to take sides.
Syria could easily become a failed state easily and given the history of the area with its ethnic and religious and sectarian background the war could last for years to come. In Lebanon itself there was a war for 15 years. Even President Obama said that Syria would not go back to what it was before and the problem is that in politics they do not consider the government is valid. In history there are a lot of wars that lasted for years – sometimes for decades – and the government won the war at the end of the day and weakened the rebels.
We can just mention Biafra during the Nigerian crisis, the Spanish civil war and the Sri Lankan civil war. The government crushed the Tamils after 20 years. Not all crisis end in peace brokered deals like northern Ireland or Lebanon.
But at the end of the day Syria needs to find its political map for achieving peace especially as the Syrians lived in a democratic country after independence from France and there were a lot of parties for free elections and even the Muslim Brotherhood. All of the parties had members of parliament in the Syrian parliament.
Now it could seen very difficult to find a solution. If the West, I don’t blame the West because the West now actually hesitated lot and up till now has not wanted to enter militarily. Actually for the first time the Arab world, (countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE) influenced the position of the West –not the other way round.
Previously we used to say that the West made the decision and the Arabs followed. Now it is the opposite. Some of the Arab countries, I will name them – Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait and to some extent Jordan and Morocco – they wanted the Americans to fight their war. They do not to engage without the West giving them the intelligence for the war. I do not understand why this is happening especially as Syria sided with Saudi Arabia with Kuwait during the Kuwaiti crisis and sent 40,000 troops to fight their war.
There are some people who are saying that because Iraq has been lost to the Shia. What happened is that the monopoly power since Iraq’s independence was in the hands of the elements hated by Sunnis. The majority of Sunnis want to live in peace. Some people, the outside powers, say we have lost Iraq we want to take Syria. That is why they are pushing for the new Syria.
The irony is that they want the new Syria to be democratic and have a free vote. But they do not apply this in their own countries and they are not even considering to do that. Not now, probably not even after 100 years. What they are saying is that we want Syria to topple this regime and the Syrian people to build their country. But they are destroying Syria.
There are a lot of theories. They are saying we are going to dismantle Syria and rejoin it again and to redraw it again on sectarian and religious lines. They are not doing this by the way. They are fracturing Syria and when you fracture any piece of equipment you destroy it and you can’t rejoin it. Syria cannot be dismantled.
I am sorry to say that Israel wants to be a pure Jewish state. And because Israel wants to be a pure Jewish state the Arab minorities should have their own mini states also built on religious, sectarian and ethnic lines. This is one theory. I believe that the Assad regime did not think that this was going to happen. He thought that there was a strong army and a strong state and the revolt could have been crushed very quickly. They over looked the early days of the revolt. It is believed that for the first six months the revolt was a peaceful one. But the
truth of the matter is that it was not because from the very beginning they started attacking state institutions.
Imagine if in England, in London a group attacks police stations, schools, hospitals, and starts kidnapping people and attack everything that belongs to the state. And they call that a revolution. The Syrian regime did not think the situation was very serious. On the contrary they thought they would play into their hands to convince the world look what they are doing to our country and suddenly they found themselves overwhelmed by the sheer force used against the state institutions and against the Syrian army itself.
Anyway the status quo now is very difficult to even speak. There are tens of military organisations. Some of them are affiliated with Al Qaeda, some with the independent free army some of them independent, some of them are money or power driven, and some of them are gangsters and nobody knows what is going on.
As a Syrian every day I wake up and look up the websites. There are websites for every village and city in Syria. Firstly I look at the website of my home town and every day I find, two, three, four people, younger than my children. The youngest of my children is 23 and they are 15, 16, 17 – why are they dying? Because they are defending their parents, their area, their streets and the same street, the same districts, people most of them left the town but those who left were attacked by people who are not Syrians. They are from Chechnya, from Saudi Arabia, from Tunisia, from Kuwait, from Jordan. When they are killed some of them show their id’s and you can see them on television.
A lot of young people say they have been sent to Syria to raise the word of God as if the rest of the Syrians are God hating people. This is completely untrue. No one hates God, not in the East and not in the West but they have brought their own strands.
There are solutions to the Syrian crisis. The first one is for the West to realise that what they call creative chaos will work for some time but it backfire because the people of the Middle East have been engaged for decades in civil war, that will create a fall out on other areas of the region, on other states, on Europe and on America and will be unimaginable. Already there are two million Syrians abroad and they have reached Europe.
Just last week Germany took five thousand Syrian refugees. Those people were having their schools their homes, their hospitals, they were well off . Syria did not have foreign debts, there were no poverty problems. The Syrian people have got strategic supplies of food and medicine for years to come and that was due to the richness of the country and the richness of the people.
Now everything has been destroyed. I think three or four generations have been lost just like the generations of Iraq, Somalia, Sri Lanka etc. You can build a house but you can’t build a human being over night. Everyone of us has got children. I am over 60 now. Just last week the last one got a job. Imagine that you spend all your life just to raise your children and if you destroy the hopes of 24 million people and then come to bring a new democratic Syria – after ten after 100 years, after 200 years and we reach the same level.
Dictatorships do not last forever. But Franco stayed in power for 40 years and then he handed over to a democratic government and brought back the monarchy and now Spain prospered probably because of the help of the European Union. There is now a new political atmosphere.
In general I think that in general Syria’s plight is not an internal one. It is an external one. I am just trying to get this message across. If the Arab world, the Gulf countries, stopped supplying arms and money to the rebels the two parties would come together and try to negotiate a peace settlement. Nobody says that Bashar Al Assad must stay as the president forever. We are talking about the state, the regime. If the state actually breaks down then it will take years and years to rebuild it.
There is a problem now. I think the opposition as far as they are fragmented they are not recognised in Syria. I personally lived in this beautiful country for 30 years and did not visit my country for a quarter of a century, 25 years because of the regime. I was asked to be one of those opposition figures, to talk and negotiate and appear on tv but I refused. This is not the way to build a new country. I believe the West should really stand up and say to their closest allies stop messing in the Syrian crisis and then the Syrian people will find a solution for their problem.
Everyone of you knows that at least eight million Syrians are refugees either inside or outside their country. And much of their country is in ruins now. If we keep doing the same things – the West and the regional power like Turkey God knows what will happen not only to Syria but also to Lebanon and Jordan – even Israel itself with all its might will not be spared.#
Lastly we know that democracy works. We experienced democracy a long time ago and we could restart again but we need the help of the rest of the world to understand our problem, our plight and to come to the same conclusion the world leaders found in New York yesterday and today at the end of the day a political settlement is the real thing. This will solve the Syrian crisis – not the war.
Personally I lost 16 people of my family. They were killed. The youngest was two years old and the oldest was 60 years old and none of them carried a weapon, none of them fought the other side. They were just sitting in their homes most of the time and the shells dropped on them. This is happening in many parts of Syria. We lost many homes. Some of my relatives were kidnapped. We paid ransoms to free them. Thanks God we managed to do that. This is one family only. You can imagine the plight of the rest of the Syrian people. Thank you very much.
*Dr Qassim Mazraani is working with BBC Arabic TV. He was Director of the Arabic News Network (ANN) TV for many years. He had also worked with BBC in its earlier stages in mid-nineties and MBC. He had obtained his Diploma, MSc and PhD from Loughborgouh University. He had obtained his first degree from Damascus University. He was a journalist and column writer with Al Arab London-based newspaper.
**Professor Michael Kerr is the Director – Middle East & Mediterranean Studies Programme, King’s College London (KCL) and Professor of Conflict Studies, KCL. He has held various posts in the past 20 years as advisor to politicians, visiting lecturer and Director of several institutions. He is the author of several books including: The Destructors: The Story of Northern Ireland’s Lost Peace Process, Irish Academic Press, 2011, 2. Imposing Power Sharing: Conflict and Coexistence in Northern Ireland and Lebanon, Irish Academic Press, 2006, 3. Transforming Unionism: David Trimble and the 2005 General Election, Irish Academic Press Dublin, 2005
