The intensity of what can now be called a civil war in Syria continues unabated. The latest massacre of over one hundred adults and children near Homs, ostensibly by government forces (though the government says otherwise) suggests that the pressures exerted by the United Nations through the intermediation of former Secretary General Kofi Annan are having little effect on the government of President Assad. Yet it seems that the government is unable to inhibit its opponents from various kinds of provocations that, in turn, provoke reprisals by the Syrian armed forces.
The unanimously approved statement emanating from the Security Council immediately after the massacre, indicates that the Russian government has felt forced to accept the line of harsh condemnation of world governments, and to limit its virtual siding, up to now with President Assad’s regime. The general interpretation of the killings is that Syria has broken its agreement to maintain a ceasefire, which was one of the central planks of the Annan Plan. But they have led the Russian Foreign Minister to publicly distance his government from its hitherto close diplomatic proximity to the Syrian government, as indicated in his statement, “It is not the most important thing who is in power in Syria, what regime has power. For us the main thing is to put an end to the violence among civilians to provide for political dialogue under which the Syrians themselves decide on the sovereignty of their country.“
Up to now, with the experience of Libya, and what both the Russians and the Chinese consider to be a virtual NATO capture of that country and the exclusion of their influence, they have been careful to insist that the Syrian issue cannot be solved by outside intervention, but by inducing the Assad government to find a way of negotiating a cessation of the war, and to negotiate new terms for a political solution. For Russia this would be the expression of the Syrian government’s maintenance of its sovereignty, rather than finding itself in a position of subordination to external, by which they mean, Western forces or governments. This stance has also characterized the position of China on the Sudan territorial issue, which really has to do with the oil resources of that area.
But an embattled Assad would appear to be unable to give the Russians the kind of diplomatic space that they need to maintain their posture of the need for non-intervention in Syria. The President would seem to be religiously following the strategy of suppression to the end that his father used on the last occasion of a civil uprising in the country and which led to the Hama massacre of 1982. Assad will also be feeling that, as the representative of the Alawite minority grouping, concessions that surrender authority or power to his opponents will mean dominance by those groupings, and not much of a likelihood that they will be allowed any substantial share of the new power arrangements.
But his resistance would appear to be losing, rather than gaining him, external allies to assist whatever diplomatic strategy he wants to undertake. His government has lost an important ally in Turkey, whose Prime Minister Erdogan had at first taken a stance of insistence on negotiation. But Assad’s resistance to his entreaties has, in effect pushed Turkey into the Western camp as the conflict has resulted in an increasing tendency to flood his country with refugees.
The result is an increasing isolation of Syria in the international community, especially as the Arab League has aligned its position with that of the Security Council in supporting the Annan Plan. In addition the government of Iran, which had sought to influence Assad to some form of compromise, now appears as well to have given him up as a lost cause. But Syrian history, in the long history of the Assad family’s rule, would seem to have been one of fighting from a position of isolation, in much the way that it has stood rigidly against the United States position in its neighbour Lebanon, giving the Hezbollah forces support in their struggles.
Now, however, even those forces are beginning to feel the negative effects, in Lebanon, of the Syrian struggle. And that is a situation likely to lead to the disintegration of relationships within the Lebanese political system, which is itself a tediously arranged patchwork of the multiplicity of sects which make up the governance arrangements of that country.
In the midst of all this, however, it is apparent that the Western countries are not desirous of attempting any major intervention to remove the Assad government as was attempted in the case of Libya. For one thing, the United States election process that culminates in November, inhibits President Obama from undertaking what would be an unpredictable distraction; and the odds are that the Europeans will prefer to do nothing that will rock the Middle East, and with that, the already dangerously fluctuating price of oil.
European diplomacy, in the case of Libya, was led by Britain, France and Italy. France with its new socialist government, and Italy under a caretaker administration can have no inclination to add to their concern to ensure that nothing further destabilizes their economies; and the British do not have the same kind of interest, material or ideological, that they had in Libya.
So the ball is likely to continue to be held by Kofi Annan, assisted by Russian and Chinese diplomacy that will be insisting that whatever the outcome in the area, it must not redound to the diplomatic credit of the West; and a diplomacy that will, at best, support only a graduated pressure on the Syrian government. And Annan will have to continue to impress upon Assad that the main choices to be made are his, and not outside of Syria.
