Σάββατο 25 Μαΐου 2013

A Balkan map for the road to Damascus?

It is two years since the EU imposed an arms embargo and other sanctions 
on Syria “to achieve a change of policy by the Syrian leadership without 
further delay”. Since then, over 80,000 people have been killed, over a 
million have sought refuge in neighbouring countries and over four 
million are internally displaced. And in that time, the EU has issued well 
over 100 statements and applied 21 further sets of sanctions, without any 
visible impact. If the highest wisdom of a state is masterly inactivity, this is 
the opposite: impotent hyperactivity. 
A Balkan map for the road to Damascus?
Indeed, everyone’s policy towards Syria has failed: 
the West has not succeeded in replacing the 
Assad regime with a liberal, secular democracy; 
Russian and Iranian support has not enabled 
Assad to reassert control; Saudi Arabia and other 
Gulf States have not managed to propel the 
Sunni majority into power at the expense of the 
Alawite minority. International leaders know that 
they need to do something different: that is the 
message of recent American and British attempts 
to re-launch a peace process in partnership with 
Russia. But there is not even the outline of an 
international consensus on what to do.

This crisis is on Europe’s doorstep. The nearest EU 
member-state, Cyprus, is 100 miles from the Syrian 
coast. Europe should devise a more effective set 
of policies and sell them energetically to the key 
players inside and outside Syria. Clearly, Syria is 
not Bosnia in 1994. But there are general lessons 
to draw from the Balkans.

The first is that a framework has to be found 
for reconciling the interests of the parties’ 
international patrons. In former Yugoslavia, the 
establishment of the contact group of major 
Western powers and Russia was a necessary 
though not sufficient condition for progress. 
Despite Moscow’s initial wariness, over time 
a degree of confidence was established, so 
that the Russians applied pressure in Belgrade. 
Together with the changing military situation on 
the ground, this cleared the way for the Dayton 
peace process.

In the Syrian context, putting together a small and 
effective contact group would be challenging: 
some US officials say that it could be “politically 
impossible” to involve Iran in peace talks. But 
excluding Iran a priori would only encourage it to 
play a spoiling role. A contact group would also 
offer opportunities: for example, obliging the EU 
and Turkey to unite around common objectivesand actions, which they have so far failed to do 
despite their obviously shared interests in the 
stability of the region. 

The second lesson from the Balkans is that all 
parties have to know that while they cannot 
win an outright victory, they will not face 
annihilation. Debate raged within and between 
Western countries from 1992 onwards over 
whether to support the forces of the Bosnian 
government with arms, at a time when they 
were taking a beating. It was Douglas Hurd, 
then British Foreign Secretary, who notoriously 
warned that lifting the arms embargo would only 
create a “level killing field”. 

The Americans nonetheless covertly supplied 
weapons and training to the Bosniaks and 
Croats and ultimately lifted the arms embargo 
unilaterally in November 1994. That on its own did 
not end the fighting; indeed, it took the Srebrenica 
massacre in August 1995, and NATO airstrikes, UN 
artillery bombardments and the defeat of Serb 
forces in Croatia to bring about a ceasefire and 
ultimately the Dayton agreement. International 
military action proved to the Serbs that they could 
not win, but also showed the Bosniaks that their 
success depended on international support – 
which could be withdrawn.

The same arguments are playing out in Syria. 
German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle 
said after an EU foreign ministers’ meeting in 
March: “I don’t think the bloodshed in Syria 
will decrease, should we engage in an arms 
race.” But the bloodshed is not decreasing 
anyway. There is a strong case for training and 
equipping forces loyal to the Syrian National 
Coalition – which, after all, the EU accepts as 
“legitimate representatives of the aspirations 
of the Syrian people” – to shake the confidence 
of the regime. But there must also be a credible 
threat from leading NATO and Middle Eastern 
powers that they will launch military strikes 
against Assad’s air and ground forces. Given 
that Russia and China are unlikely to support 
military action (even tacitly, as in Bosnia and 
more recently Libya), there would have to be 
a coalition willing to act without UN Security 
Council authorisation, for example by seeking 
UN General Assembly blessing through the 
“Uniting for Peace” procedure (designed by the 
US in 1950 to circumvent Soviet vetoes in the 
Security Council). 

The third lesson is that immediate regime 
change should not be a precondition for starting 
negotiations – a hard thing for the victims of 
atrocities to accept. The Dayton process did 
not unseat Slobodan Milosevic or indict him for war crimes. Of course, Milosevic did not rule 
post-war Bosnia, but there are examples – the 
Government of National Unity in Zimbabwe, 
for instance – of an opposition movement 
reluctantly accommodating the brutal leaders 
of the ancien regime, in the interest of ending 
violence. The Syrian National Coalition should 
hear from its foreign supporters that it will not 
achieve a knock-out military victory and that 
it should focus on getting what it can at the 
negotiating table, which may or may not include 
Assad’s departure. The key objectives should 
be an end to violence and a political construct 
guaranteeing the rights of all communities in 
Syria. Without that, conflict will start again.

“There must be a credible threat from leading 
NATO and Middle Eastern powers that they will 
launch military strikes.”

The fourth lesson is that the rest of the world 
cannot walk away after a political settlement. 
The Implementation Force (IFOR) in Bosnia had 
54,000 troops, including Russians. Together with 
its successor, SFOR, it played a vital early role in 
creating confidence and ensuring that the terms 
of the peace agreements were respected.

Inevitably, any suggestion of ‘boots on the 
ground’ in Syria will raise the spectres of 
Afghanistan and Iraq. But Bosnia was different: 
there was a prior political settlement from which 
all the parties had gained something; and the 
involvement of Russian forces gave the Serb side 
some sense that IFOR was not a hostile army of 
occupation. Whether the Russians would join 
such an effort in Syria is a moot point; Putin’s 
world-view is very different from Yeltsin’s. 

But a purely Western force would have much 
less chance of being seen as a disinterested 
guarantor of peace.Even if these lessons are applicable to Syria, 
none will be easy to implement. They involve 
uncomfortable compromises, risky political 
choices and negotiating with partners who 
should be in prison. Plenty of experienced 
diplomats who know the region well think that 
nothing can be done to halt the catastrophe. 
We cannot make Syria an earthly paradise. But 
we have to try in every possible way to stop 
it becoming still more of a hell on earth, lest 
Europe be singed by the flames.

Ian Bond 
Director of foreign policy, CER

sourche: http://www.cer.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/attachments/pdf/2013/bulletin90_ib_article1-7420.pdf

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