Month: December 2011
Delusional, deluded or deluding?
The full transcript of the Barbara Walters interview with Bashar al Assad is worth a read, if only because it will likely one day be seen a presaging the fall of the Assad regime, like Qaddafi’s mad rants in Libya. Bashar’s denial is total:
OK, we don’t kill our people, nobody kill. No government in the world kill its people, unless it’s led by crazy person. For me, as president, I became president because of the public support. It’s impossible for anyone, in this state, to give order to kill people.
Mistakes may have been made, but they are not his or the government’s. Individuals have made mistakes are being held accountable. He feels no guilt. The press is free. Foreign correspondents are welcome. There was no order for a crackdown, just the legitimate institutions of the state defending themselves from terrorists, as any state would have to do.
The terrifying part of all of this is that he gives the distinct impression of believing it. That would be delusional. It is difficult to imagine how someone so out of touch with reality can be convinced to stop the brutality.
In theory it is also possible that he is deluded: maybe his younger brother Maher, responsible for the security forces, doesn’t bother telling him what is happening? Certainly if he watches too much Syrian TV, he wouldn’t know that the protests are mainly peaceful and the security forces ferociously violent. He could then believe that there really are terrorists inciting this instability and attacking the Syrian state.
That would be truly deluded, but there is still another possibility: he is attempting to delude. Not so much the Western public, which by now knows better, but his own people, who will be treated to this interview repeatedly. Listen to Deborah Amos on the PBS Newshour Tuesday evening:
Watch Syria’s Assad Denies Ordering Deadly Crackdown as Sanctions Drive Down Currency on PBS. See more from PBS NEWSHOUR.
This fits with what Bashar says about his strategy in the interview:
…the majority of the Syrian people are in the middle and then you have people who support you and you have people who are against you. So the majority always in the middle. Those majority are not against you. If they are against you you cannot have stable most of the city…
Walters: You feel the majority of the people in this country support you?
Assad: I say the majority are in the middle and the majority are not against — to be precise.
He is trying to win over the majority, who are caught in the middle between the state and the terrorists.
I lean towards this last interpretation. Bashar al Assad is not a rocket scientist (only a physician), but he is more than smart enough to know what is going on and rational enough to stop it if he did not think it was in his interest. His focus is where it should be: winning the hearts and minds of the majority that is not yet against him, or at least keeping them neutral.
This understanding should inform the strategy of the opposition and the international community. Actions that turn this majority in Bashar al Assad’s direction (violence, sanctions that target vital commodities, rhetoric that suggests NATO is coming to the rescue) should be avoided. Actions that win over the substantial Syrian middle and lower classes (providing humanitarian assistance, international monitoring of the sort the UN has already undertaken or the Arab League has proposed, sanctioning non-vital trade and investment, denouncing regime violence, nonviolent boycotts, strikes and demonstrations) are the way to go.
Bashar is trying to outlast his opponents; they need to prepare for the long haul, even if we all hope this will end soon.
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This is not easy
American Ambassador Robert Ford is returning to Damascus, where violence continues. Security forces and pro-regime militias killed dozens yesterday while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was meeting with opposition Syrian National Council members in Geneva. It is not clear how many the defector-manned Free Syrian Army has killed, but the SNC is claiming its armed partners will only defend Syrians and not undertake offensive operations.
There is no sign of the Arab League observers Bashar al Assad claims to have agreed could be deployed. Syria is now saying that sanctions have to end before observers can be deployed. I guess Damascus forgot to mention that earlier.
What is to be done? More of the same I am afraid. There is no quick solution. Even if Bashar were to exit suddenly, there would still be a regime in place fighting for its life with the resources Iran provides. The effort now has to focus on tightening sanctions, especially those imposed by the European Union and the Arab League as well as Turkey. It is important also to continue to work on the Russians, who have so far blocked any UN Security Council resolution.
Burhan Ghalioun, who leads the SNC, goes over all these issues and more in his Wall Street Journal interview last week. Unfortunately, it attracted attention mainly for what he had to say about Syria being able to recover the Golan Heights and breaking its military alliance with Iran. Much more interesting were his commitment to nonviolence, to a “civil” state, to countering sectarianism, to Arab solidarity and to building a serious democracy with rule of law. The outlines of an SNC program are starting to emerge, including a desire for an orderly transition, maintenance of state institutions and elections within a year. But I found it hard to credit his dismissal of the Muslim Brotherhood. It has long played an important underground role in Syria and is likely to persist as an important political force in the post-Assad period.
The Americans seem to me still focused on hastening Bashar’s removal. That is certainly a worthy goal, but it may not happen. We also need to be worrying about sustaining the nonviolent opposition, which is under enormous pressure every day. Ambassador Ford’s return may give them a boost, but he is unlikely to be able to do much to help them or to communicate effectively with the regime, whose listening skills are minimal.
Getting the observers in would be one important step, but it is unclear to me whether they really exist. If Bashar did agree to them, could the Arab League deploy them within a reasonable time frame? Who are they? How many? How have they been trained? What rules of behavior will they follow? How will they report?
Bluff is not going to win this game. Enforcing sanctions, persuading the Russians to go along with a Security Council resolution, deploying Arab League observers, sustaining the protesters, keeping an exit door open for Bashar: none of it is easy, but together these things may begin slowly to turn the tide.
Here is Bashar al Assad with Barbara Walters: he asks for evidence of brutality, denies that he has given orders for a crackdown and suggests the UN is not credible. He likely also thinks the sun revolves around the earth:
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A step forward, but only one
Here are the agreed conclusions on Integrated B(oundary/order) Management (IBM) reached between Pristina and Belgrade. No question but that these are a step forward: an agreement for joint management of whatever you want to call the line between them. The heart of the matter is this:
4. The joint, integrated, single and secure posts will be located within a ‘common area of IBM crossing points’, jointly delineated, where officials of each party carry out relevant controls. Exceptionally, and limited to the common IBM areas, the parties will not display symbols of their respective jurisdictions;
The EU will chair the implementation group. The arrangement is not intended to decide or influence the question of status, and the agreement does not cover revenue or fiscal questions. It only provides a mechanism through which Belgrade and Pristina will presumably each meet its own revenue and fiscal requirements.
So far, so good. What is the agreement’s broader significance? It is one more step on the way to Belgrade’s acceptance of the Pristina authorities as the legitimate government on the undivided territory of Kosovo, whatever the status of that territory is. It is also a step by Pristina towards problem-solving cooperation with Belgrade.
It is not however more than that. There is still a long way to go in achieving the kind of cooperation, and mutual respect, that will allow both Serbia and Kosovo to proceed in their ambitions to join the European Union.
Is it enough to gain Belgrade candidacy status for the EU? On the merits, I think not: this is far short of Chancellor Merkel’s demand that Belgrade dismantle its parallel structures in northern Kosovo and give up on partition. There may of course be additional assurances on those points, but I would want to hear them said out loudly and unequivocally, if not signed and sealed, before accepting them as dispositive. If the EU decides to go ahead without those assurances, it will only be harder to get them in the future.
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Diplomacy imitates confused reality
Yesterday’s Bonn conference on Afghanistan reflected all too starkly the war. Lots of countries showed up, but Pakistan–certainly among the most important–did not. The Taliban weren’t there either. Iran was, but sounding out of tune with both the Americans and Afghans, who emphasized the need for continuing assistance and foreign military presence. Tehran blames the whole mess on foreign intervention. Afghanistan was looking for long-term commitment, not specific pledges. There was no progress on the country’s confusing current reality.
The best I can say for the event is that Hillary Clinton knows what is important: she emphasized rule of law, including the fight against corruption, and underlined the importance of being realistic about what can be achieved. Some might claim that these two points are mutually contradictory, but that’s the confusing reality.
I am surprised that the pressures for withdrawal from Afghanistan are not stronger than they are. I guess having an opposition devoted to “winning” gives a Democratic president a free hand to remain longer, if he wants to do so and can keep his own party in line. But it is hard to see how we’ll make it to 2014, when most of the U.S. troops are supposed to be on their way home, unless there is progress in negotiating with the Taliban.
No one seems to think that is happening, but I admit it would be hard to tell from outside. Negotiations of this sort go slowly and badly until suddenly they go well. It is worth trying, if only because success in is so important to rescuing the overall effort from failure.
Today’s sectarian attacks on Shia targets, which are unusual in Afghanistan, can be interpreted at least two ways: either there is a Taliban splinter group (or Al Qaeda) that is trying to wreck ongoing negotiations, or the Taliban have decided to widen their war in a sectarian direction, hoping to bring more chaos to Kabul and Afghanistan generally (one of the attacks took place in the usually quiet northern town Mazar-i-Sharif). More confused reality.
PS: The Taliban have joined in condemnation of the attacks. A Pakistani group with ties to al Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi al-Alami, has now claimed responsibility.
PPS: Those asking for the U.S. to complete the job in Afghanistan seem to me to be asking for more than we are likely to give.
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Please, Athens, prove me wrong
Is Greece in the Balkans? Of course the answer geographically is yes. But its leaders now have to decide whether it is still culturally part of the Balkans–where many games are zero sum, with one side’s loss being the other’s gain. Or whether Greece has really become part of Europe, where at least in good times a rising tide is expected to lift all boats.
The occasion is today’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) decision that Athens violated a 1995 “interim accord” when it blocked Skopje’s entry into NATO at the Bucharest summit in 2008 under the awkward name “The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.” The court went on to decline to order Athens not to do it again, saying:
As the Court previously explained, “[a]s a general rule, there is no reason to suppose that a State whose act or conduct has been declared wrongful by the Court will repeat that act or conduct in the future, since its good faith must be presumed”
How I wish that such presumption were justified!
These are not good times for Europe in general, but especially not for Greece. It is paying a high price for fiscal profligacy. Many in Europe are still expecting a formal default on its sovereign debt, followed by who knows what: exit from the euro? German receivership? Greeks are furious at their government for the austerity it has been forced to impose and what many regard as the unfair distribution of the burdens of fiscal adjustment. The kind of growth that might lift Greece out of its debt trap seems nowhere in the forecasts.
I’m afraid this will not put Athens in a mood to do the right thing by Macedonia: accept it for NATO membership as The FYROM and go back to the negotiating table with renewed determination to find a more permanent solution. We have the unfortunate and recent precedent of Serbia, which also recently lost its case when the ICJ advised that Kosovo’s declaration of independence breached no international prohibition. Did Serbia change its tune? No. It simply said the ICJ had answered the wrong question (a question posed, yes, by Belgrade).
Please, Athens, prove me wrong: show us all that you have left behind the beggar-thy-neighbor politics of the Balkans and instead want to demonstrate truly European credentials by unblocking membership in NATO for The FYROM. That in turn would allow Montenegro an invitation to enter as well, giving renewed vitality to the Alliance and reenergizing the Balkans to proceed with the many reforms the Euro-Atlantic institutions require.
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Montenegro, shield of the West
That is, of course, super-hyperbole: Montenegro is a tiny country of fewer than 620,000 people whose virtues include a beautiful coastline along the Adriatic and willingness since the late 1990s to be counted in the growing pro-democracy, pro-Europe camp in the Balkans. It can lay reasonable claim to being the most ethnically integrated (and varied) country in the region (only 45% of the population self-identifies as “Montenegrin” tout court).
The postage-stamp sized country gained independence from its union with Serbia, the last remnant of Yugoslavia, in 2006 and has since made good progress. It is now a candidate for membership in the European Union but will not complete the 35 chapters of the membership process for some years.
Montenegro’s leadership would like to bring it into NATO, even if only 40% of the population is currently in favor (30% are undecided). But the Montenegrins hesitate: the Americans are telling them it will be difficult to do this in May at the NATO summit in Chicago. They are excessively respectful of American advice. Neither NATO nor the EU is in an expansive mood in this era of euro-schlerosis (or worse) and difficulties pursuing the Alliance war in Afghanistan. That is unfortunate for the NATO, which has so far benefited from its investment in enlargement.
The Montenegrin military numbers a bit over 3000. A couple of dozen participated in NATO’s Afghanistan mission and others have joined UN mission in Liberia and Cyprus as well as the EU naval mission off Somalia. Podgorica (that’s the charming capital, once known as Titograd) is well-intentioned, but its capacities are miniscule.
Still, it would be a good idea for Montenegro to get fully read and to press for NATO membership, and for NATO to think about opening the door. Why? First, as one keen Balkan-watcher notes, Montenegro is first in line, so if it is shut out none of the other candidates can come in. This would be particularly problematic if Macedonia, which is fully qualified for NATO membership but blocked by Greek objections to its name, were to manage somehow to get itself unblocked. That could happen: either because Athens and Skopje come to an agreement on the name (unlikely) or because the International Court of Justice decides that Skopje–under an agreement with Greece signed in 1995–is entitled to come into NATO under its awkward UN designation: The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (The FYROM).
The ICJ decision on that question issued today may, or may not, open the door for Macedonia to enter NATO as The FYROM. The court decided that Greece had violated the agreement but said it could not order Greece to allow The FYROM into NATO. Such respect for sovereignty seems almost quaint. But what it does is to leave the issue, once again, up to Athens, which so far has shown no inclination to put this issue behind it. Let’s hope Greece makes a wiser decision this time around.
There are more than tactical reasons for admitting Montenegro to NATO. It would help to convince all the non-NATO, non-EU members in the Balkans that they really do have an opportunity to join the West, even if they may have years more of preparation before they fully qualify. It would raise the ante with Serbia, where the majority of the population opposes NATO membership. And it would help to insulate Montenegro against any instability that arises in either Bosnia or Kosovo, where things are still not fully settled.
With an active push, NATO membership is at least possible for all of these countries far sooner than EU membership is likely for any of them. Chicago is an opportunity to keep the Balkans and NATO moving forward at minimal cost in these uncertain times.
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