Remembrance without resolve

How much time is required to decide if the UN observers in Syria are failing?  If you are the New York Times, two weekend days after authorization by the UN Security Council will do.  You wouldn’t want to wait until a significant number of them have actually deployed.  Even today, only eleven are active.  And you would cite Syrian army attacks occurring while they are not present as evidence of their ineffectiveness, whereas the opposite would seem more likely the case:  reduced attacks while the observers are present suggest they are having an impact.

The observers admittedly have a thankless task.  There is as yet no peace to keep in Syria, where the regime continues to attack its opponents, refuses to withdraw the military from population centers or to allow peaceful demonstrations, blocks journalistic and humanitarian access and is not prepared to discuss a transition away from the Assad regime.  The opposition also occasionally resorts to violence against the security forces.  If they are going to have an impact, the observers will need to acquire it after full deployment over a period of weeks, working diligently with both protesters and the regime to ensure disengagement and to gain respect for Kofi Annan’s six-point peace plan.

This they can do, but only by being forthright in their assessments of what is going on, determined in their efforts to go where they want when they want and honest in communicating their observations to both the Syrian and the international press.

The regime will do everything it can to intimidate the observers and shield their eyes from the worst of what is going on.  It will retaliate against protesters who communicate with the observers.  And it will play “cat and mouse,” encouraging the observers to go where nothing is happening and discouraging them from going where something interesting might be observed.

Kofi Annan will not be easily fooled.  His long experience with UN peacekeeping and with the Security Council will ensure that Bashar al Assad faces a savvy and determined international civil servant, provided Washington continues to back the UN effort.

The initial deployment is for 90 days.  It should have been shorter, so that the Security Council would be forced to review and decide whether to renew the mission earlier than July.  Still, reports every 15 days to the Council will keep the issue on its agenda.  The number of observers is limited to 300, still too few to monitor a country the size and population of Syria.  At the very best, they will be able to make a difference in a relatively few communities, unless their numbers are much increased.

Some of the observers are likely to resign in frustration, as some of the Arab League observers did over the past winter.  Others will take the regime’s side, criticizing the protesters for violence against the security forces.  There will be confusion, even consternation, as they try to get a grip on a very slippery situation, one that threatens every day to descend into sectarian bloodletting of the worst sort.

Ultimately, Kofi Annan will need to decide whether the observers are serving a useful purpose.  The history of such missions suggests that they are greeted initially with a surge of violence, which subsides if the observers gain respect as truly neutral.  The difficulty is that “neutrality” is in the eye of the beholder.  One of the beholders in Syria, Bashar al Assad, has labelled all the demonstrators terrorists and will try to settle for nothing less from the UN.

As chance would have it, President Obama on Monday announced the creation of an Atrocities Prevention Board, saying

…remembrance without resolve is a hollow gesture.

The first test of those words will be in Syria, Bahrain and the border between what is now Sudan and South Sudan.  In all three places, there is a need to stiffen international community and in particular U.S. resolve to prevent atrocities, protect civilians and make oppressors accountable.  This does not necessarily mean the military action others are calling for. In fact, none of these situations lends itself to military means.  But the full political, diplomatic and economic weight of the United States should be brought to bear.  The President needs make sure his words and gestures are not hollow as he weighs U.S. options in these on-going conflicts.