Month: January 2015
The war may be over, crime persists
Sergio Guzmán Escobar, a SAIS master’s student, reports from Friday’s conversation with Juan Carlos Pinzón, Colombia’s Minister of Defense, at the Inter-American dialogue. Video of the event is available here.
With the Colombian peace talks between the Government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionaras de Colombia (FARC) – the world’s longest lasting Marxist-Leninist insurgency – reaching what analysts call a “point of no return” the Colombian Minister of Defense, Juan Carlos Pinzón, discussed the country’s security outlook. The minister arrived from Davos, Switzerland where he reassured international investors about the continuity of Colombia’s security policies in a post-agreement scenario.
Moreover, he reviewed the country’s current security threats and outlined them as:
1. Armed Insurgent Groups – Communist insurgencies groups like the FARC and the Ejercito de Liberación Nacional (ELN), who engage in terrorist activities, drug trafficking, extortion, child recruitment and illegal mining.
2. Organized Crime – Remnants of the former right-wing paramilitary organization Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) and groups of organized gangs that engage in drug-related violence in both urban and rural contexts.
3. Citizen Security – street crime and urban gangs who are responsible for the palpable insecurity in the cities, including muggings and house burglary.
The fact that the negotiations come to a successful end will not necessarily mean that the country’s security outlook will improve overnight. The nature of the threats will change and the armed forces and the police will have to respond accordingly. The minister noted that Colombia has already undergone four different Demobilization, Disarmament and Reintegration (DDR) processes and will be able to see the process through in collaboration with multiple government agencies that have experience in this field, especially the National Agency for Reintegration.
As a result of the negotiations, rumors have emerged about the future of the Colombian military possibly downsizing as part of the agreements with the FARC. The minister was emphatic that the armed forces are not going to be downsized regardless of budgetary pressures. The size of the armed forces in the next 5-10 years will remain constant. But there will be a greater mix of military police activities (the Colombian police is a under the Ministry of Defense and is a separate branch of the Armed Forces), to enable the armed forces to engage threats resulting from the peace process. “An agreement will not banish crime.”
Responding to allegations that a new rural police force would include demobilized members of the FARC, the minster remarked “No.”
A pending issue the minister failed to signal in his remarks arises from Venezuela. As the peace agreements are close to being finalized, Colombia is no longer dependent on Venezuela’s “good offices” to keep the FARC at the negotiating table. If oil prices remain low, Caracas’s economic situation will be dire. Scarcity of basic goods will cause President Maduro’s political support among the population to wane. Turbulence in Colombia’s neighbor may represent a real security threat.
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Macedonia in Europe
The Conflict Management Program
and
The Center for Transatlantic Relations
Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies
present
Macedonia: Can It Join Europe?
Presenter:
Fatmir Besimi
Deputy Prime Minister of Macedonia for European Affairs
Introduction and Moderator:
Daniel Serwer
Professor, Conflict Management
Senior Fellow, Center for Transatlantic Relations
SAIS
Rome 806
1619 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Tuesday February 3rd
3-4 PM
RSVP: itlong@jhu.edu
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Thaçi at SAIS
The Conflict Management Program
and
The Center for Transatlantic Relations
Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies
present
Kosovo: From importer of security to a stabilizing factor of South East Europe
Presenter:
HE Hashim Thaçi
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs
Republic of Kosovo
Introduction and Moderator:
Daniel Serwer
Professor, Conflict Management
Senior Fellow, Center for Transatlantic Relations
SAIS
Rome Auditorium
1619 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Wednesday February 4
10 AM
RSVP: itlong@jhu.edu
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Putin’s Petard
I participated last night in SAIS’s Central Asia-Caucasus Forum, which convened a panel on “Putin’s Kosovo Card: its Meaning to Eastern Europe, Caucasus, and Central Asia” that included Kurt Volker and Mamuka Tsereteli with the skillful moderation of Fred Starr. These are my speaking notes:
• Vladimir Putin has persistently and insistently claimed that what the US did in Kosovo sets a precedent for what Russia has done in Ukraine.
• He has conveniently forgotten that Russia argued in 1999 that only the UN Security Council could authorize bombing of Yugoslavia, so if Kosovo is a precedent it is one Russia should not be following in Ukraine without UN approval.
• Putin has also conveniently forgotten that Russia played a critical role in urging Slobodan Milosevic to yield control of Kosovo to NATO.
• I have no doubt that in his mind what he is doing in Ukraine is in part retaliation for what the US did in Kosovo, over Russian objections. But that is quite different from claiming Kosovo constitutes a precedent.
• The claim it is a precedent is based on a bizarre and false analogy with no serious validity. Let me count the things that are wrong with it:
1. NATO intervened against Serbia to protect Kosovo Albanians from a concerted campaign of ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity by the Serbian government. There have been human rights violations, but no comparable campaign of mass atrocity and expulsion by the Ukrainian government against Russian-speaking Ukrainians either in Crimea or in Donbas.
2. Russia intervened overtly in Crimea, taking territory by military force and annexing it. The US never sought to annex Kosovo’s territory, or to attach it to any other country, something its internationally imposed constitution now prohibits.
3. The UNSC voted an end to the Kosovo war in June 1999 with resolution 1244, which confirmed the outcome and made the issue of its legality moot. There is no such resolution for Crimea or eastern Ukraine. I hope there will never be one unless Russia agrees to withdraw and yield sovereignty back to Ukraine.
4. The UN established a protectorate in Kosovo and governed it until 2008, ensuring that it transitioned to democracy and implemented all the requirements of the UN-sponsored Ahtisaari plan, including in particular protection for the Serb population in Kosovo. Russia has blocked any international engagement in Crimea to protect non-Russians. There is no sign that Crimea or any Russian-controlled part of Ukraine is headed for democracy, and ethnic cleansing of both Ukrainians and Tatars is ongoing.
5. Kosovo is now recognized de jure as sovereign by more than 100 other states and accepted de facto by many more. The Russian annexation of Crimea and the supposed independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia have obtained few international acknowledgements.
6. Russia has also intervened covertly in eastern Ukraine, constantly denying its official presence and prevaricating about its military aid to the Russia-sponsored insurgents. It is currently launching an offensive against Mariupol, which has a large Russian-speaking population (44.4% in 2002, 48.7% Ukrainian). There was no such covert intervention in Kosovo, where the NATO air campaign, its preparations for a ground offensive and even its support for the Kosovo Liberation Army were well-known at the time.
• If there is a Kosovo precedent for what Russia is doing in Ukraine, it is not NATO’s protection of the Albanians but rather Russia’s own attempt to grab the Pristina airport by force in June 1999 as prelude to the arrival of Russian forces by air and occupation of northern Kosovo.
• An even more significant precedent is Slobodan Milosevic in the early 1990s, who claimed to be protecting his co-national Serbs from mistreatment while expelling Croats and Bosniaks from territory the Yugoslav National Army seized in Croatia and Bosnia.
• The pattern is a familiar one: exaggerated reports of mistreatment, organization of militias to protect against largely fictional mistreatment, provocation by those militias against legitimate state forces, then intervention to protect co-nationals from any efforts to restore law and order.
• Russia has repeatedly engaged in this pattern of creating problems in order to control territory with Russian-speaking majorities in the former Soviet space: Transnistria, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Transnistria, it should be noted, pre-dates Kosovo.
• Moscow has gotten away with it before, so it will try again. Maybe in Kazakhstan. And it will encourage copy-cat efforts in Bosnia’s Republika Srpska and Nagorno-Karabakh, trying to ensure that the sovereign states in which those entities are located cannot exert effective control.
• This is a strategy of destabilization and control by military and paramilitary means.
• One more thing: if Putin seriously thought Kosovo was a precedent for Ukraine that he is justified in following, Moscow would accept the results of the NATO intervention and recognize Pristina. Fat chance of that.
• So as the Russian army attacks Mariupol, let’s call it what it is: naked aggression on neighboring state with the aim of grabbing territory populated in part by Russian speakers.
The discussion revolved in part around criteria for statehood and sovereignty as well as partition questions. Putin’s card is a petard, which is a small explosive device with a tendency to explode in ways that “hoist” the owner. The Russian Federation may well eventually face internal problems inspired in part by Putin’s own behavior in Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova, not to mention Syria.
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Can the Libyans find peace in Geneva?
After the first round of talks earlier this month left observers cautiously optimistic, key Libyan stakeholders were back in Geneva today to continue to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the bloody conflict in the country.
The main objective of the Geneva talks is creation of a national unity government, as well as solidification of the ceasefire declared by a number of armed groups following the first session on January 14-15. A boycott of the negotiations by the Tripoli-based General National Congress (GNC) and sporadic outbreak of violence in Eastern and Southern parts of the country has perturbed the meager successes of the first round of negotiations, but the majority of delegates are now back at the talks.
The UN-sponsored mediation track still faces a number of difficulties. The most serious is the failure to bring all the relevant actors to the table. The GNC boycott means that only one of the two main political parties to the conflict, the Tobruk-based government, is fully represented. Tripoli is indirectly represented through a number of boycotting members of the Tobruk-based House of Representatives and other civil society members (including Nihad Maiteeq , the sister of former prime minister Ahmad Maiteeq). There have also been consultations between UN envoy Bernardino Leon and the GNC leadership. Nonetheless, the lack of formal participation by the GNC arguably harms the legitimacy of any agreement in Geneva – particularly any agreement about a national unity government.
A related problem is the perceived preference by the international community for the Tobruk-based government. The basis for this preference is an election in which fewer than 20% of Libyans participated, the results of which were voided by the Libyan Supreme Court. That government’s close relationship with general Khalifa Haftar, whose military campaign against the entire spectrum of Libyan Islamists has greatly contributed to the polarization of Libyan politics, makes this one-sided recognition difficult to defend.
Jason Pack, a Cambridge University researcher and analyst of Libyan political affairs, points to the problems of this one-sided approach in a recent New York Times Op-Ed:
Western governments are reluctant to acknowledge the implications of the Supreme Court ruling because many of them are secretly cheering for the Tobruk faction to either reconquer the country or dominate a national unity government. After all, the Tobruk government claims to be fighting Ansar al-Sharia in Benghazi — the very same group that killed the American ambassador, Christopher Stevens, in 2012. Perversely, the West’s ability to act as a neutral party and promote compromise is hindered by the fact that it has already recognized Tobruk as Libya’s sole sovereign.
Western backing of the Tobruk regime also seems to rest on a simplistic narrative of the Libyan conflict as a clash between republican secularists and radical Islamists. This binary perspective fails to identify the multiple forces that operate and gain from the conflict and, as one analyst has pointed out, empowers the hardliners on either side that have most to lose from a negotiated settlement.
Even more problematic than Western one-sidedness, however, is the strong support afforded to the local adversaries by regional allies. The Egyptians and Emiratis support Khalifa Haftar’s anti-Islamist campaign. Qatar and Turkey support the Islamists in Tripoli. This has aggravated the conflict, fueling a destructive polarization of Libyan politics. Instead of bringing the parties to the table, the foreign support has emboldened these forces, while simultaneously eroding the legitimacy of both parties in the eyes of ordinary Libyans. Further military support is likely to aggravate the situation further. The dangers of a longer term proxy war in Libya should not be taken lightly.
In spite of the monumental difficulties that the UN mediation efforts are facing, some indicators point in the right direction. Bernardino Leon and his team at the UN Support Mission to Libya (UNSMIL) seem to have made up for the GNC’s non-participation with the engagement of a wide spectrum of political actors and civil society representatives. Following the current round, representatives of Libyan municipal councils will meet on Wednesday to discuss confidence building measures at the community level. Although no date has been provided, it is hoped that this will be followed by discussions between key militia leaders. This multi-track approach may help the UN instigate results that can be implemented on the ground.
The political and economic situation should provide a sense of urgency that may help ripen the conflict for a negotiated settlement. The bloody fighting that characterized much of the second half of 2014 has now turned into a stalemate, with no one side appearing to have a decisive advantage. Tripoli and Tobruk are rapidly running out of money. In both cities the politicians know that Libyan state revenue is the glue that holds their militias together. Once these revenues disappear, many militias might find it more advantageous to pursue their own agendas, further fragmenting the Libyan political landscape.
The great challenges of the current Libyan conflict cannot be resolved in a few days in Geneva. But progress in the talks could stop the situation from deteriorating.
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Syrian opposition getting their act together
The Syrian Coalition of Revolutionary and Opposition Forces informs me that members of various factions of the Syrian opposition met in Cairo over the past few days and agreed yesterday on the attached Cairo Declaration. They also agreed to hold a national conference for all Syrian opposition factions in the coming months.
Attendees and signers included members of a broad spectrum of opposition groups, as well as national figures from various segments of Syrian society, including: Aref Dalilah, Hussein Awdat, Haitham Manaa, Ahmad Jarba, Nibras Fadel, Jamal Suleiman, Riad Naasan Agha, Saleh Muslem, Jihad Makdesi, and Samir Seifan.
I am told the signatories include a significant slice of opposition from inside Syria as well as a higher proportion of Alawites and Christians than in the Syrian Coalition itself. The Muslim Brotherhood was not present (after all, the meeting was in Cairo) but the door remains open to its participation in the spring conference.
This looks to me like the latest in a long series of efforts to unify the opposition. This time the platform is nationalist, non-sectarian, civil, and democratic, including explicit reference to gender equality. It pays due deference to decentralization but also foresees a unified Syria and withdrawal of all foreign forces. I think it doesn’t explicitly address the upcoming intra-Syrian dialogue Moscow is sponsoring, but it is possible some of the signatories may be planning to attend that meeting starting Sunday.
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