Tag: United Nations
Syria: conference time
Secretary Kerry’s visit to Moscow has yielded a proposal for a Syria “peace conference,” to be held as early as the end of this month. This is significant in at least two ways:
- the Russians and Americans both still prefer a negotiated transition (often misleadingly referred to in the press as a “peaceful” one);
- any dramatic increase in US assistance to the Syrian opposition will likely have to wait until the conference is held, or proves to be a mirage.
What are the prospects for success of this initiative? Not good unless Moscow and Washington are prepared not only to convene the event but also strongarm their respective friends (the regime and the opposition) into attending and settling. I am reminded of the interminable series of conferences on Yugoslavia that the European Community, as it was then known, convened in the early 1990s. The warring parties all showed up, if I remember correctly. But little was accomplished on the main issues until the Americans twisted President Izetbegovic’s arm at Dayton, compelling him to accept a peace agreement he thought unjust.
The main issue in the Syria conflict is power: who will control the government in Damascus? Russia and the United States a year ago agreed to a transition in which power would be delegated to a government with representation of both the Asad regime and the opposition. The American view is that this means Bashar al Asad would give up all power (and presumably opt to leave the country). The Russian view is that Bashar can stay and maybe even run in an election.
Sharp as this contrast is, the Americans and Russians have some common interests. Neither wants to see a victory for Sunni extremists. Both would want any opposition representation in a transition government to be predominantly moderate. Moscow and Washington will be particularly keen to emarginate Jabhat al Nusra, the Al Qaeda in Iraq affiliate that has established itself as a leader in the opposition fight against the Asad regime. Neither the Americans nor the Russians will want to see a post-Asad massacre of Syria’s Alawites and Christians, some of whom have been mainstays of the Asad regime. The Russians will want to maintain their port access in Syria. The Americans should be able to live with that. The Americans will want a more or less democratic outcome. The Russians will be able to live with that, so long as it does not open the door to haven for extremists who mount insurgencies in Russia’s Muslim-populated territories.
What would cause the regime and the opposition to agree to a negotiated settlement?
The opposition is having serious difficulties on the battlefield. Its fragmented forces are able to “clear” some countryside areas and parts of towns, but they are unable to “hold” and “build.” With 6.8 million Syrians now in need of humanitarian relief according to the UN, the opposition is simply overwhelmed. Air and artillery attacks on “liberated” areas make it impossible to meet the needs of non-fighting citizens. The regime intentionally targets hospitals, schools and bakeries, in an effort to demoralize people and get them to expel the rebel fighters. All the (necessarily non-extremist) opposition Syrians I’ve met from inside Syria support the idea of negotiating with the regime. In the parlance of conflict management, the secularists and moderate Islamists perceive the situation as “a mutually hurting stalemate” in which neither side can gain from continued fighting. The situation is therefore “ripe.”
The regime is less inclined to see things that way. It still has ample Russian and Iranian support. It is able to deliver humanitarian assistance to much of the territory it still controls. Valerie Amos, the UN’s humanitarian chief, noted yesterday at a Middle East Institute event that some opposition family members move to government-controlled areas when their (mostly) men go off to fight against the regime, because they are safer and food is more available. The Syrian army is exhausted, but the elite forces that do most of the fighting are not flagging, as they are mostly Alawite and view this struggle as an existential one.
So we do not have here a “mutually hurting stalemate,” even if some on one side perceive the situation as ripe (and likely many citizens sitting on the fence would too). Nor do we have a sense on both sides of a “way out.” Much of the opposition may be willing to talk, but they don’t want a negotiated solution that leaves Bashar al Assad in place. The regime stalwarts see no negotiated solution without him.
If you want a negotiated solution, which Moscow and Washington both prefer because it will give them more control over who gains power, what you’ve got to do is get the regime to perceive it cannot gain from continuing the fighting while not giving the opposition so much encouragement that it decides to continue. There are many ways Washington and Moscow can do this. But we’ll save the options for another day. We’ll also need to discuss who speaks for the opposition and for the regime, which is a non-trivial issue that will need to be resolved before any conference has a chance of success.
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The Americans are coming
President Obama, bless his heart, is sending John Kerry off to Moscow next week to convince the Russians that something needs to be done about Syria’s use of chemical weapons. Yesterday’s leak that the President is considering supplying weapons directly to the opposition is presumably intended to strengthen Kerry’s hand in what must be an uphill push.
The smart money is betting the Russians won’t budge. I’m not so certain, but in any event Obama is doing the right thing to pursue them. He may eventually have to act without Russian concurrence, in order to maintain American credibilty in the eyes of the Iranian and North Korean regimes. But it would be far better reach a political accommodation that ends the Asad regime with the Russians on board, so as not to endanger their cooperation in the nuclear talks with Iran or the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Obama needs Moscow for both.
Kerry’s push could get some help from unexpected quarters. Missiles were fired yesterday at a Russian civil aircraft flying over Syria. There is no reason to believe the opposition has the capability to target aircraft at an altitude anywhere near 9000 feet. If they did, they would surely use the capability against the Syrian air force. The Russians were already busy denying that they were urging Hizbollah to withdraw from Syria. Someone in Moscow has to be scratching his head and asking if Russia is on the right side in Syria.
Russia need not change its mind and come over to the opposition. Great powers rarely do that. Russia wants to convince the world it is again a great power. A wink and a nod would suffice. That’s what Moscow did in Kosovo in 1999. The UN Security Council resolution legalizing that intervention passed after the war.
The really vital interest for Russia in Syria is to avoid a Sunni extremist takeover, which Moscow fears would infect its restive Muslim population in places like Chechnya and Dagestan. Here Obama and Putin are in the same sinking boat. What they’ve done so far has increased the likelihood of an extremist takeover in Syria, not decreased it. If Russia is serious about dealing a blow against jihad in Syria, it is becoming eminently clear that Bashar al Asad is not the guy to do it.
The Russians do not believe that Asad has used chemical weapons. I trust Kerry will be going to Moscow with a gaggle of intel analysts in tow to make the case. It will not be easy. The Russians don’t trust anything we say. Our record, from the Tonkin Gulf to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is not a great one. Let’s leave aside “Remember the Maine!”
But I think there is good reason to believe chemical weapons have been used in Syria, likely to test our reaction to their use. If we don’t react, they’ll be used a bit more, slowly erasing that (red) line in the sand.
Obama might like to just ignore the challenge, as chemical weapons are no better at killing people than conventional arms and a good deal more difficult to handle. That’s where Iran and North Korea come in. If he fails to react to Syria’s use of chemical weapons, how will he convince Tehran or Pyongyang that there is a credible threat of military action against their nuclear programs? That threat is vital to any possibility of diplomatic success with either of them.
This gloomy picture could change dramatically if Moscow decides it has bet on the wrong horse and decides to abandon Asad. It’s not likely, but it’s highly desirable. Obama and Kerry are right to try.
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Civilians >> chemical weapons
The “Salon” I did with Stanford’s Lina Khatib yesterday on “Should the U.S. intervene in Syria?” focused mainly on chemical weapons, as all conversations about Syria yesterday did.
Lina, who had published a piece with Larry Diamond on Thursday making the case for military intervention (arms to the rebels plus a no-fly zone but no boots on the ground) in Syria, is concerned not only about chemical weapons use, the evidence for which she regards as “credible,” but about the fertile ground for Islamist extremists and the impact on the region. The longer the fighting lasts, the worse it gets.
I don’t disagree with any of that. But it doesn’t matter whether she and I think the evidence of chemical weapons use is credible. What matters is what the Russians, Chinese, Turks and others think. If there is going to be serious military intervention in Syria by the United States, it is going to need multilateral cover, preferably a UN Security Council resolution as well as an Arab League request. The standards the evidence is going to need to meet are high. The world is in no mood for another Middle East war based on flimsy claims related to weapons of mass destruction.
It is going to take time to assemble the evidence and convince skeptics. Once we are ready, Peter Juul proposes a reasonable course of action to mobilize the UN Security Council and NATO (for both military action and humanitarian relief). If that fails, the US will have to consider unilateral action without multilateral cover, but that is a course of action with many drawbacks.
There is also a credibility issue in the other direction: if the US doesn’t act against Syrian use of chemical weapons, why would the Iranians believe that we would take action against their nuclear program? This is a serious problem, but it should not drive the timetable. Being 100% certain, and trying to convince others, is more important than the timing.
That is a cruel thing to say. Syrians are dying every day. The average is climbing towards 200 per day, 6000 per month. The total by now is well over 70,000. Those are staggering numbers. Few of them are killed by chemical weapons. Bombing, Scuds, artillery and small arms fire are much more common:
The targeting of civilians is a war crime, no matter what the weapons used. Civilians are more important than the weapons that kill them. The standards of proof are easily met. The Syrian security forces and their paramilitaries are attacking and killing civilians daily with conventional weapons.
I would like to see the international community act on those grounds, rather than focusing on a limited (and difficult to prove) use of sarin gas. But this is not the unipolar moment of 1999, when the United States led a NATO intervention in Kosovo without UN Security Council approval. That is unlikely to happen. So we are heading down a long road of difficult proof.
Some, like Leila Hilal on Chris Hayes’ show last night, would prefer a negotiated solution. So would I. But it is not looking as if Bashar al Assad is hurting badly enough to yield to the transition plans that Russia and the United States agreed in Geneva last June. The mutually hurting stalemate that would provide the conditions for that will require that the revolutionaries do a bit better than they have managed so far. More international assistance is going to be needed.
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Pandora’s box opens also in Serbia
Yesterday’s House subcommittee hearing on Kosovo and Serbia focused mainly on Chair Rohrabacher’s strong advocacy of self-determination for everyone. Why, he asked repeatedly in many different ways, should we force people to live in a state where they don’t want to live? Isn’t self-determination fundamental to Americans? Why should we not want it for others? What is sacrosanct about borders drawn by dictators, monarchs and colonialists? Why shouldn’t everyone be able to choose the state in which they live? Why would we give that choice to Kosovars and not to others?
He was joined in these refrains by at least three of the four experts on the non-Administration panel of witnesses. I was the most vigorous of the dissenters, helped along the way by Democratic Representatives Engel and Keating. Any newbie watching the show might have thought that there is a real debate on this issue in Washington, and maybe even a partisan divide between Republicans who advocate self-determination and Democrats who want to trap people as minorities in states they do not want to live in.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Representative Rohrabacher is an outlier, not a trend. There is no real debate in Washington, where both Republicans and Democrats generally prefer the traditional position in favor of state sovereignty except where there is mutual agreement to divorce (e.g., Czechoslovakia, the breakup of the Soviet Union and Sudan’s partition). Even then, the preference is definitively in favor of changing the status of a pre-existing boundary (from an internal one to an international border) rather than moving it to accommodate ethnic differences.
Why is this the case? To make a long story short: it saves lives. Trying to move a border to accommodate ethnic differences is never simple or straightforward. There is always someone on the wrong side of the line. That someone will either try to move the line again, or the majority on his side of the line will try to move him, or both. This is how ethnic cleansing begins. It ends in death and destruction, sometimes on a genocidal scale.
Why then did some of us advocate Kosovo independence, which amounts to partition of Serbia?
First, it is important to note that the boundary between the former Yugoslav province of Kosovo and Serbia was not moved. In the eyes of those who recognized Kosovo’s sovereignty, the status of the boundary was changed to an international border, but it is drawn where Tito left it. This is not because we think there is something sacrosanct about former Yugoslavia’s internal borders, but simply because redrawing it is problematic and likely to lead to conflict. There are something like 10,000 Albanians who would like to return to homes north of the Ibar river. There are more Serbs who live south of the Ibar than north of it. They don’t want to leave–they’ve proven that by staying this long. If the border were redrawn at the Ibar explicitly to separate Serbs and Albanians, you’d have a lot of unhappy people unable to return or retain their homes.
Second, there really was no choice. UN Security Council resolution 1244 removed Kosovo (in principle all of it, including the territory north of the Ibar) from Serbian sovereignty in 1999. From then until Kosovo declared independence in February 2008, Serbia made no effort whatsoever to “make unity attractive,” in the phrase used in Sudan. In the meanwhile, the UN was relatively successful in building up democratically validated institutions in Pristina, which now enjoy substantial but not universal Serb participation.
When Belgrade approved the new Serbian constitution in 2006, it needed a “double majority” (50% of those voting had to approve and 50% of registered voters had to vote). It got the second majority only by crossing off the Kosovo Albanian names on the voter registration lists, thus denying Kosovars the right to block adoption of the constitution by not voting in the referendum. This for me was the last straw. It meant that Belgrade did not regard the Kosovars as citizens of Serbia. Therefore they had to be citizens of a different state. That state is now the Republic of Kosovo.
The Kosovo situation is not, as US government officials often claim, “unique.” There are certainly parallels and worse in Kurdistan. But the Kurds, for their own reasons, have not yet chosen to declare independence, knowing full well that the US, Turkey and Iran lean heavily against. That 17% of Iraq’s oil revenue also weighs heavily against. The fact that the boundary between Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq is not yet agreed would make a Kurdistan declaration of independence a sure-fire way to start a debilitating conflict in a country that is now the world’s third largest oil exporter. That conflict would likely spread to “Eastern” Kurdistan (which is inside Iran) and to Turkey.
Redrawing the border between Kosovo and Serbia would likewise ignite regional conflicts. Albanian nationalists would see it as triggering their right to unite with Albanian communities in Serbia, Macedonia and Albania, a right explicitly denied in Kosovo’s constitution. Republika Srpska, the Serb-dominated 49% of Bosnia and Herzegovina, would seek either independence or union with Serbia.
That is enough to deter me, but I’ve saved the worst for last: Serbia itself would be put at risk. Its Vojvodina province, or part of it, might well be inspired to seek independence or union with Hungary. Bosniak-majority municipalities in Sandjak would certainly want to join Bosnia, never mind that they are not contiguous with it.
I trust this “Pandora’s box” scenario is one the international community will choose not to trigger by redrawing Kosovo’s borders. But I fully anticipate that Albanians in southern Serbia, Bosniaks in Sandjak, Hungarians in Vojvodina and perhaps other minorities elsewhere in Serbia will start asking for the same rights Serbia has gotten in the Belgrade/Pristina agreement for the Serb-majority municipalities in northern Kosovo. I’ll be interested to hear whether those who want everyone treated equally will advocate for them, or side with Belgrade when it denies them the right to govern themselves, including choosing their own police chief and having a special appeals court panel.
Pandora’s box opens also in Serbia. Best to keep it closed.
PS: Here are the videos of the hearing.
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There is still time
Yesterday was a big day for Serbian diplomacy. President Nikolic spent 40 minutes this morning at the UN denouncing the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Former Foreign Minister and now President of the General Assembly Jeremic claimed Serbia is committed to peace based on rule of law while continuing to disagree with the International Court of Justice on whether Kosovo’s declaration of independence breached international law (the result of a question Jeremic himself posed while foreign minister). The Prime Minister took himself off to Moscow, where Prime Minister Medvedev pledged to back whatever Serbia wants on Kosovo.
This trifecta tells us something about where Serbia is headed: it intends to maintain its claim to sovereignty over all of Kosovo, backed by Moscow. It will defy and criticize decisions of international tribunals whenever they do not accord with Belgrade’s own views. Its interest in EU membership is relative. It will not compromise even over the northwestern 11% of Kosovo, where fewer than half the Serbs in Kosovo live.
I imagine all of this defiance plays well for the domestic Serbian audience, where Nikolic, Jeremic and Dacic may all be campaigning sooner rather than later. Deputy Prime Minister Vucic, who increasingly is the real power in Serbia because of the popularity of his (once also Nikolic’s) “Progressive” Party, is widely thought to be contemplating early elections. Vucic’s anti-corruption campaign has garnered him a lot of support.
There is every reason to believe that nationalists will emerge from new elections even stronger than they are today. This is a Serbia pointed in the wrong direction: it is choosing a retrograde and quixotic claim to Kosovo over the EU and continuing to deny its role in the wars of the 1990s, or seeking to balance out that role by reference to the misdeeds of others. I share Belgrade’s unhappiness that more non-Serbs have not been convicted for crimes against Serbs, but that in no way relieves Serbia of responsibility for acts committed on its behalf.
American and European Union efforts to persuade Serbia to moderate its views on Kosovo have so far failed. Western policy has essentially been all carrot, no stick. Washington agreed to disagree on Kosovo while fully supporting Serbia’s efforts to gain access to EU benefits. The EU, until Angela Merkel’s tough stand against Serbia’s parallel institutions in northern Kosovo, was holding the door wide open to Serbia, hoping that its entry into the accession process would be sufficiently attractive to end its claim to sovereignty over Kosovo, or at least allow it to disband the Serbian institutions in the north.
Serbia prides itself on “non-alignment,” even after the end of the Cold War. It now risks condemning itself to a future aligned with Putin’s Russia, which has already tied Serbia tight with energy deals of dubious merit.
There is still time to choose the EU–Catherine Ashton won’t submit her report on efforts to normalize relations between Pristina and Belgrade until April 16. Vucic is burning up the telephone lines. My understanding is that Pristina and Belgrade delegations are expected to reappear in Brussels before then. Both capitals will be better off if Serbia finds a way to declare victory and reverse its stand on an agreement that will protect most Serbs in Kosovo better than if the negotiations fail.
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Syria isn’t going away
I couldn’t agree more with Fred Hof’s bottom line in his and Alex Simon’s paper prepared for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Sectarian Violence in Syria’s Civil War: Causes, Consequences, and Recommendations for Mitigation:
Left on its current trajectory, Syria is on the path to state failure and sustained sectarian violence, featuring mass atrocities and cleansing that could amount to genocide in some areas.
That is a clear and compelling alarm, one the Holocaust Museum is uniquely qualified to sound.
As Fred and Alex painstakingly elaborate, all of the likely scenarios, including an opposition victory, will produce serious risks. This is due in no small measure to the history and context of the Syrian war. Syrian society is riddled with cleavages: sectarian, ethnic, regional, urban/rural and ideological. The Asad regime papered over them a thin veneer of secularism but quickly ripped that off when the Sunni majority rebelled. The regime has intentionally sectarianized the war, ensuring itself Alawite and other minority support by making the fight an existential one. As Hof and Simon put it:
Thus, while preaching and promoting secularism, Assad built a system implicitly featuring the sectarian poison pill: any attempt by non-Alawites to bring down the regime would run the risk of taking the country down with it via a bitter sectarian struggle.
- regime victory
- managed transition
- rebel victory
- stalemate, descent into further sectarian violence, possible state failure
They quite rightly conclude that each is worse than the last when it comes to the risks of mass atrocity and even genocide in some areas.
Check: possible future developments foreseen. Check: alarm bell rung. What is to be done?
That’s where the Holocaust Museum paper is less satisfying, but not for lack of good policy proposals. Hof and Simon want an inclusive, tolerant opposition government committed to rule of law on Syrian territory. They want a negotiated settlement that creates a transition regime. They want trust funds to back the transition. They want supply of training and weapons to good guys, while funding to bad guys is blocked. They want a UN-authorized, NATO-led stabilization force, to accompany unarmed observers. They want US support for a democratically oriented, non-sectarian outcome.
I can’t quarrel with wanting these things. But it is not at all clear how to get to them, or even how some of them would help to prevent mass atrocity. In my view, what is needed is a less global set of options targeted on the specific issue of protecting civilians. More than 70,000 Syrians are now dead due to a war that started only a bit more than two years ago. This is a colossal failure of the responsibility to protect, which lies first and foremost with the Syrian government. The options may be quite different in each scenario, but the moral imperative is the same: something needs to be done to save lives.
It is looking very much as if the fourth scenario is the most likely one (stalemate, descent into further sectarian violence, possible state failure). Preventing that or mitigating its consequences is going to require more international political will than has been forthcoming so far. Even if there is an opposition victory, the transition will be a long and painful one. With the withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, the US has dismantled much of its civilian capacity to handle cases of state failure. We need to be thinking about how to fill the gap, either with our own personnel and resources or other peoples’. UN? Arab League? Turkey? One way or another, Syria is going to be with us for a long time. It isn’t going away just because Washington ignores it.
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