"Viscous nasty business" ...
"aggressive pressure ... by US diplomats",
"ferocious pressure on weaker non-permanent
members", the "type of pressure [that] is very,
very difficult for weaker countries ... to
resist.''
That's how a former British
diplomat at the United Nations, Carne Ross,
described last September's UN showdown over the
Palestinian Authority's bid for recognition for
statehood. [1] "This is how power works." he said.
He might have added "money", for route to
the UN Security Council in the case of Syria this
week has been one of bullying, bribery,
unprecedented procedural violations at the Arab
League, along with media manipulation and
significant distortions of reality.
At
stake in this diplomatic battle of "historic
importance" is the
campaign led by the
United States, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United
Kingdom and France to secure a UN mandate for
external interference in Syria with the aim of
deposing President Bashar al-Assad and his regime.
The UN face-off comprises two draft
resolutions - a "battle royal" with "all the
trappings of a cold war", writes the seasoned
diplomat, M K Bhadrakumar. [2] Despite claims to
the contrary, the US/UK/France/Gulf Cooperation
Council draft resolution [3] would essentially
allow for a phased process of regime change.
Far from presenting the findings from the
Arab League's monitors report, that report has
been effectively shelved in presentations by Arab
League secretary general Nabil al-Arabi and Sheikh
Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, the Qatari foreign
minister. Why? Because the report effectively
supported many of Syria's positions, and
acknowledged that Syria had met nearly all the
requirements as set out by the Arab League.
According to the draft, Assad is required
to leave office in favor of his deputy, who would
oversee a national unity government leading to
presidential and parliamentary elections.The UN
secretary general, "in consultation with the
League of Arab States", would report on
developments every 15 days. Significantly,
"further measures" would be taken in the event of
Syria non-compliance.
A British official
speaking anonymously told the Associated Press
that while "the text would stress there are no
plans for any military intervention in Syria -
though the option would not be explicitly, or
permanently, ruled out". [4]
The January
30 statement from the US ambassador to the UN,
Susan Rice, makes much of the absence of
sanctions, and although it is true that the draft
resolution [5] does not explicitly call for
sanctions, in an implicit way it precisely calls
for them: point 13 of the draft resolution "takes
note of the measures imposed by the League of Arab
States on the Syrian authorities on 27 November
2011, and encourages all [UN] States to adopt
similar steps" (on November 27 last year, the Arab
League halted transactions with Syria's central
bank, froze Syrian assets in other Arab states and
Arab investment in Syria and imposed a travel ban
on senior Syrian officials). [6]
As
foreign ministers arrive for the showdown,
attempts are being made to circumscribe discussion
through limiting it solely to the proposals from
the Arab League Secretary General al-Arabi and
al-Thani whose explicit agenda is regime change.
German ambassador Peter Wittig clarified last
week: "We want to be reflecting what the Arab
League wants ... we don't want to put ourselves in
the driver's seat, that is the role of the Arab
League." [7]
January's out-going chair of
the Security Council, Baso Sangqu of South Africa,
laconically noted the need to meticulously follow
the Arab League's position on Syria, while in the
case of Libya, the SC pointedly ignored the
African Union's position and proposals. "Each case
is different," replied Wittig.
Despite
attempts to circumscribe debate, Russian Foreign
Minister Sergey Lavrov insists that the full Arab
League monitors' report be tabled. According to
Ria Novosti, apparently "some of the report's
information was missing" in the document that Arab
League foreign ministers submitted to the UN
Security Council. Of course, we'll hear their
proposals but we would like to see the report
itself," Lavrov said. [8]
Lavrov is wise
to ask for the full contents to be discussed (the
full report is available online here),
because the Saudi claim that "the Syrian
government did not execute any of the elements" is
plainly untrue. The initial one-month mission of
the Arab League observers had four clear aims: to
protect citizens, cease acts of violence, release
detainees and withdraw all military presence from
cities and towns. This should then lead to
dialogue between the government and the
opposition, and the launching of a parallel
political process.
In terms of stopping
acts of violence, the report states its presence
created a "considerable calming of the situation
and restraint on the part of those forces". The
Mission did "determine an unarmed entity that is
not mentioned in the protocol" and called for "all
sides to cease all acts of violence".
The
presence of armed opposition groups involved in
the conflict and armed smuggling is now
acknowledged in the new US/UK/France/GCC draft
resolution (paragraph 8). In relation to
detainees, the report notes 5,152 detainees
released, and confirmed that "all military
vehicles, tanks and heavy weapons had been
withdrawn from all cities and residential
neighborhoods". It concluded that essentially the
mission had enjoyed the co-operation of the Syrian
government.
The report noted its short
23-day mandate found that "many parties falsely
reported explosions or violence" which were
unfounded; also referring to "media exaggeration"
in the "nature of incidents and the number of
persons killed in incidents". The mission noted it
had also been the "target of a vicious media
campaign" including publication of statements
falsely attributed to the mission's director; and
concluded that there needed to be a "commitment of
all sides to cease acts of violence, thereby
allowing the Mission to complete its tasks and,
ultimately, to lay the ground for the political
process ... a process [that] must be accelerated
and a national dialogue launched ... in order to
create an environment of confidence that would
contribute to the mission's success". This last
recommendation is precisely what is by-passed in
the Western-sponsored resolution.
Senior
political sources have confirmed that last
September, Qatar "bought" the president's position
of the Arab League from the Palestinians in return
for a donation of US$400 million in "aid" to PA
President Mahmoud Abbas who at the time was
"prioritizing" payment of salaries to employees -
it was Palestine's turn to hold the rotating Arab
League President's position. [9]
The
presidency - along with its position as chair of
the League's Syria committee - gave Qatar the
opportunity to pursue Assad's fall. However, all
this may change in March with Iraq's assumption of
the six-monthly presidency.
With Qatar at
the helm, the Western plan was to set criteria for
Arab League monitoring designed to provoke a
Syrian refusal. A senior Arab League official
speaking off-the-record in December said that the
league's Syria initiative was steered away from
its original form by "some of the ministers who
didn't like the direction and started dictating
certain ideas that they knew Syria would not
accept".
"The "Protocol" to create a
League observer delegation was forwarded with an
"ultimatum" in a short time, which we have never
experienced in the history of diplomacy at the
Arab League ... This is needed not only for Syria
- why not a plan for everywhere in the region?".
"The whole process was meant to gain a refusal, to
move to the second stage of this game," said the
official. [10]
So it is not surprising
that despite the ministerial committee of the Arab
League voting four to one (Qatar) for an extension
of the mission by one month, this was overruled:
Saudi Arabia withdrew its monitors, followed
swiftly by the remaining Gulf Cooperation Council
(GCC) countries. Arab League secretary general
al-Arabi reportedly decided unilaterally to
suspend the mission, ostensibly because the
observers faced increasing security risks,
particularly in wake of a fatwa issued by
the spiritual leader of the Syrian Salafists,
Sheikh Adnan al-Arouri, who announced on
al-Arabiya that it was lawful to kill the
observers.
Paradoxically, the very success
of the observer mission has been used by the West
as further propaganda in favor of Security Council
action. The withdrawal of Syrian security forces
from cities and towns, as required by the
observers, has been used to present a false
picture of the opposition ‘seizing' control of
parts of Syria from the army - the presence of a
few armed insurgents or insurgent-manned
roadblocks does not constitute control.
Take the case of al-Zabadani, for example.
Reports claim that a ceasefire was agreed with the
Syrian army on January 17 and that armed
opposition elements took control the following
day. The Israeli intelligence website Debka on
January 27 warned against giving regard to such
inaccurate reporting:
This week, Arab and Western media
called the Zabadani battle the first rebel
important victory, claiming they had liberated
the town. Tariq Alhomayed, editor-in-chief of
the influential Saudi A-Sharq al-Awsat, wrote
Monday, January 23: "Today the Syrian
revolutionaries are pursuing a strategy that
seems smart and effective so far, namely the
search for a Syrian Benghazi or, as a source
close to what is happening on the ground in
Syria told me, ... 'multiple Benghazis, not just
one.' These could be Homs, Zabadani, and others,
which the rebels consider to be liberated
cities." ... There is only one problem with
these glad tidings: They never happened. Neither
Zabadani nor Homs have become "Syrian Benghazis"
or liberated cities.
What really
happened was that on January 18, local Zabadani
town leaders, fearing their town was in for a
heavy military bombardment, struck a deal with
the Syrian army: They won a ceasefire
conditional on their expelling all armed rebels
and their weapons from the town ... the
dismantling of all barricades and military
posts; and the disappearance of armed men who
had been roaming their streets. For those
concessions, the Syrian army agreed to halt its
attacks on Zabadani and pull back several
hundred meters from its outskirts.
Some
of the rosy opposition propaganda making the
rounds has begun trickling into Western
intelligence evaluations - in Washington too.
It is infecting accounts whose factual
accuracy is relied upon as the bedrock for
policy decisions on Syria. In actual fact,
the FSA [Free Syria Army] has no hideouts around
Damascus; nor did the rebels seize Douma. As we
write this, Assad and his forces are in full
control of Damascus. Therefore, Western
intelligence assessments claiming the Free
Syrian Army, while not yet a direct threat to
the regime, is increasingly influencing the
course of the struggle as the engine of
processes that will eventually topple the
regime, are premature at best and made of whole
cloth at worst. [11]
Pro-regime change
commentators argue that "Syria looks more like
Libya every day". [12] If it does, it is because
the mainstream narrative on Syria is intentionally
constructed to be so - in order to justify the
call for external intervention. But this doesn't
mean it is necessarily correct.
As British
TV Channel Four's diplomatic editor wrote last
week in relation to Youtube footage showing
purported captured Iranian snipers, Revolutionary
Guards, no less,confessing, most probably after
being tortured, to shooting civilians in Syria:
"[this] goes to show how careful we have to be
before airing footage we didn't shoot ourselves,
and how cruel and dirty this conflict has become."
[13]
The extraordinary act of war by Qatar
and Saudi Arabia in agreeing to supply weapons to
armed insurgents in a fellow Arab state in any
other situation would be called state-sponsored
terrorism, particularly given that there is
evidence that a majority of Syrians do support
Assad. Commenting on a series of recent Facebook
polls, and having taken into account the
limitations of such polls, even some with between
180,000 to 1 million respondents, Syrian analyst,
Camille Oktraji concludes:
[I]n addition to the majority
support Assad enjoys, the even larger majority
that voted against al-Jazeera, Turkish military
intervention in Syria, an Arab boycott of Syria,
changing the colors of the Syrian flag or
against a UN vote targeting Syria, should be
construed by policy makers in Washington and
"the international community" that they are
interfering on the side of a minority of Syrians
and against the wishes of a clear majority.
[14]
Under cover of this pretense that
the insurgents are gaining control, rather than
that Syria has effectively complied with its
monitoring obligations, the US, UK, France and
their GCC colleagues are trying to bulldoze the
Security Council with a resolution intended to
ratchet the process towards regime change. Whether
they will succeed or not, remains to be seen.
Russia continues to insist that it will not
support any resolution that facilitates regime
change - it wants a Syrian-led political process,
not "an Arab League-imposed outcome" or
Libyan-style "regime change". Russia's Deputy
Foreign Minister Gennagy Gatilov said yesterday:
"The Western draft Security Council resolution on
Syria will not lead to a search for compromise ...
Pushing it is a path to civil war."
Russia
and its allies' determination may win the day:
"There's no longer any expectation inside the [US]
administration", reports Foreign Policy, "that
Moscow will support international action aimed at
removing Assad from power, even by non-military
means. But the UN confrontation is meant to
isolate Russia diplomatically and make it clear
that the Arab League and its Western friends have
exhausted all diplomatic options before moving to
directly aid the internal opposition, if that
decision is ultimately made."
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