Category Archives: Domestic Politics / Revolutions

That sound coming from Syria these days is the sound of diplomatic doors slamming shut as the country lurches toward all-out sectarian civil war. If you can hear it over the sound of government artillery shells blasting civilians in Homs…

One of these doors slammed a week ago when Russia and China vetoed the UN Security Council resolution put forward by the Arab League, which called for Syria’s president Bashar al Assad to step aside in favor of a transitional government. Russia considers Assad a friend and customer, and therefore didn’t want to side with his enemies. China never likes the idea of meddling in the internal affairs of other countries. The United States and other western powers pushed forward a resolution that Russia was sure to veto (an unwise course in my opinion), thereby giving up the potential to deliver a united message to Assad from the international community.

Assad responded by stepping up a lethal assault on neighborhoods of Homs that oppose his rule. The UN’s high commissioner for human rights today called it “an all-out assault in an effort to crush dissent with overwhelming force,” addressing the UN General Assembly where Saudi Arabia today took the case against Syria. Unfortunately nobody needs to slam the General Assembly door closed because that body has no power to do anything about the situation (as Secretary General Ban Ki Moon politely reminded the Saudis).

Yesterday the Arab League officially terminated its observer mission in Syria, another door closed. Instead it is now proposing a joint UN-Arab League observer mission in Syria. (Observers are unarmed peacekeepers, arguably the weakest form of peacekeeping force.) The proposal faces three big challenges: (1) Peacekeeping forces require the consent of the host government, which Syria says it will not grant; (2) They require authorization by the Security Council, where Russia may again use its veto; and (3) They generally can work only after a cease-fire is in place, lest they fall into a Bosnia-style dilemma of “keeping the peace where there’s no peace to keep.” So the peacekeeping door is probably firmly shut for the moment.

A cease-fire itself is no closer than ever. The opposition won’t negotiate with the regime, at least not while the killing continues. The regime does not want a cease-fire while it’s trying to use massive force to put down the opposition.

And so the violence escalates, as the government intensifies its crackdown and nonviolent protests slowly morph into an armed insurgency. Turkey and Saudi Arabia appear likely to support the opposition with arms and money, while Iran and Russia will do the same for the government.

During the Cold War, civil wars around the world were larger and longer because of the support pumped into each side by the opposing superpowers. These proxy wars faded away twenty years ago, and that is one important reason why levels of war violence have been lower around the world. But now, there is a new prospect of big powers fueling both sides in a proxy war in Syria. The fault line in Syria runs right down the Sunni-Shi’ite divide that pits Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah on one side (backed by Russia) against Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and most of the Arab League on the other (backed by the United States). Right under that fault line sits the world’s most important pool of oil, the one resource without which the world economy cannot function.

What is to be done? Well, the last deal that had legitimacy all around was the Arab League agreement with Syria last December 19 that let the monitors in and called for pulling back Syrian forces from cities, starting negotiations with the opposition, and giving human rights workers and journalists access to Syria. At the time, opposition leaders said it was just a stalling tactic by Assad, which was probably true, but nonetheless this agreement — especially the demand to pull forces back from cities under assault today — is the basis for moving forward, because Assad already agreed with it and Russia therefore can’t really oppose it.

With some effort, the western powers could line up Russian and Chinese support to put the stamp of the UN Security Council on this demand to pull out of the cities — not the demand that Assad step down — and then push measures to induce Assad to comply. Opposition leaders should be pressured to join negotiations for a cease-fire (it’s in their interest as the party being blasted), and if one can be achieved then the international community should move quickly to insert a UN peacekeeping force (I’m not so sure a joint force with the Arab League is the best way to go, given its lack of neutrality).

It may be that such an approach would fail to stop the slide into a sectarian civil war. It may fail to stop Assad’s slaughter of civilians, and on the other hand if it does stop that slaughter the Assad regime may not be able to stay in power, and a new strategy will be needed to hold the country together under a transitional government. In other words, the outcome probably will not actually be a stable cease-fire with an international peacekeeping force. But this is still the step to try next order to move forward — the step that U.S. policymakers skipped past in bringing to the UNSC what amounted to a demand for Assad’s resignation. Arming the opposition would be a disaster. Waiting and hoping is not likely to improve things. Playing “make Russia look bad” does not help the Syrians.

It is very worrisome that the Syrian conflict could ignite actual war between countries, in an unstable region at a pivotal moment, and with all that oil on the line. To my way of thinking, the best way to prevent this is to line up the international community for united, forceful diplomatic action and focus directly on reducing the violence, not just on changing the regime.

U.S. ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, recently told Foreign Policy magazine that the conflict with Russia over Syria (and Iran) did not necessarily portend a return to the Cold War. She pointed to successful cooperation in the UNSC on Iran and North Korea sanctions, the independence of South Sudan, and the UN support of the Afghan and Iraqi governments. “There are going to be issues that are difficult. We’ve had our share of those of late and they … divide us and even get rancorous. But I don’t think is a fair characterization of the body of work that we’ve been doing over the last several years…” Point well taken — now let’s kick that U.S.-Russian cooperation into gear to steer Syria away from civil war.

The international community is not, as sometimes claimed, an oxymoron. It works surprisingly well and is improving through time. This week the international community faces a new challenge and opportunity, as the Syria problem lands squarely in the UN Security Council (UNSC), where I believe the world’s conflicts should be addressed.

For most of a year the situation has escalated both on the ground and in the international response. Syria’s violent suppression of nonviolent protests has led to armed resistance by some regime opponents and threatens to escalate into sectarian civil war. More than 5,000 have died. My predictions of a protracted stalemate are proving depressingly correct.  But the international response has not been static.

At first, bilateral relations played the major role. Individual countries such as Turkey tried to intervene diplomatically to convince the Assad regime to change course and stop the violence. This did not succeed, and Turkey among others turned against Assad. (Indeed, Syria’s only important reliable friends these days are Iran and Russia.)

Next the regional organization came into play. The Arab League developed a peace plan that required the Syrian government to pull back its forces from cities (some of which would then be de facto opposition territory). Syria resisted implementing this plan, and the Arab League sent in monitors to poke around in Syria and report whether progress was occurring. It wasn’t. First the Gulf states withdrew from the monitoring mission, and then the Arab League as a whole suspended it, called for Assad to hand over power to a transitional government, and asked for action by the UN Security Council.

That’s how the matter came to be discussed this week in the UN. And there they all were — the five permanent members, this year’s ten nonpermanent members, the ambassadors of Syria and of the Arab League. To underscore its importance, the USA sent secretary of state Hillary Clinton to sit in the U.S. seat, and European countries sent foreign ministers. It is a “world order moment.” (Syria, however, used the occasion mostly to attack the Arab League and particularly Qatar, which participated in the air campaign in Libya and has led efforts to remove Assad from power in Syria.) The discussions began Tuesday, continued today behind closed doors, and are expected to culminate in a vote on Friday or Monday. Here’s is a great video summary of the situation as of Tuesday, from al Jazeera:

In these UNSC discussions, the USA and Britain have called for Assad’s ouster and the imposition of economic sanctions on Syria if the violence continues. The United States declares that it is not looking for another Libya-type resolution, which authorized force to protect civilians but was stretched to include fairly direct assistance to rebels who overthrew the government. Russia and China were upset by the stretching of the Libya resolution, and want language in any new resolution that rules out military intervention.

Russia declares that trying to change Syria’s regime by force or even by sanctions could trigger a bigger regional war, presumably along the Sunni-Shi’ite divide between Iran’s and Saudi Arabia’s allies. More fundamentally, both Russia and China have violently suppressed domestic unrest in the past, and they want the international community to uphold a strong norm of sovereignty, based in the UN Charter, that essentially says any country can do what it wants within its own borders. That old norm is being challenged of late by a new norm of sovereignty, the Responsibility to Protect, that says the international community may violate sovereign as a last resort if necessary to save civilians from mass atrocity events. The intervention in Libya was a successful application of that principle, halting an imminent massive slaughter in Benghazi, notwithstanding Russia and China’s grumbling about the later uses of air power to help the rebels overthrow Gaddafi.

Syria is no Libya, however. Russia has promised to veto any resolution that does not rule out military intervention, and this means any military intervention would have to occur without a mandate from the UN Security Council. That idea is tempting to some, and Anne-Marie Slaughter believes that the situation in Syria could become so dire as to warrant a Kosovo-style intervention, i.e. without UN authorization.

If you had a request from the Arab League backed by the protesters themselves and you had a – perhaps a super majority on the Security Council, meaning nine, 10, 11 out of the 15 vote to support, then I would be willing to countenance action even in the face of a veto as we did in Kosovo. When it comes down to this kind of humanitarian intervention, I think the rules surrounding the veto are more complicated, and there are precedents as in Kosovo for acting even in the face of a veto.

But this kind of coalition-of-the-willing action is becoming less attractive in recent years, and it seems unlikely that the west would use force against the Syrian regime without the unique legitimacy afforded by the UNSC.

My prediction (why not?) is that the international community will succeed in passing a UN resolution condemning the Syrian regime’s violence and telling Syria to halt it. Possibly it will even endorse the Arab League plan, which among other things calls on Assad to step down. It will not impose sanctions, or perhaps just weak symbolic ones, and it will make clear that the resolution does not authorize outside military force.

Daniel Serwer notes Russia’s interest in vetoing a resolution if only to look strong with an upcoming presidential election. But President Obama has his own election year and would in no way use military force against Syria, so there is not really any conflict about a Libya-style use of the UN to legitimize a western air campaign.

The western powers have every reason to want a resolution to pass, not be vetoed, and therefore they will be limited by what Russia will allow (abstaining but not vetoing). They will press for a few days to see how far they can get, and then take the deal. And that’s a good thing because it means the international community is functioning as it’s supposed to. Not good for Syrian civilians, perhaps, but good for world order. The region is unsettled and the Arab world split, so it is important for the international community to speak with one voice, and that voice is the UN Security Council.

The big fault line between Shi’ite and Sunni branches of Islam in the Middle East, centered on the rivalry of Iran and Saudi Arabia, is influencing conflicts in countries throughout the region, including Syria.

Today the Arab League monitors from the Persian Gulf states (Saudi Arabia and allies) left Syria, saying that their presence was not effectively changing the violent behavior of the Syrian regime of Bashar al Assad (backed by Iran). The rest of the Arab League monitoring mission remains, and the League as a whole extended the mission and is expected to send replacement monitors, but the League’s head also called on the UN Security Council to help out. (In my opinion the pullout is not a bad thing, as both the Gulf states and Iran are too close to Syria to play as useful a monitoring role as other Arab states or the UN might.)

The Sunni-Shi’ite conflict was simple back in the 1980s. Iran, the world’s only Islamic Republic and a Shi’ite country, was locked in a war with Iraq. The war would kill close to a million people through trench warfare, the use of chemical weapons, and rocket attacks on each other’s cities. Backing Iraq and its Sunni leader Saddam Hussein were Saudi Arabia, the other Arab countries, and tacitly the United States.

Things are actually more complicated than that. No countries are purely Sunni or Shi’ite. Most have an interwoven patchwork of these sectarian communities — a village here, a city there — as this map shows (high res here):

Two countries next to Iran — Iraq and Bahrain — had Shi’ite majorities ruled over and repressed by Sunni minority regimes. In the past decade, of course, Iraq is no longer Sunni-led but, thanks to George W. Bush, led by Shi’ite parties.  (One U.S. official claimed that Bush didn’t know the distinction between Sunni and Shi’ite before deciding to invade Iraq.)

A step further from Iran is Syria, with a Sunni majority ruled over by a Shi’ite-based (Alawite) minority. That is the regime we are all focused on currently, the one the Arab League is monitoring to no avail. Moving along westward, Lebanon is almost half Shi’ite and that community is the base of the armed militia Hezbollah. After decades representing the disempowered and fighting Israel, and after being implicated in the 2005 assassination of Lebanon’s liberal prime minister, Hezbollah last year became the dominant party in Lebanon’s government.

To the south, meanwhile, in Bahrain last year the Shi’ite community rallied for democracy and was violently repressed with help from Saudi armed forces. The United States, whose Fifth Fleet is based in Bahrain, stayed pretty quiet. A quarter of the Saudi population is Shi’ite but they are in no position to cause trouble and the Saudi royal family has the money to buy out any discontent in the Kingdom. In Yemen, where Shi’ites make up more than 40 percent of the population, the Shi’ite Houthi tribe in the north has been in armed conflict with the central government for decades, even as Sunni al-Qaeda radicals wage war in the south.

Thus, in recent years the Arab side of the Persian Gulf (or is it the Arabian Gulf?) has remained firmly in Sunni control, while across the Gulf four countries in a line now have Shi’ite-affiliated regimes — Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Of these, Iraq and Lebanon have been relatively neutral on Syria (mixed interests and their own problems at home), but Iran has been the Assad regime’s most important external backer (along with more powerful but less enthusiastic Russia).

The emergence of a more solid Shi’ite bloc stretching from Iran to Lebanon is not a positive development in my view. It tends to polarize the region and to extend the ambitions of Iran, which acts in defiance of international norms on important issues. It also raises a legitimate concern that Iran’s creation of a nuclear weapon in the coming years would spark a rush by Saudi Arabia to follow suit. The danger of a terrible war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, with their respective allies, is worth worrying about.

In the middle of it all, of course, is oil. Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Russia all share one interest — they are the world’s three top oil exporters. They benefit from reliably high prices for oil on world markets (high price spikes that lead to crashes are less useful). On the other hand, both the western powers and China share an interest in a low, stable oil price. And there was China’s prime minister recently visiting Saudi Arabia, not Iran, for a friendly chat. Turns out that although China is Iran’s largest oil customer, China actually buys twice as much from Saudi Arabia, whose total oil exports are almost triple the level of Iran’s. China wants assurance, which it no doubt received, that Saudi Arabia would fill any gap in China’s supply created by new sanctions on Iran.

The United States supports the Saudi side, and Russia the Iranian side, but China really just wants oil and doesn’t care where it comes from. The main  interest of China and other consuming nations is political stability in the Middle East, to keep oil prices stable and the spigot turned permanently on. In the past, although oil is the world’s most traded commodity in terms of value, its price has seen wild swings triggered by political events like wars and revolutions. A little stability would be a really good thing for the world economy. Saudi Arabia alone has the vast reserves to keep world supplies steady even if another OPEC member stops exporting. And hence the Chinese prime minister’s visit.

As for the UN Security Council, its ability to play any meaningful role in Syria will depend entirely on Russia. As some Kremlin officials suggest their patience with Assad is wearing thin, the western powers are pressing Russia to back the Arab League’s recent call for Assad to step down. When that question comes to the Security Council, soon, Russia will have to decide exactly where it stands.

Monday is election day in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with the presidency and parliament to be decided. These will be Congo’s second democratic elections after decades of dictatorship and war (the first was in 2006). There is plenty to criticize in the elections but they are an important step forward for the impoverished country of 70 million people.

President Joseph Kabila is expected to win re-election (with the opposition squawking that it’s unfair), while in the Parliamentary election 19,000 candidates are competing for 500 seats. The 2006 election was organized by the UN, but this one the Congolese government is running by itself, with just a smallish monitoring mission from the EU as outside help. Logistical problems are a challenge in the very large country with few decent roads — ballots were held up when bad weather delayed flights to remote locations.

Clashes between supporters and opponents of the president, and security forces, reportedly killed eight people in the capital. Yesterday the main opposition candidate Etienne Tshisekedi returned to Congo from South Africa, and his supporters flocked to the airport to greet him. But police would not let him proceed for eight hours. EU observers criticized the police action as a “serious breach of the right to campaign.” For his part, Tshisekedi a few weeks ago declared himself already president, which is not a helpful style of campaigning. The government responded by shutting down the radio station that aired the interview. Today the government cancelled all political rallies to head off violence (and maybe to keep the opposition from gaining ground).

One indicted war criminal being held in the Hague is running for president, and another, indicted for mass rapes in eastern Congo but at large, is running for a seat in parliament. So there’s plenty to criticize in the conduct of the elections.

But, as I always like to say, compared to what? In this case the answer is not compared to a perfect democracy, not even compared to the USA (ahem, Bush v. Gore), but compared to what came before — 70 years of colonialism, 30 years of dictatorship, and a decade of horrific war, all against a backdrop of absolutely wrenching poverty.

Many people criticize the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Congo, because atrocities still occur in some eastern provinces, including the ever newsworthy mass rapes. Poverty and corruption are still rampant and yes, the elections are imperfect. But when the UN arrived a little over a decade ago, there were six foreign armies fighting “Africa’s first world war” in the Congo. The economy was in reverse, mortality was rising dramatically, sexual violence was widespread, and democracy was not even a remote possibility. Most of these problems have not been 100% solved in a decade — surprise — but most of them have been moving in the right direction. Considering the size and funding of the UN mission compared to the size and challenges of the country, the peacekeepers have made fabulous progress. Their work isn’t done, but maybe we should think about giving them more resources to do a better job, not just complain that they are a failure.

An official with the Carter Center says Congo’s electoral commission has “gotten through a relatively successful campaign period. Yes, there have been some major incidents and some deaths, but these I don’t think have resulted in a mass, public rejection of the electoral process. Far from it.”

So let’s give two cheers for a modestly successful election tomorrow in the Congo, and refocus on helping the troubled country move forward step by step.