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As Kofi Annan Steps Down, What’s In Store For Syria? | NPR
Kofi Annan will step down at the end of the month from his post as UN-Arab League envoy for Syria. Annan’s resignation is the latest blow to the faltering efforts to find a solution to the crisis in Syria. Steve Inskeep talks about the implications with Robert Malley of the International Crisis Group.
Photo: Freedom House/Flickr
Los Angeles Times | Arab League calls emergency meeting on 2 Sudans
The Arab League said Thursday it would hold an emergency meeting over the increasing violence between Sudan and South Sudan. The south reported new skirmishes even as Sudan’s president increased his threats of war toward the south.
Sudan President Omar al-Bashir said the recent violence has “revived the spirit of jihad” in Sudan. South Sudan said it had repulsed four attacks from Sudan over a 24-hour period as fighting on the border showed no signs of slowing.
Acting on a request by Sudan, the Arab League scheduled an emergency meeting of foreign ministers in Cairo next week to discuss the violence, Deputy Arab League Secretary-General Ahmed bin Helli said. The league earlier called on South Sudan to withdraw from the oil-rich Heglig area that southern troops invaded and took over last week.
Despite the threats from Sudan, a southern government spokesman said South Sudan was only defending its territory and considers Sudan a “friendly nation.”
South Sudan military spokesman Col. Philip Aguer said three of the attacks were on Wednesday and one was on Thursday. He did not give a death toll.
South Sudan broke away from Sudan last year after a self-determination vote for independence. That vote was guaranteed in a mediated end to decades of civil war between the two sides. But the sides never fully agreed where their shared border lay, nor did they reach agreement on how to share oil wealth that is pumped from the border region.
Instead, the two countries have seen a sharp increase in violence in recent weeks, especially around the oil-producing town of Heglig. Both sides claim Heglig as their own. It lies in a region where the border was never clearly defined.
The Washington Post: U.N. monitors begin work in Syria
A team of six U.N. observers set up headquarters in Damascus on Monday and began reaching out to the Syrian government and its opponents, in hopes they could start healing the country’s violent divides.
The team is led by a Moroccan colonel named Ahmed Himmiche, and another 25 members are expected to arrive in the next few days, said a spokesman for U.N.-Arab League envoy to Syria, Kofi Annan.
The team is set to monitor the implementation of a six-point peace plan proposed by Annan, accepted by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and backed by Syria’s allies Russia and China as well as Western governments who have called for Assad to step down. The Syrian foreign minister was due to arrive in China on Monday for meetings, according to Chinese news agencies.
According to a U.N. Security Council resolution passed Saturday, the monitors’ work is dependent on the maintenance of a cease-fire that went into effect April 12. Despite numerous reported violations of the terms of the agreement by both security forces and armed opponents of Assad, the daily death toll remains dramatically lower than it has been in recent months, when dozens of civilians, soldiers and rebels were killed almost daily.
Syria’s Phase of Radicalisation
Damascus/Brussels | 10 Apr 2012
With the Syrian crisis having taken a perilous turn, predictable obstacles in implementing UN envoy Kofi Annan’s peace plan should not lead to give up on what – for now at least – remains the only serious option on the table.
Syria’s Phase of Radicalisation, the latest policy briefing by the International Crisis Group, examines what has driven President Bashar Assad to unleash his loyalist forces and opposition groups to escalate their own violence. It concludes that in the absence of a realistic, workable alternative, the best (if slim) chance to halt this slide is to build on aspects of the envoy’s initiative and achieve broad international consensus around a more detailed roadmap.
A year into the uprising, violence has crossed several horrifying thresholds. Regime forces have subjected entire neighbourhoods to intense bombardment. Within large cities, massive bomb attacks have taken the lives of innocent civilians. Perhaps most sickening of all have been pictures displaying the massacre of whole families, including the shattered skulls of young children. This escalation has not elicited a meaningful response from key players, making it likely that the situation will only get worse.
“Conditions presently exist in which extreme forms of violence are becoming routine”, warns Peter Harling, Crisis Group’s Iraq, Lebanon and Syria Project Director. “This will empower the most radical elements on all sides, justifying the worst forms of regime brutality and prompting appalling retaliation. Should these trends persist, the current death toll likely will appear modest in hindsight”.
The outside world is caught between four costly postures. Iran and Hizbollah support the regime unconditionally. Russia and China put the onus on regime foes at home and abroad to defuse the situation. The West has exhausted its economic and diplomatic leverage and tiptoes around the question of military intervention. Saudi Arabia and Qatar threaten to arm the opposition but it is easy to see how such efforts can backfire – and difficult to see how they might bring a well-armed regime to its knees.
All of which has ensured that the regime finds itself in its comfort zone, perceiving no immediate threats either to itself or its leaders’ lifestyle; bolstered by the blind backing of hard-core supporters; convinced that the international community will do very little; and persuaded that the balance of power has shifted in its favour over the past several weeks.
Without renouncing prospects for a genuine political agreement on a transition – which will require a shift in the diplomatic or military balance of power – the priority today must be de-escalation. Action should be taken to flesh out Annan’s plan regarding the make-up and mandate of an observer mission, mechanisms to ensure weapons are not smuggled through Syria’s borders and procedures to investigate the worst acts of bloodshed.
“Full and timely implementation of Annan’s plan almost surely was never in the cards”, says Robert Malley, Crisis Group’s Middle East and North Africa Program Director. “But that is not a reason to give up on diplomacy so soon. One should not repeat the mistake committed at the time of the Arab League-sponsored initiative: to expect its failure; rush to pull the plug on an unsatisfactory policy; wait for the emergence of an alternative that has been neither considered nor agreed. And then watch, as the killing goes on”.
"Full and timely implementation of Annan’s plan almost surely was never in the cards”, says Robert Malley, Crisis Group’s Middle East and North Africa Program Director. “But that is not a reason to give up on diplomacy so soon. One should not repeat the mistake committed at the time of the Arab League-sponsored initiative: to expect its failure; rush to pull the plug on an unsatisfactory policy; wait for the emergence of an alternative that has been neither considered nor agreed. And then watch, as the killing goes on."
—Robert Malley, Program Director for the Middle East & North Africa, from the media release for our new briefing, Syria’s Phase of Radicalisation.
For months, neither the Syrian regime, the international community, nor the opposition in exile have offered much hope in a dangerously deteriorating crisis. Increasingly, they seem to be unintentionally conniving in bringing about a civil war although it will serve no one’s interests, destabilize Syria for years, and suck in the rest of the region. Their enduring pursuit of maximalist demands may sabotage what chance still exists for a negotiated transition.
The regime’s vision consists in cracking down decisively against residual pockets of foreign-backed trouble-makers, then opening up politically within sensible boundaries — similar to Jordan’s or Bahrain’s promise of limited reforms. Outside players currently bent on its demise, it wagers, ultimately will realize it cannot be destroyed; already hesitant for lack of good options and fear of ensuing chaos, they will grudgingly move to softer forms of pressure and, in time, even resume engagement. The regime’s sympathizers and allies are all too keen to believe that it is strong, that the reach of the protest movement is wildly exaggerated by hostile media, that the foreign conspiracy is both all-encompassing and impotent, and that Syrian society is so disease-ridden — a hodgepodge of fundamentalists, thugs, and third party proxies — that it cannot but deserve the security services’ tough medicine.
This narrative is flawed in more ways than one. For ten months, the regime has been collapsing in slow-motion, and it is showing. Its political structures, weak at the outset, have eroded beyond repair; the executive has lost any ability it once had to implement policy and the ruling party is an empty shell. The security services remain largely cohesive and ready to fight, but in many places they increasingly resemble at best an occupying force cut off from society, at worst a collection of sectarian militias on a rampage. The military is fragmenting, slowly but surely. The regime’s territorial control depended on the protest movement remaining largely peaceful. Now that an insurgency is spreading, it is losing its grip. Arguably, the regime has refrained from using much of the firepower at its disposal, for fear of tilting the balance decisively against it within the international community. It could easily muster enough troops to put down resistance in any specific area, but at the expense of letting things slip elsewhere in a losing game of whack-a-mole; other rebellious areas would go for broke, knowing their turn would soon come if the regime was allowed to deal with them sequentially. Meanwhile, the economy’s collapse is accelerating. Because none of this is lost on a majority of Syrians, once spectacular demonstrations of loyalists have narrowed to the point where official footage prefers close-ups to aerial photography. The “silent majority” the regime claimed to have on its side is now angry and scared: it both blames the country’s leadership for spelling disaster and distrusts the protest movement, exiled opposition, and outside world for offering no clear prospect for the future other than growing chaos.
The Arab League, often seen as a do-nothing organisation, has confounded expectations by changing gears as revolutions sweep the Middle East.
Of all the startling changes that the Arab Spring has brought about, perhaps the most intriguing has been the transformation of the Arab League.
This 22-member organisation, previously seen as a comfortable club for Arab autocrats, has been rocked to its well-appointed and expensive foundations.
With the energetic and, by Arab standards, youthful prime minister of the wealthy gulf state of Qatar playing a leading role, the league let Egypt’s Mubarak fall with barely a murmur.
It voted to suspend Gaddafi’s Libya in February and watched while the Qataris assisted anti-government forces there. And a crucial vote in March in support of a no-fly zone enabled Nato to play a decisive role in swinging the war to the rebel side.
And then most unexpectedly of all, the Arab League took a hard stance against the Syrian regime of Bashir al-Assad.
In August, the league condemned the Syrian government for its repression of nationwide uprisings and called for an immediate end to the violence.
Then in November it suspended Syria for failing to stick to a deal that included halting military action and starting talks with the opposition.
And when Syria continued to prevaricate, the league slapped sanctions on the regime.
In all its previously unremarkable 66-year history, nothing quite like what has happened in the past few months has ever before occurred.
It’s as if a gentleman’s club, very wealthy, very smug and sure of itself, had suddenly been forced to drink deep from the revolutionary’s cup and found it rather intoxicating.
So how did it all come about?
The Arab League was an organisation established in Cairo in 1945 primarily to be a counterweight to the looming and soon to be realised state of Israel.
Through the decades since, the league’s efforts to establish itself as a significant political force have been lacklustre at best.
Egypt’s influence in the league waned as the power and financial clout of the gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia, grew.
Although the league has a military protocol, and various members have waged wars on Israel over the years, its only previous joint exercise was, ironically, to join Syrian troops in Lebanon from 1976 to 1983.
Countless summits have come and gone while the Arab League slumbered on, apparently unconcerned about human rights abuses, rampant poverty and unemployment, and the frequently brutal suppression of pro-democracy activists among its members.
Then came the Arab spring.
As dictators fell one by one, the league began to wake up. Angry young Arabs were shouting and the risks of appearing not to listen were all too readily apparent.
Ignoring the Arab Spring was not an option. The alternative, to support the push for freedom, was scarcely more palatable for this league of autocrats. But influential players like Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah knew something had to give.
Facing pressures from western allies, and worried that their own populations were enthusiastically taking up the Syrian opposition cause on social media sites, the more energetic members of the club sat up and took notice.
None more so than Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, the 52-year-old prime minister and foreign minister of Qatar.
One of the world’s wealthiest men, he’s earned the nickname “peacemaker” for his efforts over the years to broker reconciliations between warring factions in Africa and the Middle East.
Middle East observers see him as tough, bright and very much up to speed with what is happening in the region.
He grasped earlier than his colleagues that the league could not ignore the killing of unarmed civilians in Syria. And he pushed hard to suspend the country and impose sanctions against the embattled regime of President Bashir al Assad.
Ever the pragmatist though, Jaber Al Thani had shown no public concern for the violence and killing of protesters in February and March in Qatar’s next-door gulf neighbour Bahrain. The Bahrainis were happy to return the favour by voting for sanctions against Syria.
Riyadh-based Saudi analyst Mohsen Al Awaji says “without the personality of that man, the message would not have been delivered. His was the strong hand behind the process.”
Others see the Qatari initiative as further proof that Saudi Arabia is out of touch and slow to move in fast changing circumstances.
“Compared to the Saudi royals, the Qataris are in overdrive, they are hyperactive,” says Middle East expert Peter Harling of the think tank International Crisis Group.
Harling argues that Qatari foreign policy is decided by a tight group - the emir, the prime minister and a few key advisors.
“Their style,” he adds “fits the era. It’s a golden opportunity for them to stake a claim”
BEIRUT: An Arab League ultimatum to Syria to allow international observers into the country to monitor continuing violence or face economic sanctions expired yesterday. As the deadline approached activists reported new clashes between army troops and defectors that left 29 dead countrywide.
A senior Arab League diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Syria ignored the deadline. The announcement of the 24-hour deadline from the Arab League came after the European Union said on Thursday that safeguarding civilians against the government’s crackdown had become a priority. The United Nations said at least 3500 people had been killed since March.
Syria has denounced the proposal for international monitors as an ”impossible” violation of its national sovereignty.
The meeting of Arab League foreign ministers in Cairo called on the President, Bashar al-Assad, to admit a mission of 500 civilian and military observers to monitor the human rights situation and oversee efforts to carry out a peace plan that Syria had agreed to on November 2. The league suspended Syria after it failed to comply with the plan, under which it had pledged to withdraw all military units from the streets, stop killing protesters and allow the monitors to enter the country.
The league’s secretary-general, Nabil al-Arabi, said that if Mr Assad did not comply, the economic and social council of the league would meet today to consider imposing sanctions. The league also asked the United Nations secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, to support its efforts.
Meanwhile, Riyadh al-Asaad, the commander of the Free Syrian Army, called for outside powers to launch air strikes against ”strategic targets”. This would replicate the armed intervention in Libya that helped overthrow Muammar Gaddafi.
”We are not in favour of the entry of foreign troops as was the case in Iraq, but we want the international community to give us logistical support,” Mr Asaad said. ”We also want international protection, the establishment of a no-fly zone, a buffer zone and strikes on certain strategic targets.”
But the International Crisis Group, a Brussels think tank, released a report on Thursday expressing concern that Syria would be vulnerable to regional powers that have an interest in the outcome of the crisis if international pressure or intervention forces Mr Assad to step down.
BEIRUT — The Arab League told Syria on Thursday that it has one day to agree to allow international observers into the country to monitor ongoing violence, or it could face sanctions.
The organization has previously extended the deadline for the government to accept the observers’ mission, but rejected Syria’s suggested changes to the plan. The sanctions could include freezing assets and stopping financial dealings.
The ultimatum comes amid mounting international pressure on the Syrian government to end a crackdown on a protest movement that has spread across the country since spring. Activists say that more than 400 protesters and security forces have been killed this month as the violence has increased.
French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe called on Thursday for international forces to set up “humanitarian corridors” in Syria to allow aid groups access to cities where security forces’ operation have taken a heavy toll on civilians and sectarian tension is growing.
Although the European Union has no plans to expand sanctions, a spokeswoman said Thursday that “protection of civilians in Syria is an increasingly urgent and important aspect of responding to the events in country,” according to the Associated Press.
Turkey’s president, Abdullah Gul, and prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have both called for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, their former ally, to step down.
Some Syrian activists who had initially hoped to be able to pressure Assad’s government to reform or quit without international interference are now seeking outside help.
“We are inside the fire. If we go right, there will be fire, and if we go left, there will be fire,” said an activist in the eastern city of Deir al-Zour, who said the number of people attending demonstrations had increased since security forces shot dead a 15-year-old youth two weeks ago.
“We think that the Arab governments should make a no-fly zone over Syria,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he fears for his safety.
However, the Brussels-based International Crisis Group think tank released a report Thursday expressing concern that Syria would be vulnerable to the many regional powers who have an interest in the outcome of the crisis there if international pressure or intervention forced Assad to step down.
The report suggests that the United States and Israel would try to shape a new leadership’s foreign policy and that Turkey might try to restrict the activities of Syria’s Kurdish minority and support the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Iran, which has close ties with Assad, could sponsor the remnants of the security forces, it said.
“In short, the challenge is less to draw in outside actors than to keep them at bay,” the report.
