Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Syria: a plan with no resolution



It is clear that events have acquired an unstoppable momentum of their own

Editorial
guardian.co.uk, Monday 23 January 2012

"A man sits in Damascus playing with his iPad. On it he calculates that France will have a new president in May, and in November America could well have one, too. The two bugbears of his life, Nicolas Sarkozy and Barack Obama, will have gone. Ergo, all he has to do is to live out the new year and his problems are over. Bashar Assad is delusional and, according to some reports, more responsible for the day-to-day repression than he would have us believe. But as an indication of the cocoon in which he lives, these calculations are tragically characteristic of the man.

Whether the civil war everyone feared has already started, it is clear now that events in Syria have acquired an unstoppable momentum of their own. The regime continues to crumble. Its economic situation deteriorates steadily – Syria's GDP shrank by nearly 30% last year – and law and order is steadily collapsing. Doubts persist about the unity of opposition groups, but the revolution is transforming itself into an armed struggle. The opposition are pan-national, and their numbers are growing, swelled not just by army defectors, but emboldened, too, by a growing sense of entitlement. If it did nothing else, the presence of the Arab League observer mission provided a vehicle for the opposition, and a measure by which the regime devalued by its deeds any commitments made in words to withdraw troops and release political prisoners.

Chaos inside Syria is matched by chaos outside it. The Arab League has a richly deserved reputation of being a consensus-based organisation that can never reach a consensus. Never more so than at its last meeting in Cairo on Sunday. The Saudis said they would withdraw their monitors in a move that might bring the observer mission itself to the brink of collapse. Qatar called for a full review of the mission, urging that Arab troops be sent to quell the violence, but Sudan, Egypt, Algeria, Iraq and Lebanon all objected. After a day of heated argument, one decent idea did emerge – the so-called Yemeni solution: this would require Assad to hand over power to a deputy and to negotiate over a government of national unity, followed by presidential and parliamentary elections within five months. There are pitfalls to this plan, not least that in Yemen itself President Ali Abdullah Saleh's departure leaves his regime intact. But it was welcomed by the Syrian National Council, the main opposition coalition, in Cairo. The local co-ordination committees condemned the prolongation of the observer mission, pointing out that 795 Syrians had been killed during the first month of its operation. Syria's protesters are on their own, but the league may have given leverage to those who oppose Russia's efforts to keep on arming the Assad regime. At the moment, it is the most one can expect."

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