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3 China
sits out Syria regime change tango By Peter Lee
According to the
authoritarian playbook preferred by China, Syria's
President Bashar al-Assad is doing the right
things: driving a wedge between the "loyal
opposition" to his rule and hardcore rebels and
revolutionaries through the use of targeted
amnesties and concessions; forcefully isolating
and suppressing violent political dissenters;
incrementally escalating the use of military force
to regain control of militia-held strongholds like
Homs; and offering a way out with a new
constitution.
Perhaps he has done the
right things, but not in the right way; or perhaps
not enough. As the harsh crackdown approaching its
first-year anniversary, the Assad regime has
profoundly alienated
a significant portion of
its population. Reconciliation and stability are
going to take more than a new constitution,
delivered with a pat on the head and an apology
from the government.
A necessary and
dangerous process of accommodation and power
sharing will be needed.
China perhaps has
grasped this point even more clearly than Russia,
or the Assad regime itself. As Syria and
Western/Arab policy on Syria lurch from crisis to
crisis, China may watch for opportunities to
advance its strategy.
This weekend,
Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Zhai Jun will visit
Damascus to try to create some space for a "third
path" political strategy, one that eschews both
regime change and perpetuation of the status quo
for a process of evolutionary reform keyed on the
new constitution.
The draft Syrian
constitution is a multi-faceted document. It
accommodates a multi-party system, addressing a
key grievance of many moderate Syrians, but still
offers the Ba'ath Party various advantages. It
outlaws "religion-based parties", in order to
wrong-foot Assad's mortal enemy, the Muslim
Brotherhood, but stipulates that the president
must be a Muslim, in order to appease conservative
Muslims.
Assad has announced a referendum
on the new constitution will be held on February
26. It will be very interesting to see how the
constitutional referendum plays out, and what
level of support the government can still command
after a heavy-handed one-year crackdown.
But it is unlikely that Assad's enemies
inside the country, in the West, the Gulf
Cooperation Council (GCC) and Turkey will allow
the Syrian government to use the referendum to
buttress its legitimacy and demonstrate a capacity
to guide the nation out of its political impasse.
As is inevitably the case, any effort by
the Syrian regime to gain political-reform
traction has been met with determined "it's too
late/atrocity of the day" propaganda pushback
designed to pre-empt any impetus toward
reconciliation.
Even as the referendum was
announced, US State Department spokesperson
Victoria Nuland (the wife of neo-conservative
Robert Kagan and previously a national security
advisor to vice president Dick Cheney) stated that
Assad's departure was the only viable option; a
Washington Institute for Near East Policy pundit
dismissed the referendum as "window dressing"; CNN
reported "the vast majority of accounts from
within the country say that Assad's forces are
slaughtering civilians en masse"; and Western
media uncritically passed on the opposition's
idiotic accusation that the Syrian air force had
bombed the government's own diesel pipeline (which
somebody, presumably of the aggressively violent
opposition that the West refuses to acknowledge
exists, apparently blew up). [1]
Assad's
announcement of the pushed-up date for the
referendum (it was originally expected to happen
in March) was probably a response to the latest
escalation in regime-change activity, the "Friends
of Syria" conference to be convened in Tunisia on
February 24.
Assad's foreign antagonists,
deprived by a Russian/Chinese veto of the
opportunity to further delegitimize the Assad
regime through the UN Security Council, will use
the Tunisian conference to formalize a case for
humanitarian intervention in Syria - a moral
imperative that justifies, even demands disregard
for conflicting demands of treaties and
international institutions when necessary - under
the "responsibility to protect" or R2P doctrine
similar to the one used for Libya.
In a
parting gift to the anti-Assad forces, UN Human
Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay raised the specter
of an International Criminal Court indictment
against Assad, of the sort that complicated the
situation in Sudan, closed the door on a
negotiated exit for Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, and
would make any sort of negotiation with Assad
virtually impossible.
The Fact-Finding Mission, the
Commission of Inquiry on Syria, and I myself
have all concluded that crimes against
humanity are likely to have been committed
in Syria. I have encouraged the Security Council
to refer the situation to the International
Criminal Court. All Member States must ensure
that these crimes do not go unpunished. [2]
Pillay also issued a demand for
humanitarian access that could form the
cornerstone of West/GCC justifications for Syrian
intervention:
International and
independent monitoring bodies, including my Office
and the independent Commission of Inquiry must
also be allowed into Syria. And humanitarian
actors must be guaranteed immediate, unhindered
access. [Emphasis in original]
There will be no "no-fly
zone" for Syria; Assad has assiduously and, one
would imagine, intentionally, avoided the use of
air transport and air support in his security
operations, thereby denying a pretext for the West
and GCC to come in with a "no-fly zone", which in
Libya quickly morphed into a "no drive zone" and
then into an "attack any government target of
tactical or strategic value zone".
To get
around this obstacle, if the French have their
way, humanitarian intervention would involve
creating a "humanitarian corridor" to deliver food
and medical supplies to Homs, thereby driving a
stake through the heart of the Syrian regime's
claim to legitimacy and national sovereignty and
energizing the opposition ... at least that
portion of the opposition whose strategy relies on
foreign intervention to collapse the Assad regime.
In the Western media, only the Syrian
National Council, or SNC, exists as the voice of
Syrian opposition. The real situation is
considerably more complicated and opposition to
Assad is by no means typified by the SNC.
In fact, it is a remarkable testament to
the bankruptcy of the West/GCC's Syria policy that
the horse they have chosen to back is, to a large
extent, a corrupt congeries of exiles with
virtually no presence inside Syria and dominated
by the Sunni Islamist militants of the Muslim
Brotherhood, a group that has languished in exile
for almost three decades.
At the end of
January 2012, Foreign Policy's Justin Vela wrote:
A wide range of activists and
diplomats are voicing concerns with the SNC,
criticizing its lack of cohesion and
effectiveness. While the majority of them have
not given up on the council, they paint a
picture of an organization out of touch with the
protesters on the ground and dominated by the
Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.
"No one from
the SNC has influence inside Syria. Most members
of the SNC are jumping on a train that started
from the street," says Ammar Qurabi, a Syrian
human rights activist ...
The most
divisive issue surrounding the SNC, however,
clearly remains the prominent role played by the
Muslim Brotherhood. "The Muslim Brotherhood is
the only party in town," says the Ankara-based
Western diplomat.
The Brothers have been
exiled from Syria for 30 years after losing a
bitter armed conflict with the regime in the
1980s, and some activists distrust its outlook
on democracy and the future composition of a
post-Assad government ... [3]
It
appears that the Brotherhood's insistence on
overthrowing the Assad government is informed by
its awareness that, whatever feelings Assad has
about accommodating the aspirations of
democratically-inspired dissidents, they do not
extend to the Brotherhood.
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