With the "Friends of Syria" (FOS) grouping
sponsored by the Western powers and their Arab
allies scheduled to hold its first meeting in
Tunis on Friday, Russian diplomacy has shifted
gear into a proactive mode. The Kremlin was a
beehive of diplomatic activity on Wednesday.
The venue of the birthplace of the "Arab
Spring" for the FOS to gather might, prima facie,
give an impression that the name of the game is
high-flown rhetoric and nothing more.
But
that is not how Moscow views the developing
paradigm. It estimates that Tunis with its
Mediterranean climate and languid
look has been carefully
chosen as a deceptive location for the West to
launch a concerted assault on the citadel of
President Bashar al-Assad and to legitimize it in
the world opinion. Moscow senses that the final
assault on Syria by the United States may not far
off, although the US propaganda makes it out to be
that the Barack Obama administration is on the
horns of a dilemma, torn apart by an existential
angst.
Moscow has point-blank turned down
the "invitation" to be part of the FOS. The
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander
Lukashevich said on Tuesday:
Officially we were not informed who
will take part in the [FOS] conference or what
the agenda will be. Most importantly, it is
unclear what the actual goal of this initiative
is ... Serious questions arise about the final
document of the meeting. According to some
information, a small group of countries, without
knowledge of others, will be asked to simply
stamp a document that is already in the process
of being written ... it seems that we are
talking about slapping together some kind of
international coalition as was the case in
organizing the Libya Contact Group in order to
support one side against the other in an
internal conflict. Russia is for all members of
the world community to act as friends of all
Syrian people and not only part of it.
That statement may leave the
impression that Moscow retains the option to
review its association with FOS at some future
stage. But its most important salient is the
analogy drawn with the West's Libyan intervention
and the uncanny resemblance between the Libya
Contact Group and the FOS in the making.
Against the backdrop of the Libyan
analogy, the Kremlin swiftly moved into the
diplomatic arena on Wednesday. President Dmitry
Medvedev phoned Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki, Saudi monarch King Abdullah and the
Iranian president Mahmud Ahmadinejad.
The
conversation with Abdullah apparently didn't go
far as the terse Kremlin announcement suggests.
The state-owned Saudi Press Agency's account
claims that Abdullah rebuffed Medvedev virtually
by insisting that any dialogue about the Syrian
situation is "futile". He said Moscow should have
"coordinated with Arabs ... before using its veto
[in the UN Security Council]." Abdullah was quoted
as saying, "But now, dialogue about what is
happening [in Syria] is futile."
Abdullah
made it clear that Riyadh has a closed mind on
Syria and nothing short of a regime change in
Damascus will satisfy the House of Saud.
Medvedev, however, held productive
discussions with Maliki and Ahmadinejad.
Interestingly, Moscow has sized up Baghdad as a
meaningful interlocutor in the Syrian crisis in so
short a time after the pullout of the United
States' troops from that country.
The
Russian initiative to Baghdad is tantamount to an
acknowledgement both of Iraq having got back its
sovereignty after eight years of foreign
occupation and its relevance and its capacity to
play a role in the Syrian crisis, as well as a
reminder to those who forgot that Iraq along with
Syria were two staunch allies of the former Soviet
Union in the Middle East.
The Kremlin
account of the conversation between Medvedev and
Maliki said:
The main subject of discussion was
the situation in the Middle East, in particular
in Syria, with the emphasis on not allowing
outside intervention in Syria's affairs and
the need to end the bloodshed as soon as
possible and launch a comprehensive dialogue in
the country itself between all sides in the
conflict. Both leaders stressed that political
and diplomatic efforts to stabilize the
situation in Syria are the only option and noted
the counterproductive impact of economic
sanctions against Syria, which only
aggravate the Syrian people's social and
economic problems. [Emphasis added.]
Medvedev and al-Maliki "stressed the
importance of continued coordination through
bilateral and multilateral contacts in order to
guarantee regional peace and security".
Interestingly, the two leaders have agreed to
expand and deepen the bilateral ties, which,
incidentally, had a big security content in the
Soviet era.
The stunning development,
however, was Medvedev's phone call to Ahmadinejad
on Wednesday. Interestingly, it was made on the
day after International Atomic Energy Agency
inspectors concluded in Tehran what appears to
have been an inconclusive mission.
Moscow
has been chary of openly displaying a strategic
understanding with Tehran on major regional
problems lest it got unwittingly entangled in the
US-Iran standoff. This political reserve
conditioned Moscow's lukewarm attitude to Iran's
persistent requests for membership of the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization.
Thus, whichever
way one looks at it, Moscow crossed the Rubicon on
Wednesday to touch base with Ahmadinejad on the
Syrian crisis, which Russian commentators
increasingly flag as the most critical
international issue today, which is reaching
"boiling point".
The Russian media account
of the Medvedev-Ahmadinejad conversation claimed
the two leaders "spoke out" against foreign
interference in Syria, while the Kremlin statement
said they "urged the resolution of the current
crisis by Syrian people using only peaceful means
and without any foreign interference. The sides
agreed that the main goal today ... is to prevent
a civil war in the country, which may destabilize
the situation in the whole region."
The
Iranian account was more forthcoming.
"Given their common views and
positions, Iran and Russia must make more effort
to help establish peace in the region and
prevent foreign intervention," Ahmadinejad said.
Medvedev, for his part, said certain
trans-regional powers seek Syria's
disintegration, which is a threat to Middle East
security. The Russian president added that Iran
and Russia can cooperate to peacefully resolve
the crisis in Syria.
Significantly,
Moscow wrapped up its diplomatic initiatives on
Wednesday with the Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei
Rybakov also making a demarche with the US
ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul at a meeting
in the foreign ministry in Moscow over the Iran
situation.
Rybakov voiced Moscow's "strong
objection" to the unilateral sanctions imposed by
the US against Iran and pointed out that such
political pressure only impeded a "negotiated
solution to the West's standoff with Iran" and
complicated Iran's talks with the P5+1 - "Iran
Six" - the US, Britain, France, Russia, China plus
Germany.
The demarche comes at a point
when Russian commentators - like their Chinese
counterparts - are increasingly placing the Syrian
crisis and the situation around Iran as two
vectors of the same matrix. It will bear watch how
the Russian-Iranian strategic understanding over
Syria develops.
A Russian commentary on
Wednesday analyzed that the co-relation of forces
in the heart of the Middle Eastern region is
changing dramatically:
Syria is developing a special
relationship with Iraq, which sympathizes with
Syria's efforts to stabilize the domestic
situation. It is quite probable that with the
withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Iran, Iraq
and Syria will at some point naturally form a
loose, tripartite alliance in the Middle East.
Given that the majority of the Iraqis are Shiite
and Iran's growing influence in Iraq in the last
few years, such a scenario is by no means
improbable.
The Kremlin diplomatic
initiatives on Wednesday seems to have factored in
the emergent regional scenario.
Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a
career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His
assignments included the Soviet Union, South
Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.
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