OPINION - Syria, Ideas to End Stalemate

"Three ideas to end stalemate (and start Building the Syrian State?)" Democracy Digest 5/17/2012

The United States today denied that a war games exercise on Syria’s border with Jordan was related to the country’s ongoing conflict.

“It’s not about Syria, it’s just a pure coincidence,” U.S. Central Command Maj. Robert Bockholt told MSNBC.com from Jordan. ”Eager Lion 12 has been pre-planned.”

But some observers suggest that even if the operation, involving 19 European and Arab military allies, does not presage international military intervention in Syria, it is probably designed to send political signals to Syria and its allies.

“You can’t honestly say that there is not a message when you get 19 nations together in multilateral force less than 50 miles away from the Syrian border,” Michael Stephens of London-based military and security think tank RUSI told MSNBC.com from Qatar.

“There is no possible reason as to why the Americans wouldn’t want a joint operation held close to Syria,” he added. “It enhances deterrence (and) the Americans could’ve quietened it down if they wanted to.”

The exercises follow a marked increase in violent attacks by jihadi groups and growing involvement by Iran in suppressing Syria’s pro-democracy movement (Damascus is by far the main destination for Iranian arms exports, defying a U.N. export ban, Reuters reports.)

President Bashar al-Assad’s claim on Russian TV that the 15-month-old uprising against Baathist rule was fueled by external powers and the violent upsurge the work of foreign-backed terrorists is dismissed by independent analysts.

“Looked at historically, the Assad regime may be secular, but it has extensive relations with jihadi groups, whether allowing them to transit Syria to fight the US in Iraq or in Lebanon to carry out its foreign policy objectives,” said Andrew Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The Obama administration is in a “holding pattern” over the conflict, says one U.S. official, as it waits for Moscow to lose patience with Assad, for sanctions to cripple the economy and for the disorganized Syrian opposition to finally present a coherent strategy and vision for a post-Assad Syria.

The Syrian National Council (SNC), the exile-based opposition coalition, rebuffed reports that a leading dissident had resigned from its ranks, insisting that Fawaz Tello had never been a member.

Escalating violence and dysfunctional opposition have contributed to the current stalemate which former State Department policy planning chief Anne-Marie Slaughter proposes to end. It’s time to add “new weapons to the diplomatic arsenal,” she writes in the Financial Times:

First, as strongly as I support the cause of the peaceful Syrian protesters who began this conflict more than a year ago, the central issue in Syria today should be framed not as the opposition versus the government but as non-violence versus violence. The violence itself must be delegitimised, wherever it comes from.

If violence itself is the enemy, then the second step is to crowd-source monitors for peace. Every citizen with a cell phone, in every city, of every creed, ethnicity and political disposition should be deployed as a UN monitor, charged with photographing every incidence of violence they witness and uploading their pictures to a central UN site. They should photograph faces as well as weapons. If the Security Council truly supports the Annan plan, then it should authorize the UN to provide such a site and publicize it throughout Syria on cable television, the internet and in print media. Women’s groups and citizen activists everywhere should support their Syrian counterparts in a movement for peace.

Finally, governments around the world, acting through the UN General Assembly, should interpret the “responsibility to protect” (R2P) doctrine as a mandate to wield the power not of arms but of diplomatic recognition. R2P requires governments to protect their own citizens from genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and ethnic cleansing, or else forfeit their legitimacy.

“These ideas will seem fanciful to many,” Slaughter concedes. “But stalemate is no solution. Given the wasteland of death and violence that Syria is becoming, why not try to build a platform for peace?”

While some opposition groups are demanding military intervention by the international community or the arming of internal militias like the Free Syrian Army, a new Damascus-based civic movement focused on non-violent democratic transition and social justice represents “a countershift inside Syria’s opposition that is recapturing international attention,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“It’s very difficult,” said Louay Hussein, a longtime critic of the Assad regime. “The regime squashed the leaders of the early protest movement, so in Syria it’s been invent and re-invent and re-invent.”

Building the Syrian State is “the highest-profile example of a handful of alliances drawing young activists away from larger opposition groups,” the Journal reports, by “arguing that protests and fighting have fueled a dead-end cycle they hope can be broken with civil resistance and, in some cases, a new focus on politics.”

Given the Syrian context, violence will not be the means to a desirable end, but an insuperable impediment to democratic transition, said Hussein, an advocate of nonviolent tactics and a founder of the group.

“If we enter the cycle of violence we will not find a democratic solution but the division of the country,”

The group proposes an action plan that includes “practical steps for ending the tyrannical regime and the current struggle in a peaceful and secure way” under the auspices of “a wide national coalition that is able to move the country into a transition” towards democracy and good governance; enhanced political participation through rule of law; building a civil society and democratic culture; media freedom and “citizenship as a founding stone for a new social contract,” including sustainable development and a form of “economic democracy” which takes into account social justice and inclusion, especially of marginalized groups.

“Some people see this kind of work as nonsense,” said Adnan, a former protester from the southern city of Deraa, who now publishes a monthly newsletter about nonviolent movements. “But we think it haunts the regime even more than weapons.”

Assad’s regime is deliberately aggravating the conflict by targeting advocates of non-violent political dissent in a largely unseen crackdown, NPR reports:

Most analysts say the campaign began with the arrest of Mazen Darwish, a prominent human rights worker and the director of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression. Darwish was jailed in February after a raid on his offices in the capital. Arrests have accelerated in recent weeks in what a U.N. Security Council diplomat terms a new phase in Syria, as the regime winds down an intense military campaign.

According to Syrian activists, the most recent arrests include Mahmud Issa, an opposition lawyer and activist from the coastal city of Tartous. In Damascus, Ahmad Mouaz Al Khatib, a moderate religious leader, was jailed in early May along with Salameh Kaile h, a noted leftist and a political commentator. Last week, the two sons of Fayez Sara, founder of the Association of Syrian Journalists, were arrested after a 6 a.m. raid on Sara’s house by security police, according to his lawyer. Sara had been part of a “national dialogue” sponsored by the regime last summer in an earlier attempt to open talks with the opposition.

“It’s a political decapitation [of] the rational opposition,” says Chris Doyle, director of the London-based Council for Arab-British Understanding.

“They are arresting left, right and center,” says a Damascus-based analyst who asked not to be named for his own safety.