Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Photo credit: PanArmenian Photo
Syria has “categorically rejected” an Arab League resolution calling for a joint Arab League-UN peacekeeping mission to end the country’s 11-month conflict, which has developed from a civic uprising inspired by the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya into something very close to a civil war.
Meanwhile, fresh violence in the Syrian city of Homs was reported on Monday. Activists say more than 400 people have been killed since security forces launched an assault on opposition-held areas on the city this month. In total, human rights groups say more than 7,000 have died throughout Syria since last March. President Bashar al-Assad’s government says at least 2,000 members of the security forces have been killed combating “armed gangs and terrorists.”
Yusuf Ahmed, Syria’s envoy in Cairo, said the peacekeeping mission plan “reflected the hysteria of these governments,” reported the BBC, which said the UN General Assembly is poised for a key debate on the crisis in Syria. The EU backed the League’s peacekeeping plan on Monday. The Arab League said it was ending all diplomatic co-operation with Syria, and promised to give “political and material support” to the opposition.
The League’s bold moves come a week after Russia and China controversially vetoed a UN Security Council resolution on Syria, which would have endorsed a previous Arab League peace initiative. The BBC‘s Jeremy Bowen in Cairo said the new Arab League resolution contains its toughest language on Syria so far and makes it much more likely that the issue will return to the Security Council.
Speaking while on a visit to South Africa, UK Foreign Secretary William Hague said: “I don’t see the way forward in Syria as being Western boots on the ground, in any form, including in peacekeeping form, but of course if such a concept could be made viable we will be supporting it in all the usual ways.”
The commentariat remain focused on what is the best way to stop the bloodshed in Syria, with some calling for militarised intervention by the West and others insistent that a diplomatic solution is a better option.
Negotiated settlement is the only way forward. Writing at The Guardian’s Comment is free, Nicholas Noe insisted “we can’t stop the bloodshed in Syria without talking to Assad.” Noe criticised the “simplistic” approach that says that bringing about the “controlled collapse” of the “murderous” Assad regime is the best course of action: “In this often simplistic approach, the underlying logic invariably rests on two core ideas. First, Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah will not come to the aid of their staunch ally in the event of an impending fall. Second, any violence committed by a dying, isolated Assad regime could be reasonably contained.” Noe insisted that both projections are “unlikely. The fall of Assad would deliver a huge, strategic blow to both Iran and its “junior partner”, Hezbollah. It simply does not follow, then, that these actors will simply bite their tongues and absorb the disaster for their mutual position in the Middle East.” Even were Iran and Hezbollah to quietly watch on, Noe warned that the Alawite Assad regime is “fairly well positioned to prolong what many in the west have confidently projected as an ‘inevitable’ demise wreaked by history. This slow denouement will mean an extremely violent civil war that will burn for quite some time, with vast humanitarian consequences and multiple unintended effects.” “As a result, the responsible course forward – both morally and strategically – is to begin seriously exploring negotiations with the Assad regime,” concluded Noe.
Get real, Obama. In an editorial, The Christian Science Monitor insisted that the time has come for US President Barack Obama to aid the Syrian opposition. The newspaper suggested the only reason Obama hasn’t militarily intervened in Syria, as he did in Libya, is because “he is a realist in foreign policy, not an idealist. He tries to deal with the world effectively as it is rather than move it toward an ideal state, such as more democracy.” However, the newspaper said there is an emerging “realist” justification for intervention: “the tipping point is near. If that is the case, the realist would want to be in on the ground floor of the post-Assad era, retaining America’s interests in this most pivotal of Middle East countries … There’s a lesson to be learned from Obama’s hesitancy a year ago in not helping force Hosni Mubarak out of power in Egypt. It gave the US a weak hand in Cairo’s still-turbulent politics. Now with Syria, the US should be helping forcefully to end an even more ruthless regime. It would provide influence to salvage US interests in the region, from protecting Israel to containing Iran.”
The situation is finely and agonisingly poised. In an editorial, The Financial Times said “the carnage in Syria is getting worse by the day” and lamented that the situation “settling in to a bloody stalemate in which the regime cannot regain control of the country, but its opponents are too weak to dislodge it.” The newspaper said arming the rebels “will raise the price of regime repression, and perhaps raise a pole of resistance that will become a magnet for defectors. Every regime offensive, however bloody, has shown the Assads can rely only on two loyal units staffed by their minority sect, the heterodox Shia Alawites, and that when they deploy units reflecting Syria’s 70 per cent Sunni majority, troops defect.” That said, a decision to arm the Free Syrian Army “could speed the spiral into sectarian war,” warned the newspaper.
These videos, posted by the Local Coordination Committee (LCC) opposition network, appears to show continued shelling in the Baba Amr neighbourhood today:
