The Syrian independence flag flies over a large gathering of protesters in Idlib. Credit: Freedom House/cc by 2.0

By Gustavo Capdevila
GENEVA, Jan 18 2014 (IPS)

The future of the complex armed conflict in Syria, which involves religious and ethnic factors as well as pressures from neighbouring countries and the strategic interests of global powers, will begin to take shape next week at a conference known as “Geneva 2.”

On Jan. 24 it will become apparent whether the warring parties in Syria will accept a negotiated solution to the three-year conflict that has already ended the lives of over 100,000 people and displaced 2.3 million from their homes, while some 9.3 million people are in extreme need of humanitarian aid.“Geneva 2 will not end the war. It can’t.” -- David Harland, the executive director of HD Centre

Representatives of the government of President Bashar al-Assad and delegations from the rebel forces that have been fighting against it since March 2011 are due to meet on that date in the Swiss city of Geneva.

So far, neither side has given a clear indication of its willingness to participate in the talks, in what are apparently delaying tactics aimed at strengthening their bargaining positions.

Prospects for the negotiations appeared to shift in recent weeks as infighting broke out among opposition forces.

A source who is well-informed about the internal situation in Syria told IPS that some opposition groups want freedom in order to combat other forces that are also opposed to Assad.

At the moment, “the more moderate groups are succeeding in military operations against the more radical Al Qaeda groups,” which are completely opposed to a ceasefire, the source said.

The Geneva 2 conference, organised by the United Nations, will open formally on Wednesday Jan. 22 in Montreux, on the northeastern shore of Lake Geneva, at the opposite end of the lake from Geneva itself.

The Montreux meeting will be attended by governments from 30 countries and delegates from international organisations, as well as U.N. representatives headed by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Participants are likely to deliver exhortations for peace and to be largely critical of the Assad regime.

In the last few weeks the United States and Russia have intensified efforts to guide the negotiations towards two primary goals at this first stage: achieving a ceasefire and opening up corridors for aid to reach those most in need.

David Harland, the executive director of the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (HD Centre), a prívate organisation based in Geneva, said the best solution for the difficult humanitarian situation is to deliver aid with the cooperation of the government and all parties.

“At the moment it’s not happening,” he said. “A lot of convoys have been blocked.”

Most convoys have been blocked because they have not received approval from the Damascus government, or because of fighting, or by criminal gangs or extremists, Harland said.

“It’s now very hard to carry out humanitarian operations in areas controlled by the opposition,” he said.

In the run-up to the conference, it is Harland’s view that a ceasefire may be very possible in areas where the opposition forces are surrounded, as in the Houla region and the city of Homs, in the western province of the same name.

A ceasefire will also be possible in areas where the government is holding out in enclaves within territory controlled by the opposition, as in Dar’a and Dayr az Zawr, in the northeast, and Idlib, in the north, he said.

While maintaining a low public profile, the HD Centre successfully offers mediation services and specialises in armed conflicts. In Syria, Harland, a former diplomat from New Zealand, has held meetings with Assad and with leaders of the armed opposition.

On the basis of these, Harland believes that “Geneva 2 will not end the war. It can’t,” he underlined.

The Geneva process has assumed that the U.S. and Russia have enough common ground on Syria to move things forward.

So far, over a period when over 100,000 people have died, this has not been the case, he said.

The problem is that the Geneva process has not found a way to give much voice to Syrians active in the opposition on the ground. “This will have to change if the peace process is to gain traction,” Harland said.

Geneva 2 will be a success “if it opens the door to a new type of peace process,” he said.

A successful peace process would have to be informed by the Syrian people themselves, but implemented with help from the outside.

“It would have to be a minuet: consultations with the Syrians on the ground, and then decisions taken by the U.N. Security Council on the basis of those decisions,” he said.

With respect to inviting Iran to attend the Montreux meeting, a move which Moscow backs but Washington opposes, Harland said Iran’s participation “could be very useful.”

“I think that we need a mechanism where all of the players who are shaping the reality inside Syria are present at the discussions and are held accountable,” he said.

In Harland’s view, the Syrian conflict resembles the 1992-1995 Bosnian War which resulted from the dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia.

Both Bosnia and Syria exhibited internal political issues and internal ethnic religious issues, he said.

Then there is a second circle of regional players which are supporting one ethnic religious community or another.

And finally, a third circle of global powers, mainly the U.S. and Russia, but not excluding China.

In this scenario, he said, the particular difficulty facing Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, who is coordinating the negotiations in his capacity as United Nations and Arab League Special Envoy to Syria, “is that some alignment of all three circles is necessary before there can be any serious prospect for peace.”

That is, there must be some basic accord among the Syrian parties, some basic accord among the regional parties and some basic accord among the U.S. and Russia and the other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council.

Harland acknowledged that the pacification of Bosnia came about after intense bombing of Serbian targets by North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) air squadrons.

“In the case of Syria, I think it’s extremely unlikely that there would be a decisive external intervention,” he said.

For one thing, there is a difference of scale: Bosnia is a country of four million people that is very close to Europe and the West, both geographically and in term of interests.  Syria has six times that population, and is rather further away, Harland said.

Another difference is that the relative power of the United States in 2013 is “less than it was in 1995, when the U.S. intervened militarily in Bosnia,” Harland concluded.

Men warm their hands by a fire in Homs, Syria, which endured two months of artillery bombardment in 2012. Credit: Freedom House/cc by 2.0

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Nov 8 2013 (IPS)

The almost three-year-old Syrian civil war has been a “silent war on human and economic development”, destroying the ability of ordinary Syrian citizens to maintain basic livelihoods, according to a report launched here Wednesday by two United Nations agencies.

“There is an informal rule that it usually takes a country around seven years to recover for each year of civil war,” Michael Bowers, the senior director of Strategic Response and Global Emergencies at Mercy Corps, a humanitarian organisation that works closely with Syrian refugees in neighbouring Lebanon and Jordan, told IPS.“The humanitarian situation in Syria continues to deteriorate rapidly and inexorably." -- U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos

“And although it’s hard to justify this type of estimate, if we look at past civil conflicts such as Yugoslavia or Iraq, it usually does take at least a decade for a country to recover.”

The massive displacement of Syrian citizens and widespread job loss have contributed to a “dramatic drop in consumption … [that] tumbled by 18.8 percent in 2012 … and 47 percent in 2013,” according to the report, by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Private consumption, the U.N. researchers note, is a direct measure of household welfare.

In addition, as many as 2.3 million jobs have disappeared since the beginning of the war, primarily due to the large-scale shutdown of economic activities in highly populated areas.

The report comes at a critical time. World leaders are currently struggling to come up with a date for the “Geneva 2” conference, which aims to pave the way for a political solution to a conflict that has left at least 100,000 people dead.

Even if that conference happens and even if a political solution is found, however, experts say the socioeconomic impact of the civil war will go on for decades. According to Alex Pollock, the director of the microfinance department at the UNRWA, the U.N. agency providing assistance to Palestinian refugees in the Middle East, it will take up to 30 years for the Syrian economy to recover to its 2010 growth rate of five percent of gross domestic product.  

Hidden impact

The economic impact in Syria is not the end of the story. The war has also had a devastating effect on key social welfare factors, including education, health assistance, and population displacement, that are going to negatively impact the country’s overall level of human development.

According to the report, as of July 2013 nearly 3,000 schools had been partially or totally damaged, many of which were eventually turned into shelters for the thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs). School dropout rates have also heightened the deep educational crisis that is plaguing the country: by the second quarter of 2013, 49 percent, or one out of two children, had been forced to quit their school.

And while the conflict has taken a toll on school buildings across the country, medical facilities have not been spared either. The report estimates that over 40 percent of the country’s hospitals are currently out of service, making it increasingly difficult for ordinary Syrians to receive basic medical assistance, not to mention the more serious health threats posed by larger and more devastating epidemics.

Although the international community, with the U.S. and the European Union at the forefront, have been providing millions of dollars in humanitarian aid and funds to foster economic development, this assistance is unlikely to pull the Syrian socioeconomic situation out of the abyss.

International assistance

International agencies such as the UNRWA have been engaged in a number of economic development projects aimed at helping ordinary Syrians to at least maintain a basic level of livelihood, including building up microfinance projects, education facilities and health infrastructure.

“We have been receiving a lot of support, primarily from the Europeans, but also from some of the Arab countries in the region,” Pollock told IPS. “And although the assistance from the Arab world has been rather small, countries such as Saudi Arabia have provided food assistance to those who have been displaced within the country.”

The Syrian government itself has been quite supportive of UNRWA’s work, Pollock says.

“We’re primarily engaged with the governing Ba’ath Party, which is also our main contact at the Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” he says, noting that the central government has also facilitated assistance to the large Palestinian refugee population in the country.

But despite the political support these organisations have been receiving, the future of the Syrian economy remains grim.

The escalation of the civil conflict has resulted in armed factions “destroying the economic and productive assets of the country,” the report argues. This has pushed the Syrian population to rely on agriculture, a highly unstable and unpredictable sector in the country.

As of Nov. 6, the war has produced nearly three million Syrian refugees, of which only 2.2 million have been granted refugee status, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Nearly 40 percent of these are children below the age of 12.

The catastrophic humanitarian crisis, however, does not seem to be moving toward any solution. On Monday, the U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos told the Security Council behind closed doors that the “humanitarian situation in Syria continues to deteriorate rapidly and inexorably,” according to her spokeswoman Amanda Pitt. The number of Syrian people in need of humanitarian assistance may have risen to over nine million, Pitt said.

World powers, however, are still struggling to coordinate strategies to achieve a political solution to the conflict. On Tuesday, U.S, Russian, and U.N. diplomats met in Geneva to try to fix a date for the “Geneva 2” conference, but to no avail.

During a U.S. Department of State background briefing on the negotiations, a senior U.S. official noted that despite the lack of an agreement now, “the conference will take place before the end of the year.”

The Syrian independence flag flies over a large gathering of protesters in Idlib. Credit: Freedom House/cc by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Oct 18 2013 (IPS)

Despite U.S. and Western pressure on the opposition to take part in U.N.-sponsored talks aimed at halting the two-and-a-half-year-old Syrian civil war, most experts here believe the rebels are unlikely to show up any time soon. And even if they do, the results will be unlikely to change much of anything on the ground.

The so-called “Geneva 2” negotiations, which are aimed at reaching an agreement on a political transition to eventually replace President Bashar Al-Assad, are supposed to take place toward the end of next month.“Today, Geneva 2 is a figleaf designed to conceal the fact that most Western countries are coming to the conclusion that they don’t want to see any side win." -- Joshua Landis

But analysts here believe the disarray within the opposition and its increasingly apparent inability to represent rebel factions — particularly radical Islamist factions, two of the most prominent of which are linked to Al-Qaeda and have always rejected international negotiations designed to end the conflict — that are leading the actual fighting on the ground could make the conference irrelevant, if it indeed takes place.

“More and more, the armed groups on the ground are renouncing ties to the political opposition and are explicitly opposed to a Geneva conference,” Mona Yacoubian, a Middle East specialist at the Stimson Centre, told IPS here.

“It’s very difficult to assert that holding it within the next six weeks is a realistic alternative, but it’s also a very important goal to work toward, understanding that there really are no appealing alternatives in the face of a situation on the ground that continues to get worse,” she said.

Indeed, with well over 100,000 people estimated to have been killed and another two million who have sought refuge in neighbouring countries, the increasingly sectarian conflict in Syria appears more and more intractable, even as the Assad government appears to be cooperating with U.N. efforts that got underway last month to destroy its formidable chemical arsenal.

“We are at a stalemate, and anybody who looks at this objectively today sees that Syria is being effectively partitioned,” according to Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma and publisher of the widely read Syria Comment blog.

While Assad continues to rule over the western and southern half of the country, the north and east are being run by various rebel militias – some of which find themselves increasingly in conflict with each other.

Kurdish militias have gained control of the country’s northeastern corner, although recent clashes between them and radical Islamist factions – many of them dominated by foreign fighters – have sent thousands of refugees over the border to Iraqi Kurdistan.

“Today, Geneva 2 is a figleaf designed to conceal the fact that most Western countries are coming to the conclusion that they don’t want to see any side win,” Landis told IPS. “And, rather than say we don’t want to see a winner, they’re looking for a political solution, but that will be extremely difficult to broker.”

Syria’s deputy prime minister, Qadri Jamil, said Thursday during a visit to Moscow that the talks should take place Nov. 23-24, but his Russian hosts, who, along with Washington, have been pushing hard for the conference to take place, declined to endorse those dates.

Echoing Landis, Jamil, who, despite his government post, has insisted he will take part in negotiations as part of the opposition, stressed that the conflict has reached a “military and political dead end.” The negotiations, he said, offered a “way out for everyone: the Americans, Russia, the Syrian regime and the opposition.”

Opposition backers in the region – most importantly, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar — had hoped that a chemical attack against rebel positions in suburban Damascus that Washington claimed killed more than 1,400 people would trigger a U.S. and Western military intervention that would shift the balance of power on the battlefield decisively in the rebels’ favour.

But when that failed to materialise – due both to the clear reluctance of President Barack Obama to involve the U.S. in yet another Middle Eastern civil war and unexpectedly strong public opposition, as well as the 11^th-hour agreement between the U.S. and Russia, Assad’s most important external backer, on a U.N. plan to dismantle Damascus’ chemical arsenal – those hopes evaporated.

Indeed, by recognising and even praising Assad’s cooperation in dismantling his weapons, the U.S. appears to have boosted the Syrian president’s diplomatic position even as it continues to insist publicly that his replacement by a transitional government with full executive powers remains the goal of the Geneva negotiations.

But, according to a new report released Thursday by the International Crisis Group (ICG), the most credible political opposition that could take part in the talks, the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, lacks sufficient influence inside Syria to truly represent the various rebel factions, including even those who are not tied to Al-Qaeda.

Described by the ICG as a “hodgepodge of exiles, intellectuals and secular dissidents bereft of a genuine political constituency, as well as Muslim Brothers geographically detached from their natural base,” the Coalition, like its regional backers, had relied heavily on Western military intervention similar to that which eventually overthrew the regime of Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi.

But “(f)or the Obama administration, such direct military intervention never appears truly to have been in the cards,” according to the report. “Instead it saw the priority as getting the opposition to unite and present a more broadly appealing vision of the post-Assad future.”

“In contrast, the opposition saw value in those tasks … only insofar as they were accompanied by substantially more Western support. Washington waited for the opposition to improve itself; the opposition waited for Washington to empower it. Both shared the goal of a Syria without Assad, but neither developed a strategy to achieve the goal that took account of the other’s constraints, triggering a cycle of frustration and mistrust that discredited the political opposition and Western governments alike in the eyes of the uprising’s rank and file.”

Even more damaging, according to the report, has been the lack of coordination among its regional supporters which in turn helped spur the rise of extremist groups – most of them financed by private funding from the Gulf states — within the rebel ranks. The Supreme Military Council (SMC), which is represented in the Coalition and has become the recipient of most humanitarian and military aid and training provided by Western countries, including the U.S., “enjoys scant leverage on the ground,” according to the report.

Instead of creating a new group, however, the Coalition’s foreign backers should urgently improve their coordination, especially on the military front; press Gulf states and Turkey to curb private support for radical groups; and urge the Coalition to focus more on providing basic services and strengthening activist networks in rebel-held areas — in part to better challenge and confront jihadi groups – and on “reaching internal consensus on workable negotiation parameters” for the Geneva track which “remains the best hope for ending the war.”

“I assume Assad will send someone to Geneva, and the Coalition will, too, because no one wants America to blame them for boycotting,” Landis said. “But it will all be a fig leaf for what is becoming the de facto partition of Syria, because that’s what’s happening on the ground.”

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.