Tag Archives: protests

That there is presently no feasible plan for stopping the murderous violence in Syria is one of the few certainties surrounding the ever worsening civil war.

Primary responsibility for the violence lies with the brutal Baathist mafia-cum-government – whether thirty years ago under Assad the elder or today under his son – which has demonstrated no hesitation in killing tens of thousands of people to maintain its stranglehold on power. Beyond the human devastation, the destruction of the Aleppo Souk – one of the premier UNESCO world heritage sites – is a damning stain not merely on the Assad regime, but on the world community as a whole.

If only the UN Security Council had dispensed with the veto power given to the Five permanent members at the creation of the organisation, which has long allowed the great powers and their favoured clients literally to get away with murder. Had such a crucial reform been enacted, the world community would have a much easier time coming together to stop these kinds of gross violations of international law, whether by Syria, Israel, or the major powers in their own occupations and wars. Sadly, such a change in the most basic alignment of forces in the international arena will not soon occur.

How the international community can impose a cessation of violence in Syria in the absence of unity of such a purpose among the P5, and why the broader international community has not pushed for a restructuring of the Security Council to help prevent these kinds of conflicts from festering, are important questions that will unfortunately not soon be answered. But as Syrians and the international community search for a way to stop the killing within the existing and flawed international framework, hard questions need to be asked about the manner in which the pro-democracy protest movement was transformed into a rebellion, and then a full scale insurgency and civil war.

A classic international conflict

To be sure, any argument that the fighting in Syria is a purely internal affair which the international community should stay out of is untenable, as it flies in the face of international legal opinion which holds that once a rebellion becomes generalised across a society and impacts neighbouring countries it becomes an “insurgency”. As such, both the government and the insurgents fighting against it should uphold the basic tenets of international humanitarian law, protecting civilians and treat captured belligerents humanely.

At the point that insurgents begin to control territory with organised troops the responsibility to uphold international humanitarian law becomes a legal obligation for all parties. In July of this year the International Committee of the Red Cross declared the Syrian conflict a civil war, meaning that all sides must abide by the Geneva Conventions and other instruments of international humanitarian law.

By that score, there is no doubt that whatever the crimes of the various opposition forces, the overwhelming scope of the murder and crimes against humanity of the Assad regime make it impossible to imagine a scenario in which a cessation of hostilities in which Assad and his most senior generals would escape prosecution for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Yet it is precisely the likelihood of such an outcome which ensures that Assad and his henchmen will fight to the death to cling to power.

How to separate senior regime figures from the rest of the state so that other members of the regime might consider abandoning them is no doubt among the most urgent questions opposition leaders and their international allies are considering. But such directly political questions can too easily obscure other, even more fundamental questions; questions that are extremely difficult to ask in the present circumstances, but which in fact need to be considered by those involved in the protests movements, as well as international activists and scholars who study them.

Specifically, we need to consider how the pro-democracy protests evolved into a violent civil war, what responsibility leaders of the Syrian opposition bear for the violence suffered by pro-democracy forces as a result of the protests, and how we can adjudicate the costs of the insurgency on Syrian civilians, and the country’s civilizational heritage.

See the original post:

Should the Syrian revolutionaries have taken up arms?