History will judge us savagely

Nations play own game or watch helpless as Syrian war drags on, says Peter Jones

IN recent months we have read about the Turkish capture of Afrin in Northern Syria and the use of chemical weapons on Douma in Eastern Ghouta, an urban area east of Damascus, followed by another US initiated missile retaliation attack. In addition, Israeli warplanes attacked a Syrian air base.

As the war drags on into its eighth year with no end in sight, almost half a million people have been killed in Syria, nearly eight million are displaced in their own country and over five million have become refugees.

So why is there no end in sight? Essentially Syria has become a battlefield of proxy wars being fought by regional actors with other international players either pursuing their own agendas or standing by helpless because the conflict has got so confusing they have no idea where to turn.

Syria’s tragedy began when it was created out of the ashes of the Great War after Britain and France made a secret deal to divide up the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The League of Nations decided the new countries would be mandates to prepare for eventual independence. Syria was made up of a majority Sunni Muslim population, a minority mix of various Shi’a sects, various Christian denominations and the tiny Yazidi minority.

The unfortunate Kurds who were initially promised some form of autonomy, ended up in six countries and became the world’s largest minority without their own country — today 30-40 million of them. In Syria, they constituted a small minority in the north of the country.

Syria was granted full independence in 1946. Ruling such a diverse country proved hard work for the new government. The war with Israel in 1948-49 led to a humiliating defeat and the arrival of Palestinian refugees who remain in Syria to this day. Arab nationalism was always a siren call and there was a temporary union with Egypt in the United Arab Republic in 1958. Following another defeat in the third Arab-Israeli war in 1967, the head of the Air Force, Hafez al-Assad, seized power in 1970.

He was an Alawite, a Shi’a sect, making up 13 per cent of the population. To make matters worse, Syria continued to intervene in Lebanon where a civil war broke out in 1975, complicated by Israeli intervention after 1982. After the death of Hafez al-Assad in 2000, his son, Bashar, took over as president, but hopes of liberalisation were soon crushed and the family continued to rely heavily on their Alawite community while maintaining security for other minorities, including the Christians.

When the Arab Spring broke out in 2011, calls for democracy in Syria soon degenerated into sectarian warfare. Various militia groups turned to regional allies for support as the conflict dragged on, leading to the current impasse. The Syrian regime continued to rely heavily on Russia, an alliance dating back to the Cold War. The regime also relies heavily on Iran which backs the Shi’a militia, Hezbollah, based in Lebanon.

Not surprisingly, Sunni forces turned to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States but the situation became more complicated with the arrival of al-Qaeda and ISIS on the battlefield, as both also oppose the Saudi regime.

Two recent factors have made matters even more complex. Turkey, under the increasingly autocratic President Erdogan, has always sought to control its Kurdish minority. The Kurds had been encouraged by the creation of an autonomous zone of their own in the north of Iraq after US forces overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003. They took a leading role in the defeat of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, backed by the US. In Syria, the Kurds had carved out their own autonomous zone, Rojava, in the north, but this has been fiercely opposed by Turkey who fear their support for the Kurds over the border. The dilemma for the US has been their reliance on Kurdish forces in the war on ISIS but also reliance on Turkey as a key NATO ally which hosts their strategically important military base at Incirlik.

This explains why Turkey this year decided to join with Islamist forces in Syria to seize control of the Kurdish enclave at Afrin, which the Kurds strategically withdrew from to prevent the massacre of even more civilians living in this multi-ethnic enclave near the Turkish border. And 167,000 people were displaced while 300 to 500 people were killed in what the Turkish government cynically called Operation Olive Branch,

alleging the presence of ISIS forces when observers agree they did not exist. Critics of the military operation in Turkey have been imprisoned, including university students who courageously demonstrated against it.

The other complication is ongoing conflict between Israel and Iran. The regime in Tehran continues to make verbal threats against the existence of Israel while the Israeli government tries hard to get the US to join them in overthrowing it. Israel believes Iranian-backed troops stationed on its border are a threat to its security and fear the unreliability of the Trump administration. Analysts fear this conflict could escalate.

Meanwhile the regime of Bashar al-Assad continues to battle for its own survival as the various forces against it continue to fall out among themselves.

So why is the international community powerless to act? Since the Cold War ended, the UN Security Council has been deadlocked over whether or not it has the right to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. Russia and China see any such move as giving carte blanche to those who criticise their own treatment of minorities like the Chechens in Russia and the Tibetans and Uyghurs in China so they veto any such move. Russia also has its historic interest in supporting Syria and tries to play the peacemaker while the US has lost all sense of direction in the complexities of Middle East politics.

In Australia, the Syrian refugees have become pawns for both the Liberal Party and the Labor Party with their eyes on winning marginal seats in the next election.

History will judge us all savagely as it is already doing over what happened in Rwanda and Bosnia two decades ago.

Syria’s tragedy began when it was created out of the ashes of the Great War after Britain and France made a secret deal