Europe is clueless about Syria
Conferences and funding have done nothing to ease woes of the people of the country suffering from seven years of conflict
Have a heart for Federica Mogherini. The EU’s foreign policy diva must be having trouble sleeping at night with the pressure on her to actually score a victory for herself in her swanky billion dollar office in Brussels. Any victory, in fact.
After three years in office, even in Brussels where journalists can be called in and dictated copy to, the poor lady can’t find one hack to do the positive, statutory ‘achievements’ article which they often do after a 100 days or a year.
After taking office in 2014, many in Brussels said her job would be a doddle, given that the person that she was replacing was so spectacularly ineffective and lacked charisma. Indeed, Catherine Ashton was handicapped by having no foreign languages and often struggled among diplomats to even remember the capitals of some countries, while making herself a laughing stock in Brussels for once getting lost inside a foreign ministry building on one of the many foreign trips that is required of the job. The poor woman simply didn’t have the education, public speaking skills or international swagger of a leading diplomat.
So enter Federica Mogherini, Italy’s foreign minister and ‘Arabist’ and sit back and see how this professional international politician puts the EU on the map once and for all as a geopolitical heavyweight.
If only it were that easy. Mogherini has been made to look a fool by the Israelis who called her bluff when she threatened them over settlements; the Turks recently told her where to get off over an EU deal which Brussels wanted to dictate; she has still yet to gain any real support from the foreign ministers of EU member states (who don’t have the confidence in her to do anything concrete on the foreign policy circuit); and she has failed to play a leading role or offer any real solutions to Libya, Iraq or Syria. In fact, her one billion euro a year budget for her new ‘diplomatic task force’ is beginning to look like a farce. What does Mogherini actually do?
Unfortunately, like the EU itself, she is beginning to panic and starting to resort to hilarious histrionics to promote herself. Take the recent ‘Syria Conference’ in Brussels, a shameful exercise in PR, which in my view, was an entirely desperate ploy on her part to salvage a shred of credibility that the EU has a role to play in peace negotiations. It does. But the role is very much just inviting people to windowless conference halls and providing interpreting services. And nothing more.
It must have been really agonising and humiliating after peace conferences came and went with all the big guns, and time after the time, the EU was not even invited. Even as an observer. Not once. Think about that. Not the Syrian government nor any of the opposition groups takes Mogherini remotely seriously as a player.
So what do you do with a billion dollars and no invites to other people’s events? Throw your own party of course! Mogherini knew it would be very hard for EU foreign ministers to not attend – and therefore other players like Qatar and Saudi Arabia would turn up – but the truth is that the entire event was about promoting herself and her office as ‘useful’, when, in reality the EU’s diplomatic service is about as useful as a chocolate machine gun in the midday sun.
Mogherini so badly needs to promote herself as a player that we are getting to ludicrous levels of histrionics now just to provide hand-out photo and video fodder for the call-centre journalists camped in Brussels. Why, you may ask, was a peace conference about Syria held so far from the country itself? Press coverage. Hold it in Brussels and the EU can muster more journalists to write up the press release spiel. It’s all about positive PR for Mogherini and her EU office.
But you can’t blame the Italian femme fatale for trying. Just a couple of months ago, her brilliant ‘rescue plan’
The EU continues to fail. And fail. And fail in Syria. And yet the hysterical, two bit soap opera where millions of taxpayers’ money is wasted.
to stop the war in Syria – hundreds of millions of dollars of cash for both Assad and extremists – wasn’t taken seriously. I mean neither side could even be bothered to issue a statement about the preposterous offer. But wait. Just a few days ago, another rabbit is pulled from the hat and she produces – yes, you’ve guessed it – another EU ‘blueprint’ to end the Syrian war: a ‘communication’ which sets out the gargantuan steps the EU needs to take to make Syria all sorted and nice and shiny and clean: a paper which says the EU should build roads in Syria and arrange election monitoring. I can just see those idiotic MEPs now in their blue EU jackets watching people vote and the huge roadside signs with the EU flag.
I’m not making this, dear reader, I swear.
The EU continues to fail. And fail. And fail in Syria. And yet the hysterical, two bit soap opera where millions of taxpayers’ money is wasted each week just on keeping up the farcical theatre to make it look credible, goes on. This is what the EU does well. Promoting itself using around a 1,000 Brussels based journalists who are too happy to publish the photos and copy verbatim the propaganda handed to them in press releases all from an organisation which preaches freedom of speech across the world.
The Brussels conference was shameful and achieved nothing. The 6 billion euros it raised over several years was already pledged by most of the players and the entire event quickly betrayed its sincerity to muster preventative diplomacy in the region by the conference showing its prejudice and loathing of Assad by condemning the Syrian leader for the chemical attacks in Idlib. I don’t remember Mogherini though ever making even a comment about Britain’s own shameful sale of cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia used in Yemen or America’s use of white phosphorous in Syria. And of course then there’s the appalling US bombing in Mosul.
What the conference did show was the EU’s bias against the Syrian regime in how quickly it condemned it for the chemical attack, without even waiting for expert analysis. And this in itself exposes the EU for its political agenda, which as an international peace broker, has no credibility. But then it had no credibility or any track record whatsoever of resolving conflict in its own back yard in the former Yugoslavia, Cyprus, Northern Ireland, Basque Country, Corsica not to mention not being able to prevent the terror attacks of both Paris and Brussels – even when both cases, the terrorists were being monitored and were known to security services.
In 2000, in Brussels, I cheekily told, in a TV interview, Commissioner Olli Rehn, who later became vice president that the EU had no record of any single example of conflict resolution. Rehn, who looked remarkably like the Russel Crowe character in ‘The Insider’ lifted his eyebrows and retorted: “Oh, that’s not true...I think we were instrumental in bringing about peace in Macedonia” he said. “Yes” (gaining confidence, smiling smugly) I think we sent some soldiers there once on a peace keeping mission” he thundered.
Martin Jay recently won the U.N.’s prestigious Elizabeth Neuffer Memorial Prize (UNCA) in New York in 2016, for his journalism work in the Middle East. He is based in Beirut and can be
followed at @MartinRJay