Britain accepts Assad may have to stay in power
Russian president makes clear he is prepared to use military force against Western-backed rebels
DOWNING STREET has accepted that Bashar al-Assad may have to remain in power in Syria during a “transition” period and will be involved in talks with Western powers, the Foreign Secretary said yesterday.
In a significant change in the Government’s position on Syria, Philip Hammond said Mr Assad might be part of a “transition authority” in the country. David Cameron had previously rejected calls for talks with Mr Assad.
However, the Prime Minister appears to have softened his stance following comments by Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and John Kerry, the US secretary of state, who have already suggested that Mr Assad could remain in power.
Mr Hammond told the French newspaper Le Monde: “Assad must go, he can’t be part of Syria’s future.” But he added: “If we reach a deal on a transition authority and Assad is part of it, then it will be necessary to talk with him in his capacity as an actor in this process.”
Mr Cameron will next week hold talks on the issue with world leaders, including Barack Obama, at the United Nations in New York.
Mr Assad is being given military support by Vladimir Putin, who said yes- terday that the only way to end the war in Syria was to support its government in the fight against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The Russian president told CBS News he had sent dozens of helicopter gunships and jet fighters to Syria to “rescue” Mr Assad.
MIDDLE EAST EDITOR PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN has sent out a challenge to the West, saying he is determined to thwart its plans to remove the Assad regime and is sending generals to Baghdad to coordinate policy with Iraq and Iran.
Mr Putin agreed that his dispatching of weapons, including 28 fighter aircraft, armoured personnel carriers and thousands of men to Syria, was aimed at shoring up the embattled regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
The presence of the weaponry at the Bassel al-Assad International Airport was confirmed by aerial photographs,
right, taken by a commercial satellite, and analysed by military experts.
Mr Putin said: “It’s my deep belief that any actions to the contrary – in order to destroy the legitimate government – will create a situation which you can witness now in the other countries of the region or in other regions, for instance in Libya, where all the state institutions are disintegrated.
“There is no other solution to the Syrian crisis than strengthening the effective government structures and rendering them help in fighting terrorism.”
The United States and its Western allies have insisted for four years that under any solution to the Syrian conflict Mr Assad would have to stand down – the demand of the political opposition in exile and rebel groups fighting him. The British government has shifted its stance – as has the US – to suggest that Mr Assad could stay on in power while a transitional government is negotiated and put in place, to counter arguments that his overthrow would make a bad situation even worse.
Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, told the French newspaper Le
Monde: “Assad must go, he can’t be part of Syria’s future.” He added: “If we reach a deal on a transition authority and Assad is part of it, then it will be necessary to talk with him in his capacity as an actor in this process.”
Mr Putin will meet President Barack Obama on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly on Monday. But even that encounter, an attempt to smooth relations and, if possible, thrash out a common position on the need to fight Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (Isil), the one thing to which both powers are committed, was mired in a row.
Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman, said the meeting was agreed in response to “repeated requests from the Russians” with Mr Putin keen to discuss the conflict in Ukraine and the sanctions regime imposed on Russia over its support for anti-Kiev rebels there.
The Kremlin said this was a “distortion”, and that the main conversation would focus on Syria.
The Russian move into Syria has changed the calculus of all sides in the conflict. Mr Putin’s words make clear he is prepared to help the regime defend itself against the Western-backed rebels, currently on the advance in the north-west, as well as against Isil.
That dashes hopes that further rebel gains could force Mr Assad to the negotiating table. Turkey, which has backed the rebels from the start, has also been trying to persuade the US to support a no-fly zone in the north of the country. That was starting to win backing among politicians in Europe keen to end the flood of refugees to the West. A no-fly zone would enable them to be protected inside Syria.
However, the Americans would be unwilling to risk a confrontation with the Russian air force if it decided to help Syria defend its airspace.
Charles Lister, an analyst at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, who met leaders of 30 major rebel groups earlier this month, said Mr Putin’s move had galvanised them and risked inflaming the conflict further. “They are thirsty for Russian blood,” he said. “They are saying, ‘Yes, Russia has sophisticated weaponry but this is a second Afghanistan’.”
He said the same message was coming from non-Islamist as well as Islamist armed groups, threatening to radicalise the rebels further.
Until now, Russia has presented its support for Mr Assad as part of the war on Isil, encouraging the West to join in. Non-Isil rebels say they are also fighting Isil – the battle is particularly bitter in the north, on the edges of Turkey’s proposed no-fly zone – and that attacking them on behalf of Mr Assad would strengthen, not weaken, the militant jihadist movement. The White House fears Mr Putin’s real motive is to take advantage of the crisis to widen Russia’s strategic footprint in the Middle East.
The new “co-ordination centre” in Iraq, reported by Fox News, and based on briefings from American officials, would be a step into what had previously been US geopolitical territory.
The report quoted the officials saying Russian officers were “popping up everywhere”.
The centre would coordinate Russian support for the pro-Iranian Shia militia which do much of the ground fighting against Isil in Iraq. It would be the first Russian presence in Iraq since Soviet times. The US has been reluctant to support these militias directly from the air because of their record of fighting American and British troops in recent years, and their reputation for sectarian thuggery.
General Qassem Suleimani, head of the Iranian al-Quds Force, has reportedly been in Moscow twice recently.
The Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, visiting New York for the General Assembly, said guardedly: “I do not see a coalition between Iran and Russia on fighting terrorism in Syria.”
Take a few international crises – the Syrian civil war, the irruption of Isil, the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine, the surge of refugees across European frontiers. All of them are linked. The tides of humanity washing up on Greek shores are driven by the violence in Syria, taken to medieval extreme by Isil. Putin, a pariah for what he has done in Ukraine, is a necessary partner in any effort to bring peace to Syria. The EU’s retreat into a competitive nationalism that threatens its very foundations underlies the failure to agree a viable plan to handle the refugee crisis.
But there is a more fundamental connection – the utter failure of the international institutions and accords put in place since the end of the Second World War either to forestall such crises or solve them when they explode. The rules-based international order is itself at risk. A sulphurous whiff of anarchy is in the air.
World leaders – all 193 of them – are currently flocking to the 70th annual session of the UN General Assembly in New York. The superstars will all be there too, Obama, Putin, Xi Jinping, Rouhani, the Pope and so on. And every one of them will be pontificating in tones of vacuous bombast. Do not think for a moment that this enhances the effectiveness of the UN. In core matters of war and peace it has proved well nigh useless.
On Syria, the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, has been wholly ineffectual. A succession of Special Representatives for Syria have achieved nothing. One of them, Kofi Annan, himself a former Secretary General, complained that, “when the Syrian people desperately need action, there continues to be finger-pointing and name-calling in the Security Council”. On Syria, as on so many other issues, the UN Security Council, the organisation’s executive engine, has been paralysed by profound splits between the permanent members, with Russia and China in one corner and the US, UK and France in the other. All of which, incidentally, tells us that there will be no peace in Syria without Russia and Iran, President Assad’s principal supporters, at the forefront of diplomatic efforts.
As the UN sinks beneath the waves, other pillars of the post-1945 international order crumble. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, two institutions established in 1944 under the dominant influence of the US and the UK to promote financial stability and economic development, are now diminished creatures. The authority of the IMF has been hit by its unhappy involvement in the Greek crisis. The World Bank is under challenge from China and its Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, of which Britain is a founding member. The World Trade Organisation, set up in the Forties with the goal of liberalising trade, has not sealed a global deal for over 20 years. The little-known Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, once one of the great pillars of détente or conflict prevention between the West and the old Soviet Union, has proved powerless before Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and Georgia.
Most of these institutions have been in decline for years. More dramatic is the sense that the EU, whose origins go back to 1951, is coming apart at the seams. Frontiers are being re-erected. Member-states are abusing each other in public. Policy is crippled. It has become obvious that the EU is a fairweather organisation that prospers only when the good times roll, an organisation that proclaims the advent of the “post-modern state”, but which is riven by old-fashioned nationalism. To this poisonous brew we must add the resentment of Germany. As I remember from my time as ambassador, Chancellor Helmut Kohl saw deep integration in the EU as the means of calming fears of German hegemony. Today this vision has been turned on its head and Angela Merkel become the bully from Berlin.
The unravelling of an international order, put in place some three generations ago on Anglo-American and European templates, is no surprise as the global power axis shifts.
Can anything be done to restore stability? It is anyone’s guess what will happen in Europe. But could the UN be brought back to life? In truth, it can do no more than its member states allow. Perhaps there lies the solution. It is astonishing that the permanent membership of the Security Council is exactly the same as when it first met in 1946 – the US, UK, China, Russia and France. So why not inject it with new blood and recognise the rise of new powers, such as India and Brazil?
We in the West have to get away from the notion that we should continue to be the dominant arbiters of what constitutes international order as if it were still 1946. Rightly or wrongly, other powers see this as selfishly serving our national interest. But what is our place? One yearns for a statesmanship and a diplomacy to guide us through the difficulties of this disorderly Hobbesian world. Sadly, as the crises rage on, and the 193 leaders gather to slap each other on the back, I detect neither.