Even as Syria’s nightmare continues, policy makers should consider the country’s future once hostilities end. Those planning for Syria’s “day after” should learn a lesson from the past and avoid an approach just adopted in Libya, and before that in Iraq, that will widen divisions rather than heal the wounds.
Even by the standards of Syria's ever-worsening stream of atrocity and massacre videos, the latest footage from the country cannot fail to shock for its sheer savagery. The video, posted on May 12 but filmed on March 26 near the Syrian town of Qusayr, on the border with Lebanon, opens by calmly filming a rebel commander cutting open the chest of what we assume is a deceased pro-Bashar al-Assad fighter, removing his heart and liver with surgical precision and sang-froid.
Syrian men don’t usually cry. But for Yasser, the memory of his son, Mohammed, hurt too much. Sitting in the dark inside his shop on a bustling market street in Aleppo, the 63-year-old, hunched over in his chair, kept asking me: “Why did he deserve to die that way?” Yasser’s grief over his son who was apparently executed is shared by far too many Syrians caught up in this grisly war.
The refugee burden that Syria’s neighbors are shouldering is heavy and should not be borne alone. But keeping people fleeing for their lives in buffer zones inside Syrian borders risks trapping rather than protecting them.
Life in Aleppo is not easy. People here have suffered from shortages of food, electricity and running water, and there has been little humanitarian assistance. The long, cold winter months were particularly rough. The only possible consolation was that there were fewer air strikes because of the cloudy, rainy weather. The government’s jets only seem to fly – and drop bombs – when the sky is blue.
The Chinese call it jin zhuan, or golden brick. The Russians have suggested calling it briuki, an acronym meaning trousers in Russian. And what about the ambiguous S? It originally was just a plural for the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, and China, places where a Goldman Sachs analyst was urging greater investment. Now it stands for South Africa, which joined in 2010 despite having an economy roughly on the order of China’s sixth-largest province.
The United States should provide aid to the refugees but ensure that no aid money goes to or through the Jordanian government as long as Jordan sends some refugees back to face death - even as it welcomes others.
Official communiqués on the BRICS summit in Durban are promising new initiatives on trade, economic development and technical co-operation. But Russia wants more from its partners than just trade. With concern rising in Europe over the worst crackdown on Russian democracy since the Soviet Union collapsed more than 20 years ago, Vladimir Putin is coming to Africa to find supporters of its world view.
During his visit Friday to Jordan, there’s little doubt President Obama will praise it for its hospitality toward some 350,000 Syrian refugees. While praise and support for Jordan’s reception of many Syrian refugees is deserved, the president should not give Jordan a free pass when it comes to its forcible returns of Palestinian refugees to Syria.
The Syrian people are caught in a horrible downward spiral. The government’s slaughter seems only to intensify as President Bashar al-Assad pursues a ruthless strategy of draining the sea to get the fish — attacking civilians so they will flee and leave the armed opposition isolated.
As rioting resumes in Egypt, militias reign ominously in parts of Libya, and relentless slaughter proceeds in Syria, some are beginning to question whether the Arab Spring was such a good idea after all. But would we really want to condemn entire nations to the likes of Mubarak, Gadhafi and al-Assad? As we know from the fall of military dictatorships in Latin America and the demise of the Soviet Union, building a rights-respecting democracy on a legacy of authoritarian rule is not easy. However, there are steps that both the people of the region and the international community can take to make a positive outcome more likely.
Unusual currents have been swirling around the United Nations Security Council’s shameful paralysis on Syria, a product of repeated vetoes by Russia and China. On January 14, a group of 58 governments urged the council to ask the International Criminal Court (ICC) to prosecute those responsible for the egregious crimes in Syria. In the face of the spiraling carnage on the ground, these governments, in an unprecedented act of “justice diplomacy,” insisted that the time for Security Council silence is long past.
It was cloudy the afternoon of January 3 when residents say the cluster bombs fell on the Syrian town of Latamneh. Three rockets containing the cluster munitions fell in nearby fields, apparently doing no harm, but a fourth landed on the street between residential buildings. Its impact was devastating.
In the absence of a reliable mechanism that Syrians know will bring them justice, revenge killing on a wide scale will be likely. And unless Syrian and international players move beyond promises for accountability and offer a concrete plan for justice, Syrian soldiers and armed militias would not be deterred by the possibility of standing trial for their atrocities.
Official communiqués on the BRICS summit in Durban are promising new initiatives on trade, economic development and technical co-operation. But Russia wants more from its partners than just trade. With concern rising in Europe over the worst crackdown on Russian democracy since the Soviet Union collapsed more than 20 years ago, Vladimir Putin is coming to Africa to find supporters of its world view.
During his visit Friday to Jordan, there’s little doubt President Obama will praise it for its hospitality toward some 350,000 Syrian refugees. While praise and support for Jordan’s reception of many Syrian refugees is deserved, the president should not give Jordan a free pass when it comes to its forcible returns of Palestinian refugees to Syria.
Unusual currents have been swirling around the United Nations Security Council’s shameful paralysis on Syria, a product of repeated vetoes by Russia and China. On January 14, a group of 58 governments urged the council to ask the International Criminal Court (ICC) to prosecute those responsible for the egregious crimes in Syria. In the face of the spiraling carnage on the ground, these governments, in an unprecedented act of “justice diplomacy,” insisted that the time for Security Council silence is long past.
It was cloudy the afternoon of January 3 when residents say the cluster bombs fell on the Syrian town of Latamneh. Three rockets containing the cluster munitions fell in nearby fields, apparently doing no harm, but a fourth landed on the street between residential buildings. Its impact was devastating.