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Sunday, March 17, 2013 5:52:53 PM
I've seen the horrific result of western paralysis. It mustn't happen in Syria
A solution to the agonies of the Syrian war should involve neither a blundering military response – nor the cruelty of inaction
Ed Vulliamy
The Observer, Saturday 16 March 2013
An old woman wounded during Syrian army shelling of Aleppo
in October is carried to safety. Photograph: Maysun/EPA
The nauseous sense of deja vu is unavoidable. Of those three, long bloody years in Bosnia-Herzegovina: [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/bosnia-and-herzegovina ] shells crashing into little villages where the elderly and very young cowered in cellars and the dead could not be buried while John Major, David Owen or Cyrus Vance strutted their latest impotent peace plan.
How the killers laughed.
Hearing the testimony of the survivors of concentration camps and serially violated women from the rape camps while Lord Carrington clasped the hand of Radovan Karadzic beneath the chandeliers, all smiles. Trying to penetrate, along forest paths, besieged Srebrenica, [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/commentisfree+world/bosnia-and-herzegovina ] shells crashing into little villages where the elderly and very young cowered in cellars and the dead could not be buried while John Major, David Owen or Cyrus Vance strutted their latest impotent peace plan. How the killers laughed.
Hearing the testimony of the survivors of concentration camps and serially violated women from the rape camps while Lord Carrington clasped the hand of Radovan Karadzic beneath the chandeliers, all smiles. Trying to penetrate, along forest paths, besieged Srebrenica, Gorazde and other UN-declared "safe areas", pounded by Serbian artillery into the dust while US General Wesley Clark made his Bosnian Serb counterpart, Ratko Mladic, a gift of cap and pistol.
Witnessing the siege and torture of Sarajevo, while éminences grises Douglas Hurd and Malcolm Rifkind jeered at the interventionists and sabotaged any attempt to ameliorate, never mind cease, the slaughter. The dark farce of diplomacy led to the only place it could lead: that lunch of suckling lamb between General Bernard Janvier, commander of the United Nations Protection Force and General Mladic three days before Mladic sent the execution squads into Srebrenica to perpetrate the worst massacre on European soil since the Third Reich. That was the achievement in Bosnia of the myth, the lie, which calls itself "the international community".
There were those in Rwanda who told the same tale, after a genocide [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/12/rwanda-genocide-bloody-legacy-angloamerican-guilt ] even more concentrated, even more casually observed by those who refused to try to stop it. Two decades on, we watch further carnage in Syria; another megalomaniac mass murderer and his machine, who will decant or plough his people into exile or the grave and will not pause until the job is done.
Though the echoes are loud and clear, Syria is not the same as Bosnia – no two places or situations ever are – as Britain and France try to lift the arms embargo on, and conceivably arm, those whom shorthand calls "the rebels", while the United States writhes with indecision and Germany counsels caution.
There are important provisos. First, while the Bosnian army presented itself as a structure, in Syria one asks: which rebels? And second, that Bosnia's carnage unfolded before the debacle in Iraq, which changed everything: that war shows no sign of ending for those still living with the daily nightmare of car bombs and carnage for a decade later this week. [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/iraq-war-10-years-on ] Does "the west" (whatever that is nowadays) want to detonate a similar, enduring horror next door in Syria? We hope not.
It is interesting that many of us who urged intervention in Bosnia were opposed to the invasion of Iraq just as passionately, felt equivocal about Libya and Mali and now Syria. We were accused of inconsistency, and there was a case to answer, but it is an important one, for it takes into account nuance, real politics rather than realpolitik; it seeks to be on the side of the people, rather than that of power as no more than "the realisation of interests", as Ralf Dahrendorf [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jun/19/ralf-dahrendorf-obituary-lords-lse ] described it.
As Syria enters the abyss, the absolutists dig in, as usual. There are what the sage on these matters, David Rieff, calls "permahawks": a mix of "liberal interventionists" and neoconservative warriors [ http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/02/13/syria_is_not_our_problem ] who, for all the ravages of Iraq and upcoming defeat in Afghanistan, still feel, he writes in Foreign Policy, "the wind at their backs", thanks to the UN's "Responsibility to Protect". [ http://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/adviser/responsibility.shtml ]
And there are what one might call, parodying Rieff, the "perma-impotents" (they are not doves, for sure), who oppose all and every intervention of any kind for their own reasons. It is a weird alliance between the anti-imperialist left and the school of Hurd and Carrington with whom it found common cause in the Balkans, who cultivate their deafness to slaughter and make of it a "rational", "sensible" response, old boy.
The rival "perma" camps are guided by "the realisation of interests" and also by the maxim that mine enemy's enemy is my friend. The permahawks oppose the Assad regime as they opposed Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gaddafi – though not at first: when mine enemy was Iran, Saddam was my friend; when Shell wanted a contract in Libya, the "war on terror" was momentarily suspended to give Gaddafi back the Lockerbie bomber. These were the calculations that led the CIA to give Osama bin Laden his first ground-to-air rocket launcher in Afghanistan, with which to shoot down Soviet planes, too full of hubris to listen to his views on their own country.
On the other side, those on the left insist that because the likes of Slobodan Milosevic, Gaddafi and Assad oppose the US (which is debatable), their bloodlust should be afforded a degree of leniency or even support. Meanwhile, on the grey, hard right, there is that usually very British tradition, now the cynics' blueprint: if in doubt, back the bully on the block in the interests of "stability" – ergo, empire, which nowadays means global cartel capitalism.
Neither has the answer in Syria. Indeed, why should there be an "answer" in Syria? Whatever happens, it will be a mess. But what kind of mess do we opt for, what is the least worst mess?
If Britain and France get their way, they will have to accept that the opposition in Syria contains a jihadist current; it includes warlords and people who are not trying to emulate our supposedly model democracy and capitalist enlightenment. And it is also driven by genuine freedom fighters and militias that – whatever their political programme – defend a civilian population under apparently limitless attack.
Military intervention in the mould of Libya is not an option – the permahawks strut their "success" in Tripoli, but are unwilling to have their bluff called by a real war; Russia has a point – this is not the UN implementing the Responsibility to Protect, this is regime change. But neither is doing nothing – beyond hand-wringing and pondering as did Hurd and Rifkind did over Bosnia, or babbling peace plans as Kofi Annan did in Rwanda and now does in Syria – an option either.
We know that, post-Iraq, intervention can only have calamitous results, and that its motives are as disingenuous as they are dangerous. We know how toxic the heady rhetoric is from those who have never heard a shot fired or a shell crash, but who from the liberal and conservative salons of London, Paris and New York urge others to war.
But we also know from recollection of the rape camps, Srebrenica, Gorazde and Sarajevo that those who advocate doing nothing can never look the desperate or the dead in the eye. And we know their inactivity is part of what sends hundreds of thousands into the refugee camps along Syria's borders and fills the mass graves, that their dry calculations are in themselves murderous.
Having spent all those nights in trenches, forests and cellars and along treacherous mountain roads with the resistance fighters of betrayed Bosnia and the people they sought in vain to protect, I'd find it hard to look a young Syrian militiaman, or his murdered family's ghosts, in the eye and say: "I'm sorry, comrade, but the politicians are right; we must not 'fan the flames' and you cannot defend yourself or your people." It just doesn't work.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/17/syria-can-we-do-nothing-to-stop-slaughter
A solution to the agonies of the Syrian war should involve neither a blundering military response – nor the cruelty of inaction
Ed Vulliamy
The Observer, Saturday 16 March 2013
An old woman wounded during Syrian army shelling of Aleppo
in October is carried to safety. Photograph: Maysun/EPA
The nauseous sense of deja vu is unavoidable. Of those three, long bloody years in Bosnia-Herzegovina: [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/bosnia-and-herzegovina ] shells crashing into little villages where the elderly and very young cowered in cellars and the dead could not be buried while John Major, David Owen or Cyrus Vance strutted their latest impotent peace plan.
How the killers laughed.
Hearing the testimony of the survivors of concentration camps and serially violated women from the rape camps while Lord Carrington clasped the hand of Radovan Karadzic beneath the chandeliers, all smiles. Trying to penetrate, along forest paths, besieged Srebrenica, [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/commentisfree+world/bosnia-and-herzegovina ] shells crashing into little villages where the elderly and very young cowered in cellars and the dead could not be buried while John Major, David Owen or Cyrus Vance strutted their latest impotent peace plan. How the killers laughed.
Hearing the testimony of the survivors of concentration camps and serially violated women from the rape camps while Lord Carrington clasped the hand of Radovan Karadzic beneath the chandeliers, all smiles. Trying to penetrate, along forest paths, besieged Srebrenica, Gorazde and other UN-declared "safe areas", pounded by Serbian artillery into the dust while US General Wesley Clark made his Bosnian Serb counterpart, Ratko Mladic, a gift of cap and pistol.
Witnessing the siege and torture of Sarajevo, while éminences grises Douglas Hurd and Malcolm Rifkind jeered at the interventionists and sabotaged any attempt to ameliorate, never mind cease, the slaughter. The dark farce of diplomacy led to the only place it could lead: that lunch of suckling lamb between General Bernard Janvier, commander of the United Nations Protection Force and General Mladic three days before Mladic sent the execution squads into Srebrenica to perpetrate the worst massacre on European soil since the Third Reich. That was the achievement in Bosnia of the myth, the lie, which calls itself "the international community".
There were those in Rwanda who told the same tale, after a genocide [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/12/rwanda-genocide-bloody-legacy-angloamerican-guilt ] even more concentrated, even more casually observed by those who refused to try to stop it. Two decades on, we watch further carnage in Syria; another megalomaniac mass murderer and his machine, who will decant or plough his people into exile or the grave and will not pause until the job is done.
Though the echoes are loud and clear, Syria is not the same as Bosnia – no two places or situations ever are – as Britain and France try to lift the arms embargo on, and conceivably arm, those whom shorthand calls "the rebels", while the United States writhes with indecision and Germany counsels caution.
There are important provisos. First, while the Bosnian army presented itself as a structure, in Syria one asks: which rebels? And second, that Bosnia's carnage unfolded before the debacle in Iraq, which changed everything: that war shows no sign of ending for those still living with the daily nightmare of car bombs and carnage for a decade later this week. [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/iraq-war-10-years-on ] Does "the west" (whatever that is nowadays) want to detonate a similar, enduring horror next door in Syria? We hope not.
It is interesting that many of us who urged intervention in Bosnia were opposed to the invasion of Iraq just as passionately, felt equivocal about Libya and Mali and now Syria. We were accused of inconsistency, and there was a case to answer, but it is an important one, for it takes into account nuance, real politics rather than realpolitik; it seeks to be on the side of the people, rather than that of power as no more than "the realisation of interests", as Ralf Dahrendorf [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jun/19/ralf-dahrendorf-obituary-lords-lse ] described it.
As Syria enters the abyss, the absolutists dig in, as usual. There are what the sage on these matters, David Rieff, calls "permahawks": a mix of "liberal interventionists" and neoconservative warriors [ http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/02/13/syria_is_not_our_problem ] who, for all the ravages of Iraq and upcoming defeat in Afghanistan, still feel, he writes in Foreign Policy, "the wind at their backs", thanks to the UN's "Responsibility to Protect". [ http://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/adviser/responsibility.shtml ]
And there are what one might call, parodying Rieff, the "perma-impotents" (they are not doves, for sure), who oppose all and every intervention of any kind for their own reasons. It is a weird alliance between the anti-imperialist left and the school of Hurd and Carrington with whom it found common cause in the Balkans, who cultivate their deafness to slaughter and make of it a "rational", "sensible" response, old boy.
The rival "perma" camps are guided by "the realisation of interests" and also by the maxim that mine enemy's enemy is my friend. The permahawks oppose the Assad regime as they opposed Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gaddafi – though not at first: when mine enemy was Iran, Saddam was my friend; when Shell wanted a contract in Libya, the "war on terror" was momentarily suspended to give Gaddafi back the Lockerbie bomber. These were the calculations that led the CIA to give Osama bin Laden his first ground-to-air rocket launcher in Afghanistan, with which to shoot down Soviet planes, too full of hubris to listen to his views on their own country.
On the other side, those on the left insist that because the likes of Slobodan Milosevic, Gaddafi and Assad oppose the US (which is debatable), their bloodlust should be afforded a degree of leniency or even support. Meanwhile, on the grey, hard right, there is that usually very British tradition, now the cynics' blueprint: if in doubt, back the bully on the block in the interests of "stability" – ergo, empire, which nowadays means global cartel capitalism.
Neither has the answer in Syria. Indeed, why should there be an "answer" in Syria? Whatever happens, it will be a mess. But what kind of mess do we opt for, what is the least worst mess?
If Britain and France get their way, they will have to accept that the opposition in Syria contains a jihadist current; it includes warlords and people who are not trying to emulate our supposedly model democracy and capitalist enlightenment. And it is also driven by genuine freedom fighters and militias that – whatever their political programme – defend a civilian population under apparently limitless attack.
Military intervention in the mould of Libya is not an option – the permahawks strut their "success" in Tripoli, but are unwilling to have their bluff called by a real war; Russia has a point – this is not the UN implementing the Responsibility to Protect, this is regime change. But neither is doing nothing – beyond hand-wringing and pondering as did Hurd and Rifkind did over Bosnia, or babbling peace plans as Kofi Annan did in Rwanda and now does in Syria – an option either.
We know that, post-Iraq, intervention can only have calamitous results, and that its motives are as disingenuous as they are dangerous. We know how toxic the heady rhetoric is from those who have never heard a shot fired or a shell crash, but who from the liberal and conservative salons of London, Paris and New York urge others to war.
But we also know from recollection of the rape camps, Srebrenica, Gorazde and Sarajevo that those who advocate doing nothing can never look the desperate or the dead in the eye. And we know their inactivity is part of what sends hundreds of thousands into the refugee camps along Syria's borders and fills the mass graves, that their dry calculations are in themselves murderous.
Having spent all those nights in trenches, forests and cellars and along treacherous mountain roads with the resistance fighters of betrayed Bosnia and the people they sought in vain to protect, I'd find it hard to look a young Syrian militiaman, or his murdered family's ghosts, in the eye and say: "I'm sorry, comrade, but the politicians are right; we must not 'fan the flames' and you cannot defend yourself or your people." It just doesn't work.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/17/syria-can-we-do-nothing-to-stop-slaughter
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