This week brought another terrifying massacre of more than 80 Sunni Syrian villagers in Qubair, near Homs, many of them women and children. Survivors say they were shot, hacked, or burnt to death, echoing reports from the massacre of 108 in Houla last week.
Locals asserted that the perpetrators were Shabiha militiamen, Shi’a Alawites, supported by regime troops. UN monitors who were able to get to Qubair on Friday – having been shot at when they tried to get in on Thursday - affirm that tank track marks were clearly visible and that the stench of burning flesh filled the air.
These massacres have brought a sectarian menace to the 15-month conflict between the regime and the protestors and threaten to precipitate Syria into a full-blown civil war. A reality acknowledged by the UN on Friday.
Meanwhile, bigger players on the world’s stage are jostling for position over Syria, often with their own interests at the top of the agenda.
At their meeting in Beijing this week, the Shanghai Co-operation Organization (SCO), led by Russia and China, re-iterated their opposition to military intervention, Western interference and forced regime change in Syria.
While UN chief, Ban Ki Moon, declared Thursday that the Assad regime had ‘lost its fundamental humanity’, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Cheng Guoping insisted that attacks on its civilians are an ‘internal matter for Syria’.
The SCO, comprising Russia, China,Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan has been revitalized in recent months by a shared, and expanding, diplomatic challenge to the West reminiscent of the Cold War.
China and Russia complain about the West’s ‘neo-interventionism’, which they present as being based on a spurious ‘dislike’ of ‘a country’s system’. Both the Chinese and Russian ‘systems’ have, of course, permitted the use of extreme violence in supressing uprisings and protests. Both fear contagion from the Arab Revolutions and may prefer a template where rebellion is ruthlessly and bloodily supressed.
Meanwhile the ‘Friends of Syria’, including US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, also met on Wednesday. Hosted by Turkish Foreign Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu in Istanbul, the group included high-level envoys from the UK, EU, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar, Tunisia and Morocco.
The Friends of Syria responded to news of the fresh massacre with calls for Bashar al-Assad to step down. Some countries wanted to implement Chapter Seven of the UN Charter, which authorizes the use of ‘all necessary measures’, including the military option, to carry out UN Security Council decisions.A spokesman for Hillary Clinton said that she had not discounted this option.
That the Friends of Syria met in Istanbul, is indicative of a polarisation within the international community which has been intensifying since the onset of the Arab Spring. The next meeting will be in Paris on 6 July where Bernard Henri-Levi-Strauss was so instrumental in instigating the military intervention in Libya and has recently been calling for one in Syria.
The Russians and Chinese feel that the West acted arrogantly over Resolution 1973 (authorizing the Libyan no-fly zone). They were not fully consulted in advance, and their abstentions did not prevent the resolution being implemented: an approach that Russian President Vladimir Putin described as ‘like a medieval crusade’. On resolutions condemning the Syrian regime, both countries have used their veto in the Security Council.
Unpopular at home, Putin is exploiting the opportunity to present himself as a formidable player on the world stage. He has already snubbed London by announcing that he will not be attending the Olympic Games. Tartus is home to Russia’s only Mediterranean naval facility and Assad is a hungry consumer of Russian military hardware.
American hegemony in the region has been shaken by its unsuccessful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the unimpressive outcome of its intervention in Libya, where chaos currently reigns.
As a result, China and Russia are flexing their diplomatic muscles. They announced in Beijing that Iran – which attended the SCO meeting as an observer - must be part of the solution to the Syrian crisis, comparing its role with that of Turkey in the Friends of Syria.
The SCO also warned that military action against Iran would not only be ‘unacceptable’ but would threaten ‘global instability’.
The SCO further asserted that it was seeking a bigger role in the ‘peaceful reconstruction’ of Afghanistan following Nato’s planned 2014 withdrawal. Presidents Karzai (of Afghanistan) and Zardari (of Pakistan) were present at the SCO’s Beijing meeting. China, in particular, has an eye on Afghanistan’s largely untapped mineral deposits.
While the SCO remains resolutely opposed to military intervention in Syria, there are indications that universal outrage over the recent massacres have budged its position slightly and that it might endorse a ‘Yemen-style’ political solution which would see the head (Assad) changed but the government remaining essentially the same.
In a speech to the UN on Thursday, special envoy to Syria, Kofi Annan, acknowledged SCO sensibilities by emphasizing that the international community must act together – implicitly warning the West against unilateral action. Annan outlined a ‘road map’ which would see Assad stepping down, possibly going into exile in Russia, making way for a newly elected parliament and president. Annan mirrored Chinese diplomatic terminology by emphasizing that ‘both sides’ must contribute to resolving the crisis.
But while the world’s greater powers jostle for position, the Syrian people continue to suffer but bravely continue to protest against tyranny.
The advent of ethnic cleansing – the victims in Houla and Qubair were Sunni – is a horrific development in a country where people from different ethnicities and sects used to live side by side in harmony.
A civil war in Syria risks becoming a proxy war for existing and emerging powers – aligning the Alawite (Shi’a) regime with the SCO countries, Iran and Hezbollah, while the opposition is backed by the West and the Sunni Arab countries. Paradoxically the ‘third element’ in the conflict, Salafi-Jihadis, mainly from Iraq, would be fighting the same corner as their arch enemies, the Saudis and the West.
The potential for regional escalation, even ‘global instability’, is real and alarming.
