Opinion Sur
The concerted attack on civilian Syrians constitute a crime against humanity that can only be countermanded not by moralistic protests but by a judicious use of decisive strength.
The week of September 25, 2016 is a date that will live in infamy. A short cease-fire agreed upon between the United States and Russia ended on Monday and gave way to a resumption of ferocious hostilities. That same day, an aid convoy from the United Nations was hit by an airstrike that the Americans and Europeans blame on Russia. Meanwhile the Bashar-al-Assad regime in Syria mounted a massive offensive on eastern Aleppo, a holdout of rebels that are fighting that regime. As in the past, the regime used barrel and cluster bombs as well as chemical weapons indiscriminately against the population. The attacks on civilians constitute a clear breach of international humanitarian law. The latest air attack was the deadliest in a conflict that has lasted five and a half years, claimed the lives of 300,000 people, and driven half the country’s population from their homes.
This massacre brings back the memory of Guernica during the Spanish civil war in April of 1937 (ironically, in those days Soviet Russia sided with the “good guys” –the Republican government– against Franco). It was an aerial bombing of the Basque town of Guernica carried out at the behest of nationalist rebels by their allies, the Nazi German Luftwaffe‘s Condor Legion and the Fascist Italian Aviazione Legionaria, under the code name Operation Rügen. The attack gained infamy because it involved the deliberate targeting of civilians by a military air force. The number of victims is still disputed, but it hovers around 1,000 –a small figure by comparison with the repeated aerial attacks on the Syrian city of Aleppo.
In response to these attacks, and commissioned by the Republican government of Spain at the time, the great Spanish artist Pablo Picasso composed a mural-sized oil painting on canvas. Picasso used a palette of gray, black, and white, and his work remains one of the most eloquent anti-war paintings of all times. The painting was first exhibited in Paris in 1937. By the express will of the painter the work remained outside Spain until the end of the Franco regime. A tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica was displayed on the wall of the United Nations Building in New York City at the entrance to the Security Council room from 1985 to 2009. One wonders what the current members of the Security Council might think of the tapestry today when on their way to fruitless deliberations on the Syrian crisis.
The responsibility for the present crimes lies not only with the regime of Mr. Bashar-al-Assad and the supporting government of Russia, but also with the misguided strategy of the Western powers led by the United States. Why is the Western policy in Syria wrong?
During this crisis, the United States has insisted on a premise that few if anybody believes in, and to which the Russians have paid lip service, while the consummate Russian diplomat Sergei Lavrov takes the hyperactive but less effective American Secretary of State John F. Kerry down the proverbial garden path of arch diplomacy, to the dead end when the US and its allies simply have to give up, as is clear in their recent and remarkable joint statement, which reads: “The burden is on Russia to prove it is willing and able to take extraordinary steps to salvage diplomatic efforts.”
The wrong-footed premise of Western strategy ends in failure. What is this premise? It is the view that there is no military solution to the Syrian conflict. In any conflict this happens when one of the parties in dispute wrongly arrives at the conclusion that the fight has reached an impasse, when in fact the other side does not believe so and continues to advance. To be sure, the eventual objective –but only eventual—is a series of diplomatic agreements to settle the Syrian civil war by negotiation and compromise.
On such misguided premise, the US believes that Russia would be willing to pursue a negotiated settlement in return for a cease-fire and the alleged prestige of conducting joint military operations with the US in Syria against terrorist groups. This is wishful thinking and it is easily debunked. The Russian view, on the other hand, is opposite, and it is no secret. Sergei Lavrov has said it loud and clear: President Bashar-Al-Assad is the only viable partner in the fight against “terrorism” –a very flexible epithet, since my freedom fighter is your terrorist, and vice-versa. Lavrov has called Assad’s army “the single most efficient force fighting terror in Syria.” For the Russians the strategic goal is: Let Assad prevails, bloody as his ‘victory’ will be (but then, the Russians never blinked at unbounded brutality under Stalin, who was reported to say “death solves all problems –no man, no problem.”) and only then try to come to terms with Assad and convince him to be more ‘civilized.’
The belief that negotiations now, under a cease fire, will produce peace and some sort of transition to a post-Assad regime, together with the half-baked and contradictory policies of the US on the ground, has placed America in a strategic pickle. Exhortations against the current massacre without action to stop it will do nothing at all.
