Project Description

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1       Background of the Study

Syria became an independent republic in 1964, although democratic rule was ended by a CIA-supported coup in march 1949, followed by two more coups that year. According to Miller (1977), a popular uprising against military rule in 1954 saw the army transfer power to civilians; from 1958 to 1961, a brief union with Egypt replaced Syrian’s parliamentary system with a highly centralized presidential regime. The Ba’ath Syrian Regional Branch government came to power in 1963 after a successful coup d’etat. In 1966, another coup overthrew the traditional leaders of the party, Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar. General Hafez-Assad, the Minister of Defense, seized power in a “corrective revolution” in November 1970, becoming Prime Minister. In march 1971, Assad declared himself, a position that he held until his death in 2000. Since tthen, the secular Syrian Regional Branch has remained the dominant political authority in what is virtually a single party state in Syria; Syrian citizens may only approve the President by referendum and until the government controlled multi- party, 2012 parliamentary election could not vote in multi-party elections for the legislature Miller (1997).

Bashir al-Assad, the President of Syria and Asma al-Assad, his wife- who is a British born and British- educated Sunni Muslim, initially inspired hopes for democratic and state reforms and a “Damascus Spring” of intense social and political debate took place between July 2000 and August 2001 Provence Micheal (2005). The period was characterized by the emergence of numerous political forums or salons, where groups of like-minded people met in private houses to debate political and social issues. Political activists such as Riad Sief, Haitham al-Maleh, Kama al-Labwani, Riyad al-Turk and Aref Dalila were important in mobilizing the movement Micheal (2005). The most famous of the forums were the Riad Seif Forum and the Jamal al-Atassi Forum. The Damascus Spring ended in August 2001 with the arrest and imprisonment of ten leading activists who had called for democratic elections and a campaign of civil disobedience. From 2001, even reformists in parliament had begun to criticize the legacy of stagnation since the rule of former president Hafez al-Assad, Bashir al-Assad has talked about reform but carried out very little, and he has failed to deliver or promised reforms since 2000 Micheal (2005). In December 2000, mass anti-government protests began in Tunisia and later spread across the Arab world, including Syria. By February 2011, revolutions occurred in Tunisia and Egypt, while Libya began to experience its own civil war. Numerous other Arab countries also faced protests, with some attempting to clalm the masses by making concessions and governmental changes, the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt are supposed to have inspired the mid-March 2011 protests in Syria Sharp and Blanchard (2012B).

Since taking office in 2000, President Bashir al-Assad has offered and retracted the prospect of limited political reform in Syria despite the serious socio-economic and political challenges that the nation of Syria face. As noted by Sharp and Blanchard (2012B), some of these challenges which include high unemployment, high inflation, limited upward mobility, rampant corruption, lack of political freedom, and repressive security forces have fuelled persistent opposition to the Syrian authoritarian government. As unrest emerged in other Arab countries in early 2011, limited calls for organized reform protests in Syria failed, but the government torture of children involved in an isolated incident in the southern town of Dara’a in March 2011, provided a decisive spark for the emergence of demonstrations (Sharp and Blanchard, 2012B). The government use of force against demonstrators in Dara’a and later in other cities created a corresponding swell in public anger and public participation in protests. Faced with a vicious response by government forces, the initially nonviolent uprising has progressively changed into an armed rebellion and civil war between government forces loyal to President Assad and opposition forces led by the Free Syrian Army (FSA), a group made up of largely soldiers who defected from the Syrian army (Dunne, 2012).  More than 150,000 people have died in the conflict to date, and over one million refugees have fled into neighboring countries, with an estimated 5,000 joining them every day (Dunne, 2012). A UN estimate further suggest that more than two and a half million Syrians are internally displaced. These worsening humanitarian situations led to the international pressure for a multilateral intervention in the crisis, which culminated in the adoption of certain conflict resolution strategies by the United Nations to manage the Syrian conflict.

Both government and the various rebel forces have been accused of committing humanitarian crimes. These have led to various Resolutions of the United Nations. The UNSC unanimously adopted Resolution 2042 on 14^th April 2012, which established Syrian Civil War Observer Force (SCWOF), Resolution 2043, which established the United Nations Supervision Mission in Syria (UNSMIS) on 21^st April 2012. The UN also renewed her commitment for resolving the Syrian crisis with Resolution 2052 on 20^th July 2012, which extended the mandate of the Syrian Observer Mission by adding thirty more days to the former’s ninety days previously agreed on. On September 27^th 2013, Resolution 2118 was unanimously passed which emphasized the Syrian civil war framework for the elimination of Syrian chemical weapons (Blewitt, 2013).The United Nations Supervision Mission in Syria, which was an offshoot of Resolution 2043 led to the deployment of 300 unarmed military observers to Syria.

With the failure of the League of Nations (1920-1946) to prevent the Second World War (1939-1945) and its migration into extinction, there was an emphasis on the need to make the United Nations, a body capable of wielding collective security vis a vis relations in the international system. Hence, the United Nations has in the face of conflict situations around the world, assumed this position of spearheading conflict management (Plesch, 2011). The UN officially came into existence on 24^th October, 1945, when the Charter was ratified by China, France, the Soviet Union (presently represented by Russia), United Kingdom and the United States of America, who became the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (Plesch, 2011). The cold war period witnessed a paralyzed UN Security Council (UNSC) as a result of constant vetoes from the US and the Soviet Union which undermined the capability of the UNSC to make progress and intervene in aid of international peace and security. By the end of the cold war, the widely publicized failures of UN peacekeeping missions in countries like the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Somalia called into question, the legitimacy and limitations of UN military interventions. This led to the concept of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), conceived in 2001 and formally accepted into UN vernacular at the 2005 World Summit (Stiftung, 2012). The R2P asserts that if a state is manifestly failing to protect its citizens from mass atrocities and peaceful measures are not working, the international community has the responsibility to intervene: first diplomatically, then more coercively, and as a last resort with military force (Stiftung, 2012).  UN intervention takes several forms, primarily through a loophole system known as peacekeeping. There are two chapters of the UN Charter that deal with settlement of disputes that are likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security. The first, Chapter VI, deals with pacific settlement, and also gives the Security Council the right to investigate and arbitrate, usually put in practice under Observers’ Missions, Diplomatic Envoys, and Good Offices. The second is Chapter VII, which gives the Security Council the right to impose economic sanctions and the right to enforce such sanction by air, sea, or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security (Jacobson, 2012).

The United Nations have engineered and supported several peace proposals for Syria like the Arab League Peace Plan, an effort by Arab nations led by Saudi Arabia to end the war. Also, there was the Russia Peace Initiatives for Syria on 30th January 2012, which involved informal talks between the Assad-led government and the rebel forces in Moscow.  Then the joint United Nations-Arab League Peace Plan in 2012 led by the former United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan. Algerian diplomat, Lakdar Brahimi, was appointed as his successor on September 1, 2012, following Annan’s resignation. Again the Geneva 2012-2013 Middle East Peace Conference was proposed by the United Nations to bring both parties together to discuss a transitional government (Jacobson, 2012).

Efforts to mediate the Syrian conflict are consistent with the broader tendency of mediation to be applied to the most difficult conflicts in the international system. Despite Annan’s presentation of a plan to end the conflict and the dispatch of a U.N. ceasefire monitoring mission, the Syrian conflict has proven difficult to manage. A lasting ceasefire has proven elusive among the belligerents, with the conflict escalating. Deteriorating conditions in August 2012 and the refusal of the Syrian regime to re-negotiate a cease-fire deal led to the resignation of Kofi Annan, who was subsequently replaced as U.N. envoy to Syria by Lakhdar Brahimi, as noted earlier. The inability of the United Nations to broker an end to the violence in Syria, despite early and frequent demands by an array of outside powers for a cease-fire, the dispatch of peace envoys and a U.N. monitoring force, raises the question of why the Syrian conflict has proven so impervious to settlement. Not only have efforts of the UN to manage the conflict been unsuccessful, conditions have continued to deteriorate in Syria with the level of violence mounting on both sides and civilian sufferings deepening.  This study therefore attempted an investigation of the role of the United Nations in conflict resolution in Syria.

1.2       Statement of the Problem

The inability of the Syrian government to manage the uprising which started as a peaceful protest has led to a full blown civil war between forces loyal to the Ba’ath government of Bashir al Assad on the one hand, and those that seek to oust his government on the other. The government of Assad deployed the Syrian army to quell the protest as a move to prevent further escalations of the uprising, but this inadvertently led to months of military sieges leading to the formation of the opposing Free Syrian Army, a group of rebel fighters comprising mainly of soldiers who defected from the Syrian army. The Syrian National Council (SNC) also, became the recognized government of the opposition groups in Syria. In the light of this, Bagdonas (2013) asserts that the largely peaceful demonstrations in Syria that called for political and economic reforms have grown into a full-scale civil war, becoming one of the major issues on the international agenda.

The United Nations intervened after series of disagreements within the Security Council. In fact Russia and china vetoed three United Nations Security Council Resolutions that was sponsored by the west (Bagdonas, 2013). Despite these disagreements, the Security Council succeeded in adopting several resolutions like Resolution 2042 on 14^th April 2012, Resolution 2043 which established the United Nation Supervision Mission in Syria (UNSMIS) on 21^st April 2012, and Resolution 2052 on 20^th July 2012, which renewed the mandate of the Syrian observer mission. Also, on September 27^th 2013, Resolution 2118 was unanimously passed and it emphasized the Syrian civil war framework for the elimination of Syrian chemical weapons (Blewitt, 2013). While these resolutions were in place, other multilateral efforts to end the crisis were also used like the Arab League mediatory efforts and the Russia Peace Initiatives for Syria (Blewitt, 2013).  In fact, on March 21, 2012, the Security Council endorsed a six–point peace plan for Syria, which specifically calls for:

• A Syrian–led political process to address the aspirations and concerns of the Syrian people;
• A U.N–supervised cessation of armed violence in all its forms by all parties to protect civilians;
• All parties to ensure provision of humanitarian assistance to all areas affected by the fighting; and to implement a daily two–hour humanitarian pause;
• Authorities to intensify the pace and scale of release of arbitrarily determined persons;
• Authorities to ensure freedom of movement throughout the country for journalists; and
• Authorities to respect freedom of association and the right to demonstrate peacefully (UN Press Release, 2012).

Despite these measures and strategies adopted by the United Nations as well as other multilateral efforts it supported, the conflict situation in Syria worsened. In fact, Grieg (2013) lamented that a lasting ceasefire has proven elusive among the belligerents, with conflict escalating sufficiently that activities by the U.N. monitoring mission were suspended in June 2012 and its mandate went into extinction without renewal following its expiration. Therefore the deteriorating conditions in August 2012 and the refusal of the Syrian regime to negotiate led to the resignation of Kofi Annan, who was subsequently replaced as U.N. envoy to Syria by Lakhdar Brahimi. The Syrian war continued despite this change. There is currently no legal basis for a military intervention, and the UN Security Council is unlikely to pass a corresponding resolution. Also, the multilateral actors capable of such a complex and highly risky military operation like United States government, NATO, Russian government and even the Arab League till date have shown no willingness to do so (Asseburg and Wimmen, 2013). The unarmed UN military observers achieved little or no success as the Syrian government remained entangled in a violent conflict of survival with the opposition force led by the Free Syrian Army (FSA). The continuous escalation of the conflict despite United Nations’ mediatory intervention, has led to many scholarly attempts to explain why the crisis have persisted.

One popular explanation attributed failure of UN mediatory efforts to internal ethno-religious differences in Syria. Although, a predominantly Muslim state, Syria is characterized by religious secularity built across ethnic lines. The Syrian constitution of 1973, as amended in 1984, provides for a republican government consisting of a President, up to three Vice Presidents, a cabinet, and a 250 member one–house legislature elected by adult citizens including women. Prados and Sharp (2005) however noted that the nature of the regime depends more on the interplay of societal factors than on structural institutions that constitute Syria’s political system. Religious sects are important in Syria as symbols of group identity and determinants of political orientation. The dominance of the Alawites (considered a religious sectarian minority by other ethnic and religious groups in Syria like the Sunni Muslims, who comprise over 70 percent of the population) in government for decades, gives the U.N mediatory role in the peace process a limited chance of success (Seale, 2012).

Another common explanation among scholars for the failure any U.N–brokered peace deal in Syria is to make reference to years of economic hardship of the Syrian people. In view of the Arab uprisings that started in Tunisia in December 2010, there have been early attempts to blame the escalation of violent conflict in Syria on generic economic arguments about poverty and deepening economic inequality in the country (Breisinger, et al, 2011). Protagonists of this view point argue that the unrest has now become a ‘do or die’ affair for every dissenting faction in the conflict because the outcome, it is widely believed, will shape the pattern of patronage politics among the varying sectarian groups in post–war Syria. This argument however fails to explain why it took the ‘Arab spring’ to usher in citizens’ revolt against their economic plight in Syria or why the nature of the crisis in Syria is not a common feature of all nations (particularly, Arab countries) with similar economic woes like Syria.

Attempts to blame the international community for the precarious humanitarian situation in Syria have also emerged. However, most arguments associated with this view blame violent escalation and consequent weakness of UN resolutions in relation to the Syrian crisis on lack of political will of international actors to commit their resources to resolving the crisis. Dunne (2012) for instance noted that the U.N promise of a negotiated solution in spite of escalating violence in Syria only deepen the impression that there is still a lack of urgency on the part of the international community about ending the crisis, after over three years since the crisis began. This argument however tends to underplay the roles played by certain Arab nations like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar and the super powers such as the U.S, Britain, France, Russia as well as regional blocs like NATO, Arab league and EU in curtailing the crisis. Most of these nations and regional bodies have made certain levels of commitment to ending the unrest in Syria.

While arguments put forward by scholars such as the lack of political will on the part of the international community, the generic economic problem of most Arab states and the internal ethno-religious differences in Syria, tried to explain why the popular protest in Syria escalated to a full-blown civil war, they unsatisfactorily explained why any of the United Nations brokered peace deal for Syria failed to resolve the Syrian crisis. The argument by scholars like Dunne (2012) and Doyle (2012) to blame lack of political will on the part of international actors to commit their resources in resolving the crisis is flawed on the ground that foreign actors, both multilateral and nation states have committed considerable financial and material resources to help resolve the crisis as well as address the humanitarian situation in Syria. The generic economic problem argument and the internal ethno-religious differences argument as put forward by scholars like Sharp and Blanchard (2012A), Matar (2012), Prados (2012) and Haddad (2012) were also flawed on the ground that they failed to explain why the conflict didn’t occur in states, particularly Arab states with similar economic and ethno-religious characteristics. The arguments also failed to explain why the Syrian crisis occurred at that particular period since poor economic performance and deep ethno-religious differences have been features of the Syrian state for a very long time before the Arab uprising.

As noted earlier, there is currently no legal basis for a military intervention, and the UN Security Council is unlikely to pass a corresponding resolution. Also, the multilateral actors capable of such a complex and highly risky military operation like United States government, NATO, Russian government and even the Arab League till date have shown no willingness to do so (Asseburg and Wimmen, 2013). However, within the present framework of intervention, as adopted by the United Nations, scholars are yet to give systematic analyses to how the mandate of UN observer missions in Syria, as well as the mandate of other mediatory frameworks supported by the UN, undermine compliance to cease-fire and other forms of peaceful compromise. One of the major reasons why states and other international actors obey international law is the possibility of being imposed with sanctions for violation of international law, however, with regards to the conflict in Syria, the mandates of the various intervention missions, as well as peace agreement signed, have excluded the application of sanction to violators of the agreements.

Scholars have also blamed the weak compliance to cease-fire agreements in Syria to the nature of the United Nations’ Supervision Mission in Syria (UNSMIS). Doyle (2012) and Heydemann (2012) for instance noted that the mandate of UNSMIS is too limited to ensure compliance to peace agreements by the conflicting parties in Syria. UNSMIS was established by Security Council resolution 2043 on 21 April 2012 as part of the Joint Special Envoy’s six-point plan designed to end the escalating conflict. The argument confused peace building with peace enforcement which involves military intervention of the United Nations. This argument erroneously suggests the only potent form of UN intervention is direct military intervention. Scholars have also argued that the limited consent of the Syrian government to the UN presence represents a serious limitation to the effectiveness of the observer mission. Suchet (2012) noted that while the Syrian government did not object to the deployment of the observers, it has denied visas to some observers based on their nationalities, and still opposes that the UN flies its own helicopters. With no air assets and no protection force of its own, the UN observer will continue to rely heavily on the goodwill of the host authority, also a party to the conflict to guarantee the safety of UNSMIS personnel and its freedom of movement and access. This viewpoint tends to suggest that the Syrian government cannot be compelled to comply with international law or it has the right to act the way it chooses to even when there is a clear evidence of violation of international. The state of Syria is a subject of international law whose actions could be regulated by the same law. One popular explanation on why the enforcement of the cease-fire agreement has been weak is to attribute its failure to fundamental defect in the various peace plans for Syria. Doyle (2012) for instance noted that the Annan six point peace plan was dependent on all parties acting in good faith in implementing it. He also argued that a 300–strong UN observer mission was slow to deploy and too small for a country the size of Syria. If the U.N had been serious, there would have been between 3000 and 5000 observers backed up by a large team of expert mediators (Doyle, 2012). Also, Heydemann (2012) supported this argument by noting that the plan failed to provide explicit benchmarks for assessing its implementation as well as failing to establish a time table that would make clear that support for the Annan plan is not open ended. Also, the argument tends to confuse the peace building strategy adopted in the peace plans for Syria with a more drastic measure of peace enforcement that involves military involvement of the mediating party.

The arguments presented by scholars as the reasons for the failure of the ceasefire agreement such as the arguments on the number of unarmed military observers, the unwillingness of the Syrian government to comply or cooperate with international resolutions on the crisis, the zero-sum  nature of the demands of the conflicting parties and the fundamental defect of the various peace plans for Syria tried to explain the cause of the escalation of the uprising into a full blown civil war but did not satisfactorily explain why the ceasefire agreement was not enforced. It is in this light that we pose the following research questions:

• Is the absence of punitive measures against violators of UN peace process implicated in the escalation of humanitarian crisis in Syria?
• Does the partisan involvement of the permanent members of the United Nations’ Security Council (UNSC) undermine compliance with ceasefire agreements in Syria?

1.3       Objectives of the Study

The study has both broad and specific objectives. The broad objective is to examine the role of the United Nations in conflict resolution in Syria between 2011 and 2013.The specific objectives are:

• To determine if the absence of punitive measures against violators of UN peace process is implicated the escalation of humanitarian crises in Syria between 2011 and 2013
• To examine if the partisan involvement of the permanent members of the United Nations’ Security Council (UNSC) undermined compliance with cease-fire agreements in Syria

1.4       Significance of the Study

This study has both a theoretical and practical significance. On a theoretical level, this study, by clarifying issues and facilitating understanding on the role of the United Nations in conflict resolution in Syria, will be a further contribution to the pool of knowledge and a source for further research and inquiries on the subject matter.

Practically, the study will be of interest and immense benefit to diplomats, international observers, as well as experts in conflict resolution/management in the Arab world on how best to tackle political unrest in Syria for the following reason:

By examining the pattern of involvement of the UN, with respect to the mandates of authorized UN missions in Syria and the mandates of other international mediatory efforts supported by the UN, the study constructively highlights the limitations of these mandates and the implication of

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