No end in sight to the Syrian tragedy
The Security Council cannot go about imposing solutions in crisis situations in various countries of the world,' said Vitaly Churkin, Russia's ambassador to the UN, as it began discussing what to do about the Syrian crisis. He needn't worry. Even as Syria drifts inexorably towards a catastrophic civil war, nobody else is willing to put troops into the country, so how are they going to impose anything?
Syria isn't Libya. It is a big country with a powerful army, the core of which will remain loyal to the Assad regime. A good 30per cent of the civilian population will join them: the Alawites (Shia), the Christians, and some of the Kurds and Druze, all of whom fear that the overthrow of the regime will put the Sunni Arab majority in the driving seat. The minorities are frightened by the prospect of Sunni power. So they will stick with President Bashar al-Assad no matter what his forces do to the Sunnis, and there are enough of them, given the regime's virtual monopoly of heavy weapons, to hold out for a long time. That's why there won't be any foreign military intervention.
But it's getting worse in Syria. Since last March, about 5,400 people have been killed by the regime's military and paramilitary troops, and some 160 observers sent by the Arab League in December didn't even slow the rate of killing.
Assad is Moscow's only real ally in the Middle East, and Russia's only naval base in the Mediterranean is on the Syrian coast. But the truth is that foreign military intervention would probably not stop the killing at this point unless it was truly massive. That won't happen.
Worst of all, this probably means Syria is heading down into the kind of hell that Lebanon went through in its 15-year civil war.
It has just gone on too long. The Syrian protests began as a brave attempt to emulate the non-violent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. The Assad regime would kill people, of course, but if the protesters stood fast and refused to kill back, ultimately the regime's support would just drain away. Non-violence was doubly important in the Syrian case, because if it were a violent revolution, various minorities would feel gravely threatened.
Alas, that non-violent strategy has foundered on the rock of Syria's sectarian and ethnic divisions. Sunni deserters from the army started fighting back, and all the other communities took fright. Now it's a civil war in which the regime has the heavy weapons but the Sunni Arabs have the numbers.
This does not mean the Arab spring was a mistake, or even that it is over. Few other Arab countries have as divided a population or as ruthless a regime as Syria. But it is still a great tragedy.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist
