Hamstringing the UN - Russia, China and Syria
Do Business Interests Preserve the Middle Eastern Dictatorship?
Syria between Genocide and GDP
The world before 9/11 was simpler, we could cling to the last vestiges
of the structured binary Cold War reality and trick ourselves into thinking the
USA is the world police, China did not have to come and save the Western
economies and Stalin was the lesser evil, giving the almost-democratically
elected el chefe Putin the right to not care about human rights violations –
foreign and domestic, thus Syria’s civil war is a non-debatable entity and the
UN can do zilch about the thousands of victims and 200,000 refugees, because
Russia and China refuse to even think about an embargo for weapons. The first
UN envoi Kofi Anan resigned
Granted, even some of our Western countries are still shipping high tech
equipment into the region that helps the government to control the e-mail
communication. So, it’s the height of hubris to chastise Russia and China with
a wagging finger. In public press conferences our democratic representatives
may strongly condemn the Assad regime, but in the backrooms our economy can
still profit from the dictatorship. Secondly, Europe and the USA currently have
their own little crisis brewing, spending another billon dollars on yet another
military intervention in the Middle East may not be in the budget. But let’s
face it, the UN is not really needed, there is still the possibility to turn
this entire issue into a legal case before the ICC in The Hague. The 1948
definition of Genocide combines the physical violence with "intent todestroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,as such".
The question is why can’t the success of the Arab spring movement be
reproduced in Syria? There are three major issues the demonstrators in the
streets have with their authoritarian government. It’s an age-old conflict.
President Bashar Assad is part of the reigning Syrian Baath party, a secular
and socialist party, interested in gaining the leadership over the unified
Arabic nations. Since 1970 all governmental power is in the hands of the
Alaouite Dynasty, only 13% of the Syrian population, a minority in Syria, 90%
are Arabs, 9% Kurds and 0,8% Armenians.
Furthermore, the Syrian youth is relatively well educated; yet, more
than one third of those under 25 are jobless. This ties in with the mostly
rural economy, 23% of the GDP are generated in the agricultural domain, thus
the chasm between urban oil and gas industries and the rural hinterlands, between
Sunni (70% of the population), Shiites (3%) and Alaouites (13%) has constantly
been growing. Syrian economy today is still influenced by the old alliance with
the former UdSSR and its planned economy. 35% of the annual budget finance the
military and spy machinery but also weapons for the Hezbollah in Lebanon.
A second mediator with a UN mandate was sent into the region, after Kofi
Anan failed, but even before he got the job, Brahimi proclaimed the situation
was hopeless and now weeks later, he still has no plan of action. The UN may be
concerned with the growing instability in the region but not enough to do
anything concrete about the issue, with Syria, Iran and maybe Iraq on the one
side, on the other, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar.
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