It’s often hard to discern when a tipping point arrives in any international crisis. For those of us working the Balkan beat in the 1990s, it wasn’t until the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica that U.S. and NATO Air Forces finally bombed the Bosnian Serb Army. While Srebrenica was horrifying, it wasn’t as if it came out of nowhere. Prior to 1995, no direct western action was taken despite years of ethnic cleansing, starvation, rape, concentration camps, the brutal destruction of hundreds of Bosniak towns and villages, and the use of heavy weapons against civilians in Sarajevo and elsewhere. Diplomatic efforts to stop the carnage went nowhere and only seemed to empower the guilty parties. Immediately after Srebrenica, however, the U.S.-led bombing campaign changed the dynamic on the ground and quickly led to the Dayton accords and an end of the war.
Are we at such a moment in Syria?
There are similarities between the situation in Bosnia in the 1990s and Syria today. Both states were born from the dissolution of the Ottoman empire. Both shared a potent mix of ethnic nationalism, religious factionalism, competing armed militia groups and a legacy of dictatorship. Bosnia’s Alija Itzebegovic ruled a Muslim dominated entity inside a larger Christian/Communist Yugoslavia, while Bashar al-Assad’s ruling Ba’ath party is little more than his tribe of minority Shia Alawites. Also, in similar fashion the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons against its enemies, targeted civilians with barrel bombs and artillery, and purposely targeted hospitals and humanitarian groups in an effort to terrorize and starve the population. In recent days Assad and his equally brutal Russian allies have shown that they are willing to use these same tactics to destroy the historic city of Aleppo.
Have we reached a tipping point? When do outside observers become sufficiently appalled to the point where they will take action? When do the pieces come together to support political or military action? To those of us who have worked in the trenches of past conflicts, we know that the timing of such action is not always based on logical calculations. Instead, the anger generated from the devastating pictures of the extreme violence and built up frustrations that finally reach a tipping point, often translate into a catalyst for action. Is Aleppo the Syrian version of Srebrenica?
To date, the U.S. has resisted pressures to engage militarily against the Assad regime. What has changed that should make the Obama Administration reconsider its policy?
For one thing, we can no longer fool ourselves that the Russians will help find a tolerable solution. On the Syrian side, it has long been accepted that Assad will never quit. Compromise for Assad means sure death. His Sunni enemies will wipe out his family and his tribe. Alawites have historically been oppressed when they were not in the position of the oppressor. The events of recent weeks have shown that the Russians have absolutely no interest in helping the West end the war on terms other than all out control of the urban population centers of Syria. They will only agree to a ceasefire after they get everything they want – hardly the basis for a serious negotiation. Of course, the Russians have long been consistent in pursuing their brutal goals. It is the U.S. that has built a policy based on hope and wishful thinking rather than cold calculation. Perhaps the stone cold reality of recent weeks will end US diplomatic willingness to appease Russian concerns.
And it is not just in Syria that Russia has shown its willingness to trample on U.S. interests. While the U.S. has been focused on its election, Putin is using the waning months of the present Administration to create a new reality that the next Administration will be forced to accept. The Russians brazenly steal and interfere in the internal affairs of the U.S. and its allies, bully our diplomats, ridicule our leaders, encroach on agreements and threaten their neighbors. Again, any lingering thought that we can work in a civil manner with the Russians is all but dead.
So, it is fair to say that any realistic hope of a diplomatic or negotiated end to the carnage in Syria is off the table. Assad and Putin will not stop until they achieve their bloody objective. Thus, continued efforts by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to engage the Russians risks his legacy, and makes the U.S. increasingly implicit in the destruction of the Syrian people. This too harks back to the Bosnian conflict. In June 1995, the commander of the UN forces in the former Yugoslavia, General Bernard Janvier, met secretly with Bosnia Serb commander Ratko Mladić in an effort to obtain the release of French hostages. In the process Janvier signaled to Mladic that the UN would work to block air strikes on the Bosnian Serb forces in return for the release of the hostages. Janvier’s poorly timed concessions expedited genocide and gave Mladic the room to slaughter thousands of Srebrenica civilians in cold blood.
Just like in Bosnia, it is unlikely that there will be any accord in Syria unless and until the West takes military action, most likely by opening a land corridor out of Aleppo or destroying the Syrian Air Force. Despite the energetic efforts of numerous diplomats in the Bosnia war, there never would have been a Dayton Peace Treaty without the NATO bombing.
Politicians will continue to argue whether we should have acted earlier in Syria. There are compelling reasons on both sides of the argument. In Bosnia too, the arguments for action, as the carnage on the ground continued unabated, went on for a long time before the west finally acted. Once they did, the war came to an end.
Are things really different in Syria now than they were just weeks and months ago? No, but they are starting to feel that way.
