Echoes of Bosnia in Syria’s agony
The searing images of children torn apart by artillery, hands outstretched for outside help that refuses to materialise or, indeed, journalists killed for doing their job are horribly familiar. Today they come to our living rooms courtesy of Syria. Two decades ago it was Bosnia.
Yesterday amid all the slaughter we saw images of Homs divided by barricades along ethnic lines. Alawite neighbours sealed off from their erstwhile Sunni neighbours. Ethnic maps were the curse of Bosnia. As this conflict becomes a fully fledged civil war they could become the curse of Syria too.
Like the Serb minority in Bosnia the Alawites of the Assad clan are convinced that they will be killed en masse if they lose what they regard as an existential battle not just for power but for survival. They fully expect to reap the brutality they have sowed. This doesn’t excuse the regime’s actions by any means. It merely helps to explain their ferocity.
Twenty years ago we also watched in horror as civilians were left to the slaughter of armies. At first there was shock that such an outrage could happen in Europe’s backyard. Soon the killing became routine. The stories slipped in the news bulletins and it took new levels of outrage – a bread queue massacre, a stumbled upon mass grave, concentration camps, Srebrenica – to shake the international community from its indifference.
In Bosnia it took almost four years, an estimated 100,000 civilian deaths and scores of toothless UN resolutions, before the international community showed enough muscle to intervene.
When it did with the Dayton Accords hammered out by the late Richard Holbrooke, President Clinton’s diplomatic bruiser, relief was mingled with regret that all this could have been achieved so much sooner.
Who knows whether Syria’s agony will soldier on for that long with that many casualties, whether Assad can survive or whether we will be distracted by “events” elsewhere?
For now, I fear, there are even more reasons why intervention will be conspicuous only by its absence. Both President Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy are fighting for re-election. Intervention in a messy civil war with uncertain results is the last thing they want or need.
I don’t know about the French public, but their American counterparts aren’t overly vexed by the killing inside Syria. They barely paid attention to Libya.
“We don’t have a dog in this fight.” That is how Secretary of State James Baker famously described America’s initial indifference to the break up of Yugoslavia. There were no geo-political consequences. The Cold War had ended. Russia was distracted by its own internal turmoil. Beijing was outraged at America’s eventual intervention – remember the accidental Nato bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade – but in those days China still hadn’t become America’s banker.
The difference is that today everyone has a dog in Syria’s fight. Prime Minister Putin takes this incarnation of the Arab Spring personally since he is facing his own Russian winter of discontent.
China is allergic to regime change from below and as paranoid about the contagion of the Arab Spring as it was about the bird flu. America is terrified that Syria will explode – rather than implode – with repercussions for Israel and Iran.
Humanitarian suffering is – for now at least – trumped by the fear of unintended consequences. The US is in a period of hunkering. The Iraq occupation has been shut down. Afghanistan is next. The post 9/11 appetite for foreign adventures has disappeared.
Senior diplomats in Washington have repeatedly told me that they would be only too happy for the Saudis or Qataris to send weapons to the Syrian opposition through the back door. And overshadowing all of the above is the spectre of Israeli military action over Iran’s nuclear programme and what that could unleash. As one official put it to me: “We will be holding our breath all year and treading carefully.”
Timing, as they say is everything. In comedy, tragedy and war. And the timing is not on the side of the people of Homs or Syria.
Follow @mattfrei on Twitter.