General's defection creates crack in Syria's regime

Confirmation came this morning that a confidant of President Assad of Syria has defected. The flight to Paris of General Manaf Mustafa Tlass will come as a personal blow to the Syrian president, not just because Tlass was a close friend but also because he  was one of the most senior Sunnis in the regime, who had apparently sickened of the Alawite leadership’s brutality in supppressing rebellions on the outskirts of Damascus.

It is too early to say whether General Tlass will trigger further significant defections, or offer himself up from exile as a potential leader of a transitional government in Syria. French intelligence are proabably debriefing him exhaustively, both for information about the true state of the regime and to assess the general’s own usefulness and ambitions for the future.

But a crack in the regime has appeared, one which offers a glimmer of hope amid an otherwise bleak landscape of bloodshed and diplomatic failure. Reports suggest up to a hundred people may be dying in Syria most days with the violence at what the UN calls “unprecedented” levels.  Assad’s forces have lost control of territory, but Assad himself is showing no sign of being about to relinquish power.

On the diplomatic front, the Americans appear to have lost patience with the Russians and the Chinese. The US, Britain and France want to give Kofi Annan’s so far moribund peace plan the full backing of a new UN resolution, reviving it with the full force of international law, but they can’t if Moscow or Beijing veto such a move.

So Hillary Clinton, speaking in Paris today, seems to have resorted to naming and shaming the obstacles in her path, neither of whom attended the “Friends of Syria” meeting.

In Geneva last week, the Russians signed up to a transition plan involving the establishment of an interim governing body, but agreeing the detail will prove far more difficult. The Russians have not abandoned Assad to his fate. In fact, I understand that the practicialities of the president leaving Syria have not even been discussed. So the fact that a senior general has abandoned him and fled Syria is a welcome morale boost for western diplomats desperately trying to tighten the noose.

In the absence of a UN resolution imposing universal sanctions for non-compliance with the Annan peace plan, what else can the west do? Encourage those states which have not individually imposed sanctions to do so. And that – along with the isolation of Russia and China – may be about as much as comes out of today’s meeting in Paris.

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