Syria, Assad and what the west must do now

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/09/syria-assad-what-west-must-do-now

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UK government policy makes us “arsonists and firemen” in Syria, says Peter Ford, former British ambassador to that country (Opinion, 8 April). It is a pity that he doesn’t spell out more clearly our need to stop being arsonists, pursuing policies that benefit bloodthirsty extremists and have caused the deaths of over 60,000 Syrian soldiers. The declared aim of our policy of backing moderate rebels is not the defeat of Bashar al-Assad, but forcing him to accept negotiations in which a precondition is that he steps down. This means that for peace to come to Syria, moderate rebels must see off Assad and then defeat Isis, al-Nusra and other jihadi militias. They could never do that without “boots on the ground” military backing from America and/or its allies. The most likely long-term outcome is that Syria will go the way of Iraq and Libya.

Assad, who Ford claims has been 'demonised', has subjected the people of Yarmouk to a medieval-style siege for two years

We must stop supporting any rebels, and stop demanding that Assad must go. America must use its phenomenal power and influence to bring about negotiations, involving Russia and all other parties, to enforce a ceasefire between Assad and moderate rebels. When that has been established, the Syrian army must be sent out to do the job it is uniquely equipped to do: eradicate Isis and other foreign armies from their country. That will make them much easier to deal with in Iraq and elsewhere. Our government should stop backing the US on Syria and instead call on Barack Obama to start serious talks with Vladimir Putin and others as a matter of urgency. Our present policy is condemning Syria to war with no end in sight.Brendan O’BrienLondon

• The article by Peter Ford was welcome and timely. David Cameron certainly did his best to whip up the civil war in Syria and then drag the UK into it. The outcome has proven far worse even than his previous amateurish and opportunistic meddling in Libya. However, Peter Ford did not mention another big ethical deficiency in Cameron’s track record – his refusal for the UK to accept a fair share of the desperate refugees whose lives have been wrecked as a result. They include talented, liberal professionals who want to escape the current savagery, some of them from Christian communities that had lived in Syria for 2,000 years. Even Nigel Farage accepts that the UK has a moral obligation to provide a safe haven to some of these deserving refugees.Dr John BirtillGuisborough, North Yorkshire

• Ian Black states categorically that the Syrian government killed up to 1,400 people in a chemical weapons attack in August 2013 (Report, 8 April), but this has never been proven. As Peter Ford refreshingly points out in the same edition, the secular Assad regime has been demonised “out of all proportion”, so that it received no credit for the subsequent handover of its stockpiles of chemical weapons, and its overtures for peace talks have repeatedly been rebuffed by the presumably deliberately unrealistic precondition that President Assad must first of all step down. Meanwhile, far from seeking a cool-headed diplomatic solution, the bellicose British government continues to follow the US lead in adding fuel to the fire – one can only assume that’s because Assad, far from being the devil incarnate, is an obstacle to western domination of the Middle East.Peter GodfreyHorgabost, Isle of Harris, Outer Hebrides

• The timing of Peter Ford’s whitewash of the Assad regime in Syria is particularly unfortunate, coinciding as it does with public attention becoming focused on the Palestinian Damascus suburb of Yarmouk. Assad, who Ford claims has been “demonised”, has subjected the people of Yarmouk to a medieval-style siege for the past two years as punishment for ousting his proxies from control of the area. This operation has cut off electricity, food, medical supplies and eventually water, forcing tens of thousands of dispossessed Palestinians to flee their homes once again and causing over 200 deaths, many from starvation.

The catastrophe in Syria occurred because the international community was hesitant to intervene at the right time

In the past week, the suffering of the remaining inhabitants of Yarmouk has been compounded by the incursion of the brutal extremist group Isis. While Assad’s forces proved themselves highly effective in blocking the entry of food and medicine into Yarmouk, they did nothing to prevent the entry of Isis. The only forces fighting Isis and attempting to protect the people of Yarmouk have been armed opposition groups. Once Isis was entrenched in the area, the regime responded with indiscriminate shelling and bombing, striking civilians and the groups that are combatting Isis rather than Isis itself. An estimated 100 civilians have been killed or injured in these attacks, considerably more than have suffered at the hands of Isis.

Ford’s contention that the way to combat global jihadism is to back a dictatorship capable of conduct like this demonstrates completely upside-down reasoning.Brian SlocockChester

• Peter Ford seems to be trying to thread together the wrong strings from the vantage point of hindsight. I would see the situation the other way around. What if we had been able to support Syrian rebels at the early stages of the Arab spring? What if we were able to hold a democratic election which could have elected a secular government able to control the whole of Syria so that there would be no safe haven, and ask for help in the international arena if it thought necessary?

The whole catastrophe in Syria occurred because the international community was hesitant to intervene in the situation at the right time. We were hesitant because Russia and China were against military intervention in Syria as they are against intervention in “domestic matters” of a state. We could have, if we had been able to conjure the political will to intervene, utilised a UN security council resolution to intervene in the situation. Instead, what happened was that the US, unable to conjure up support of the major powers (mainly due to its failure in Iraq and Afghanistan), came up with a very dubious “red line” of chemical weapons. Russia, after all its effort to impede the international effort in Syria, played out a role of a “wise mediator”, bringing the situation to a minor equilibrium where the regime forfeited the use of chemical weaponry, and the situation deteriorated. That is how I see the situation, and it is plainly wrong to blame the PM for the present situation in the Middle East.Kazufumi AokiCambridge

• Peter Ford, in criticising David Cameron on Syria, rightly questions the view that the initial demonstrations against the rule of President Assad were just another manifestation of the 2011 Arab spring. My views, while not those of the majority of commentators, were always as one with links to the Armenian and other Orthodox Christian peoples who have inhabited this region. We saw things in a different light, and one for which a particularly poignant anniversary is upcoming.

For us, the demonisation of the Syrian government over the past three years and the prediction of its imminent fall, as Mr Cameron did, showed a lack of understanding of the faultlines that exist in this part of the world, most of which are not new.

The anniversary, on 24 April, will be 100 years from the day that marks commencement of the killing of Armenians in the Ottoman empire, which is known now by many as the Armenian genocide.

This started as Britain and France sought to force the Dardanelles Straits and Anzac forces were about to land at Gallipoli. The aim was to open a land corridor to transport supplies to the Ottoman empire’s food-impoverished and long-time foe: Russia. The Ottomans turned on Russia’s oldest allies and fellow Orthodox, the Armenians. The Sunni-dominated Ottoman forces killed or force-marched into the Syrian desert over a million Armenians. Families of those who survived still live today in Syria.

The Syrian civil war has the same faultlines. That Sunni-led Islamists have turned on the country’s minorities (ie Alawites, Christians, Kurds, Druze, and other more secular or minority Sunni) was, given the region’s history, utterly predictable. The Sunni-dominated Turkish government’s role with regard to Islamic State has also been ambiguous at best.

It is thus welcome that Peter Ford is critical of Mr Cameron for failing to understand this crisis and for suggesting an alternative narrative around the causes of the Syrian civil war. My hope is that 24 April will be noted, across the world, for the important anniversary that it is. And that there be acknowledgment that the persecution of Armenians and other Christians in areas that were once the Ottoman empire should not be repeated and, particularly by Mr Cameron, that it should be afforded greater importance.Richard GriffithsLondon