A Balkan map for the road to Damascus? by Ian Bond
It is two years since the EU imposed an arms embargo and other sanctions on Syria “to achieve a change of policy by the Syrian leadership without further delay”. Since then, over 80,000 people have been killed, over a million have sought refuge in neighbouring countries and over four million are internally displaced. And in that time, the EU has issued well over 100 statements and applied 21 further sets of sanctions, without any visible impact. If the highest wisdom of a state is masterly inactivity, this is the opposite: impotent hyperactivity. Indeed, everyone’s policy towards Syria has failed: the West has not succeeded in replacing the Assad regime with a liberal, secular democracy; Russian and Iranian support has not enabled Assad to reassert control; Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States have not managed to propel the Sunni majority into power at the expense of the Alawite minority. International leaders know that they need to do something different: that is the message of recent American and British attempts to re-launch a peace process in partnership with Russia. But there is not even the outline of an international consensus on what to do. This crisis is on Europe’s doorstep. The nearest EU member-state, Cyprus, is 100 miles from the Syrian coast. Europe should devise a more effective set of policies and sell them energetically to the key players inside and outside Syria. Clearly, Syria is not Bosnia in 1994. But there are general lessons to draw from the Balkans.
The first is that a framework has to be found for reconciling the interests of the parties’ international patrons. In former Yugoslavia, the establishment of the contact group of major Western powers and Russia was a necessary though not sufficient condition for progress. Despite Moscow’s initial wariness, over time a degree of confidence was established, so that the Russians applied pressure in Belgrade. Together with the changing military situation on the ground, this cleared the way for the Dayton peace process. In the Syrian context, putting together a small and effective contact group would be challenging: some US officials say that it could be “politically impossible” to involve Iran in peace talks. But excluding Iran a priori would only encourage it to play a spoiling role. A contact group would also offer opportunities: for example, obliging the EU and Turkey to unite around common objectives