Syrian conflict needs attention after being put on the backburner
After the devastation caused by Covid-19 and a scandalous lack of progress in resolving the war, the world must start thinking about Syria again in 2021
For many of us, 2020 felt like a year in which the world stood still. Well-laid plans were put on hold, reunions with friends and families were postponed, careers took a backseat while we figured out how to take care of children and family while juggling work, and for all too many of us, personal loss that ground down our aspirations and hopes. The relief that the year is almost at an end is palpable, if only for the psychological need to turn the page on the calendar.
This collective stalemate, however, also meant that some of the most implacable conflicts in our part of the world have yet to be resolved. Though battlelines may not have shifted much (one of the few silver linings of the pandemic), people continue to suffer in purgatory, unable to resume their lives, fearful of what is to come when the guns start firing again.
No conflict illustrates this dilemma better than Syria, which despite a largely peaceful year on the military front, has grown steadily worse for its people. The crisis has claimed over half a million lives and half the country has been displaced, yet life is becoming more unbearable and more deprived, for a population that has endured a decade of war and now finds little solace in relative peace.
Bashar Al Assad largely secured military victory in Syria thanks to the backing of Russia and Iran. A series of brutal military campaigns between 2016 and 2018 allowed him to reclaim large swathes of territory that had been lost to rebels in Aleppo, the south, and in the area surrounding the capital Damascus. Only Idlib, a province bordering Turkey, and which stretches along the northern border, remained outside his grasp.
A 10-year-old Syrian boy from Raqqa, a former ISIS stronghold, just before leaving the Al Hol refugee camp to return home. AFP
The year began with a renewed push to retake parts of Idlib, which sent hundreds of thousands fleeing to the Turkish border, threatening to create a new refugee crisis. The killing of a dozen Turkish soldiers in an airstrike then prompted a major incursion by Ankara that halted and reversed the regime’s advance back in March, but added to the tensions on the border. Since the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic, these battle lines have largely held.
The coronavirus has ravaged Syria – despite a low official case count of just over 10,000 infections, independent reporting shows the pandemic has raged through society, both in government-controlled areas and in the destroyed environs of Idlib. The regime, which cannot afford the lockdown measures necessary to arrest the virus's spread, has sought to hide the true extent of the suffering, rather than do anything to stop it.
The plague was coupled with an economic crisis that has left the population increasingly destitute. Neighbouring Lebanon's economy, long a crucial access point for foreign currency and a place for Syrians to deposit their savings, collapsed. Syria's economy also suffered, with poverty and unemployment increasing, access to food declining, and fuel becoming increasingly scarce. Long bread and diesel fuel lines are common.
The economic situation has been worsened by stalled reconstruction efforts. The US Caesar Act sanctions imposed extremely tight restrictions on any business dealings in the country, making it impossible for companies and nations that wanted to continue being part of the global financial system to operate there. The impossibility of reconstruction efforts has made an economic recovery, as a consequence of Mr Al Assad's military victory, largely a pipe dream.
A priest of the Chaldean Church leads the Christmas morning mass at a church in Aleppo. Many will hope, yet again, that a new year brings better news for the country. AFP
Despite the Syria conflict largely standing still this year, life for the country's people has grown steadily worse
Yet even as things got steadily worse for the population, there was no progress on a peace settlement. A constitutional committee established under UN auspices has done little to advance its goal of drafting a new charter for the country. Nor have negotiations involving the main international protagonists in the country, Russia, Iran and Turkey, created any openings for peace, largely because they are mostly interested in pursuing self-serving agendas.
The only cause for optimism has been from outside the country. While hope withers that those responsible for the gravest atrocities of the war will ever be held to account, European courts have begun prosecuting some of the country's war criminals. In Germany, police this year arrested two doctors on suspicion of taking part in torturing political detainees, while two intelligence officers, who were charged with crimes against humanity for their role in the torture, killing and rape of detainees, also stood trial.
There is little basis for hope that in 2021 there might be a resolution to the crisis in Syria. Perhaps the new administration in the US will take an interest after a decade of turning an eye away from the slaughter, and use the leverage of sanctions to push a peace plan in earnest. Perhaps the 10-year anniversary will offer a stark reminder and an impetus for global action to solve the crisis. Then again perhaps the stalemate will continue, relegated to the backs of our minds by the absence of urgency and immediate violence.
But whatever happens, Syrians can ill afford another lost year of desperation.
Kareem Shaheen is a veteran Middle East correspondent in Canada and a columnist for The National
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Countdown to Zero exhibition will show how disease can be beaten
Countdown to Zero: Defeating Disease, an international multimedia exhibition created by the American Museum of National History in collaboration with The Carter Center, will open in Abu Dhabi a month before Reaching the Last Mile.
Opening on October 15 and running until November 15, the free exhibition opens at The Galleria mall on Al Maryah Island, and has already been seen at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
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Milestones on the road to union
1970
October 26: Bahrain withdraws from a proposal to create a federation of nine with the seven Trucial States and Qatar.
December: Ahmed Al Suwaidi visits New York to discuss potential UN membership.
1971
March 1: Alex Douglas Hume, Conservative foreign secretary confirms that Britain will leave the Gulf and “strongly supports” the creation of a Union of Arab Emirates.
July 12: Historic meeting at which Sheikh Zayed and Sheikh Rashid make a binding agreement to create what will become the UAE.
July 18: It is announced that the UAE will be formed from six emirates, with a proposed constitution signed. RAK is not yet part of the agreement.
August 6: The fifth anniversary of Sheikh Zayed becoming Ruler of Abu Dhabi, with official celebrations deferred until later in the year.
August 15: Bahrain becomes independent.
September 3: Qatar becomes independent.
November 23-25: Meeting with Sheikh Zayed and Sheikh Rashid and senior British officials to fix December 2 as date of creation of the UAE.
November 29: At 5.30pm Iranian forces seize the Greater and Lesser Tunbs by force.
November 30: Despite a power sharing agreement, Tehran takes full control of Abu Musa.
November 31: UK officials visit all six participating Emirates to formally end the Trucial States treaties
December 2: 11am, Dubai. New Supreme Council formally elects Sheikh Zayed as President. Treaty of Friendship signed with the UK. 11.30am. Flag raising ceremony at Union House and Al Manhal Palace in Abu Dhabi witnessed by Sheikh Khalifa, then Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi.
December 6: Arab League formally admits the UAE. The first British Ambassador presents his credentials to Sheikh Zayed.
December 9: UAE joins the United Nations.
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