As Syria mourns lost decade, impotent UN admits failures

Global security system is designed for deadlock on wars such as Syria's, with big powers in disagreement

Syrians paint a mural on the remains of a building in the rebel-held town of Binnish in north-western Idlib province. AFP

There is plenty of blame to go around for dragging out Syria’s decade-long war.

Syrian President Bashar Al Assad and his ruling clique have doubtless shown a ruthless desire to cling to power, and they probably would not have held on until today without military muscle from Russia and Iran.

Money and arms flows from parts of the Arab world were a problem. Fighting between Turkey and Syria's Kurdish militias added a tricky dimension to the conflict. ISIS and other extremists have few credible defenders.

But for UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, a finger of blame is also pointed at the world body.

"If a war lasts 10 years, the international security governance system that we have is not effective," he said this week.

“That should be a source of reflection for everybody involved.”

The UN was created in 1945 with the aim of stopping a rerun of the Second World War. There have been no truly global conflicts since, but Syria's decade-long crisis tested the global security system to breaking point, Mr Gutteres said.

For many, the design flaw is the UN Security Council's system of vetoes, which empowers the winners of the Second World War – the US, Russia, China, Britain and France – to reject decisions at the top table of global diplomacy.

In July last year, Russia cast its 16th and most recent Security Council veto on Syria, torpedoing a resolution drafted by western members to extend deliveries of much-needed aid across two checkpoints on the Turkish-Syrian border.

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This past decade, Russia, which has a military base in Syria and long-standing ties with the Assad family, vetoed UN resolutions on issues such as condemning the bombing of Aleppo to referring atrocities in Syria to the International Criminal Court.

Russia is often supported by a Chinese veto. Moscow backed a 2013 resolution that condemned the use of chemical weapons in Ghouta, near Damascus – part of a Russian-US deal to end Syria's chemical weapons programme.

Deadlock over Syria in the council led Mr Guterres and others to wonder whether UN rules need to be rewritten, so that permanent council members cannot veto actions when millions of lives are at stake.

Over the years, campaigners and second-tier UN powers such as Germany, India and Japan have sought to pare back the powers of the council's five permanent members, but plans for a revamp have struggled to gather the required support.

“The mechanisms of governance that we have should be more able to intervene when we have dramatic situations like these going on for so long,” said Mr Guterres.

“Unfortunately, the mechanisms we have today in place are not able to fully respond to this challenge.”

Frustration is frequently displayed at UN council meetings, including from Mr Guterres’s envoy to Syria, Geir Pedersen, a Scandinavian diplomat who generally lets little show beyond his calm and practical demeanour.

Mr Pedersen is in charge of shepherding the Syrian Constitutional Committee, which comprises representatives of Mr Al Assad’s government, opposition and civil society, and has the mandate to draw up a new constitution leading to UN-supervised elections.

The committee met five times since October 2019. Its latest meeting in January ended with no progress on drafting a new charter after government delegates rejected proposals.

“The lack of progress … is high on our collective mind,” Mr Pedersen said this week.

He will brief the Security Council on "efforts to overcome the challenges" on Monday – the 10th anniversary of the start of Syria's pro-democracy protests that quickly became an all-out civil war.

But few analysts expect the committee to make real progress. Fighting has largely ceased and forces backing Mr Al Assad, with foreign support, recaptured most of the country and he has little reason to seriously negotiate with opponents.

Mr Pedersen lamented an “immensely challenging and difficult” process.

The US and other western powers can use sanctions and reconstruction cash as leverage against Mr Al Assad, who is battling a deep economic crisis, a collapsing currency and rocketing inflation, but otherwise wield little influence over events in Syria.

Mr Pedersen’s three predecessors were similarly stumped.

The Norwegian diplomat took over in January 2019 from Italian-Swedish diplomat Staffan de Mistura, who followed veteran Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi and former UN chief Kofi Annan. They all quit the job, complaining it was almost impossible to deliver progress.

The result has been a UN that looks like a bystander in Syria’s conflict.

The world body delivers aid across the fragmented country and launched investigations into atrocities there.

This month, the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria found that the government and others were behind tens of thousands of disappearances and illegal detentions, as well as thousands of cases of torture and sexual violence against people who were detained.

But justice usually stops at the publication of detailed reports. The UN’s human rights chief Michelle Bachelet this week complained that the Security Council had not referred Syrian atrocities to the International Criminal Court and said she was looking for workarounds.

She highlighted the rare success of a court in Germany, which last month used universal jurisdiction laws to prosecute and sentence a former member of Mr Al Assad's security services to four and a half years in prison for abetting the torture of civilians.

The conviction was an "important step forward on the path to justice", Ms Bachelet said.

She urged other national courts to follow suit and “reduce the accountability gap for such serious crimes”.

Against this backdrop, aid workers and diplomats are gloomy about Syria's future. The Norwegian Refugee Council, a charity led by former UN humanitarian chief Jan Egeland, made stomach-turning projections about a second decade of war in Syria.

More than 5.6 million people have fled Syria since 2011 and millions more are displaced within its borders. Ten more years of conflict, insecurity and economic collapse would force another six million from their homes, Mr Egeland said.

"The callous indifference towards the millions of Syrian children, mothers and fathers bereft of their homes and their lives is a damning indictment of the parties to this cruel war, their sponsors and the entire international community," he said.