As a passionate human being, Malala Yousafzai knows intimately the value of life since she literally escaped the icy stranglehold of death in 2012 after a Taliban attack. As a pragmatic rights activist, the teenaged Nobel Laureate also knows that an overwhelming majority of people around the world relates to welfare causes of humanity.
So, her latest remark at the United Nations that with the death of a Syrian toddler of a refugee family on a Turkish shore the world had “lost humanity,” was not just cry of a sorrowful heart. It was a ringing call aimed at rousing the world out of its indifference. After all, it has been a combination of international passivity, the OIC’s failure as organization of the Islamic countries, UN’s inability to enforce peace, sectarian layers of the Arab conflict, Saudi-Iran rivalry, Bashar al-Assad’s state terror and ISIS and other militant organizations’ destruction and brutal treatment of minorities, women and children that has led to a hollowing out of Syria in the last five years.
The plight of Syrian refugees also drew attention of diplomats at the UN General Assembly session in New York. But US-Russia frictions were unmistakably on display with divergences on ending the gory chapter of human suffering and bloodletting in Syria. President Barack Obama made it clear that in a final diplomatic situation there would be no place for Assad who “slaughters tens of thousands of his own people” and that “Assad and his allies cannot simply pacify the broad majority of a population who have been brutalized by chemical weapons and indiscriminate bombing.”
His Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin came to Assad’s rescue, though the ruler is widely seen as a pre-Arab Spring relic, clinging to power with the help of his foreign backers, Moscow and Tehran, and trying to maintain a status quo which is not there. Assad’s playbook draws heavily on brutal tactics employed in the past by Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and now by the current Egyptian regime. The tactics employed by Middle Eastern dictators across the region along with Saudi and Iranian policies of suppression of democratic voices have deeply wounded the Arab and Middle Eastern soul.
“We think it’s an enormous mistake to refuse to cooperate with the Syrian government and its armed forces who are valiantly fighting terrorism face to face,” Putin said.
After five years of multiple conflicts in Syria and Iraq, such international divisiveness and indecisiveness hardly raises any optimism that the Syrian imbroglio would end anytime soon.
Last month, I was invited to deliver a speech at American University on the broader Middle Eastern predicament and the way out of its countless travails. But it was Syria that dangled like a big figurative elephant over the discourse with Professor Akbar S Ahemd, Ibn Khaldun chair of Islamic Studies, scholars and students. The participants were rightly perturbed as to when would the fearful chapter of killings come to an end.
So what could possibly be a viable way out of Syrian bottomless pit, I was asked. I said it certainly demanded a different approach, a broader international coalition politically, and a conscionable effort morally by all stakeholders to stem the bloodbath. The participants were in agreement that such an endeavor could only come about if the world capitals, particularly Washington, led an invigorated diplomatic drive.
That raises questions about Washington’s policy toward the Middle East – how much of engagement or retreat. Why has Assad been allowed to cross the red lines? And why has the ISIS been allowed to expand in the region? With political temperature beginning to rise in the charged US election season, two kinds of views have come to the fore.
Republican White House aspirant Donald Trump believes that Assad and ISIS or Daish should be left to their own devices – a US estrangement from the Middle Eastern tinderbox, which a majority of his conservative fellows opposes. Trump has stirred up another controversy with a statement – called xenophobic by his critics – that as president he would send back Syrian refugees taken by the United States, arguing they might be ISIS members. Last month, he had said the US should take some Syrian refugees. Ben Carson, who argued that a Muslim should not be America’s president, more or less toed Trump’s hardline.
On the other hand, Republican candidates, skeptical of Obama’s eclectic but yet-to-be-updated approach to addressing Syrian crises through military strikes against the ISIS and international diplomatic engagement like talks with Moscow and Tehran, want a much more direct American military involvement.
But as of now, it is Russia that is escalating its military involvement in Syria. Some analysts in Washington believe that after annexation of Crimea and the Ukraine conflict, Putin’s moves – ostensibly against the ISIS and in support of Assad – challenge American primacy on the world stage and that Kremlin is only filling the gap left wide open by a perceived US retreat from the region.
Meanwhile, the five-year-old Syrian catastrophe under the full glare of digitally linked civilization continues to get more troubling by the day. The Syrian civil war statistics, even by conservative estimates, are staggering – 250,000 killed, countless swallowed up among half a million crossing treacherous Mediterranean tidal waves and an untold number of children and women going through the trauma of mass displacement.
My take during the American University presentation — a viable solution to Syrian crises is linked with improvement in Iraq whose fabric had been holed by political alienation of an entire community under Nouri al-Maliki; peace in the long run would spring from the painful process of nation building on the planks of reconciliation within the society, political pluralism and a commitment to mutual respect among ethnic and sectarian groups. But for that to happen, the international community must act first – and act now, preferably under the United Nations umbrella.
The United Nations – that already has allowed too much of Palestinian and Kashmir blood to be spilled over the last seven decades – should take the lead. The world leaders – particularly the heads of five permanent members of the Security Council, all of whom were in a rare joint attendance at the General Assembly session, will have the support of citizens around the world, who, thanks to the social media, have shown such a deep sense of empathy and affinity with the suffering Syrians. Should not the spontaneous outpouring of support for Syrian refugees serve as a motivation to save Syria, and the last vestiges of an ancient civilization?
It’s also very much an interfaith opportunity. Many Islamic scholars, Pope Francis, European leaders like Angela Merkel and American opinion makers including Angelina Jolie have shown the way with their unequivocal support for the Syrians. The calls for solidarity with Syrians by Malala, millions of citizens and faith leaders around the globe are echoing all over the social media. Will the world leaders answer with a coherent approach to ending Syrian conflict?
This piece appeared simultaneously in Pakistan Today and Views and News
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