“ARE you incapable of shame? Are you no more capable of feeling shame? Is there no execution of a child that gets under your skin?” These moving words were contained in a speech at the UN Security Council by Dr. Samantha Powers, the US Special Representative to the United Nations, during a debate last week on the fate of Aleppo.
The words were intended for Syria, es- pecially President Bashir al-Assad, and the Russia Federation, which has led the dev- astating air assault on Aleppo which left the city in ruins. They were also directed at the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has helped in the ground operations of the Assad regime.
Yet, the words ought to actually apply to the whole world for the failure of its col- lective security system on which the foun- dation of the United Nations was based. The UN is an organisation formed at the end of the world’s most murderous war in 1945, primarily “to save humanity from the scourge of war.”
The statistics of the Syrian catastrophe are damning: 450,000 Syrians killed in five years; one million Syrians injured; 12 million Syrians (half of the country’s population) turned into refugees. And the question has been: how was it possible that the world watched the decimation of the Syrian population, the bombing out of its cities, the carnage and the human suf- fering, yet claim it is incapable of doing anything to alleviate the suffering or stop the slaughter?
President Bashir al-Assad is today stay- ing in power over the corpses of 450,000 slain Syrians. Yet, all he needed to do in 2011 when it became apparent that he no longer commanded the support of a vast majority of the Syrian people was to make a patriotic speech thanking Syrians for the scores of years he and his late fa- ther, Hafez, had been president of Syria, and step aside. He had the option of living in retirement in Syria and helping to set up a transition government. He was also free to go on exile anywhere he chose. He chose to remain in power, even if half of the country was decimated.
We cannot but recall that the genesis of the Syrian catastrophe began with the ‘Arab Springs,’ which was a wind of change that blew through the Arab world against the totalitarian governments that held the Arab world in bondage for generations. It began in Tunisia, and Abidine Ben Ali wisely left the seat of power. The wind blew into Egypt, forcing President Hosni Mubarak out of power and into jail. The wind took its biggest casualty in the per- son of Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan po- tentate, who had been in power for more than 44 years.
We believe that Syria became a caul- dron because of the interplay of interne- cine Syrian politics, the American refusal to be drawn any more into Arab civil wars, and its aversion to sending US ground forces to the Middle East. There were, also, the sectarian battles in the Muslim world which pit the Sunni against the Shia, and Russia’s ambition to maintain a stronghold and a naval port in the Middle East. The Islamic State and its so-called ‘caliphate’ seem to have corralled an un- usual alliance of Russians, Syrians, Irani- ans, even Americans and their allies in the Arab world, into a strange kind of al- liance dedicated to destroying the Islamic State.
We think it was tragic that the world could not come together and with one voice ask President al-Assad to go. That is a big moral failure of the United Nations. The Security Council, as the enforcement arm of the UN, has therefore demonstrat- ed how impotent it is in securing inter- national peace and security and should therefore be reconsidered. A new for- mula must be found to break deadlocks in the Security Council, especially on issues pertaining to international peace and security.
We suggest that if the Council is dead- locked twice on an issue of war and peace, especially in a situation likely to lead to a humanitarian catastrophe as Syria, the UN Secretary-General should be empowered to convene a special con- vention of the General Assembly which should in the circumstance assume the enforcement powers of the UN. Deci- sions should then be made on a simple majority for humanitarian assistance or two-thirds majority when the use of force is imperative.