Daily Times

With the uprising against Syria’s Bashr al-Assad now into its ninth month, the conflict’s evolving contours have thrown up a very different trajectory from that of either Tunisia, Egypt, or Libya. Whereas the Tunisian and Egyptian dictators eventually ceded power in the face of international pressure resulting from months long brutal and bloody crackdowns on people’s uprisings, the Libyan leader remained defiant and was eventually ruthlessly killed by opposition NTC members backed by a NATO military intervention. The intervention had been sanctioned by the UNSC to enforce a no fly zone over Libya for protection of civilians, though NATO going far beyond the UNSC’s mandate in the aerial strikes on Gaddafi’s ground forces is a matter of record that remains of grave concern. Also, reports of the NTC having been armed by the west, while the Libyan government remained under sanctions, has now made a unified international approach to resolution of the Syrian crisis far more difficult.

Whilst condemning human rights violations and Assad’s crackdown on protestors, China and Russia have become highly suspicious of an emerging pattern of NATO interventions in key Middle Eastern countries and have warned against any foreign intervention in the name of human rights. Only two months after Russian president Dmitry Medvedev called on Assad to ‘reform or quit’, Russia has now deployed warships to its base on Syria’s Mediterranean coast and also delivered anti-ship cruise missiles to Syria, in an apparent show of support for the Assad regime. The two intervening months between Russia’s contrasting stances have seen Syria largely isolated with sanctions imposed by Turkey, the EU, the Arab League and the US — in Libyan fashion — and calls by the UN for ‘action’ in Syria. Furthermore, Syrian claims of militants being funded and armed by foreign countries, again a la Libya, have gained credibility in several international quarters. Indeed, Russia has voiced its opposition to any arms embargo that might see Syrian opposition militants being armed and funded while the government remains embattled with sanctions in the classic pattern that preceded NATO intervention in Libya.

Thus, Chinese and Russian ‘support’ for Assad is essentially a bid to avoid a repeat of Libya. Russian deployment in the Mediterranean is a clear warning to the US and Europe against any intervention in Syria, based on the hope that military show of support to Syria will prevent outbreak of armed conflict in the region. With Turkey having joined hands with the west in imposing sanctions against Syria and its active support to the Free Syrian Army (FSA), perhaps in the face of escalating violence by the Syrian regime on what the west calls ‘protesters’ and Syria claims are ‘foreign funded and armed terrorists’, Russia and China are keen to avoid a prolonged civil war in Syria that would be sure to follow any toppling of the Assad regime with the help of a foreign intervention on the lines of Libya. *