We have all witnessed this week the deepening of the Syrian crisis. After months without resolution to this conflict, after months of witnessing the loss of so many thousands of lives, after witnessing the pain and destruction on all levels that this conflict has brought about, decisions taken this week have added another painful chapter to this saga.
The decision to lift the arms embargo and to start supplying armaments to the rebels on the one side, which brought the immediate reaction by the Russians on the other side to supply arms to the Syrian government, begs the question ‘Why were these decisions taken?’. Was this decision based on panic, was this decision based on guilt, does anybody truly believe in their heart of hearts that such a decision will bring a quicker end to all this pain and suffering? I tend to describe it as a case of just not knowing what to do next, a stalemate situation in which the international players have found themselves. They were witnessing the ineffectiveness of international measures, the stalemate reached by this revolution as opposed to the success of the Arab Spring that the world witnessed in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Maybe also it is due to the lack of agreement – or even better knowledge – of how to resolve the human crisis in Syria.
The lifting of the arms embargo is leading to much discussion and controversy. In my humble opinion it will lead to further uncontrolled guerrilla warfare and to the eventual dominance of the many opposition and fundamentalist factions over their respective turfs. This will, once the situation resolves itself, lead to a similar situation to that which Libya is experiencing: the impossibility of collecting the arms that have now been circulated in the hands of the Syrian population.
This decision brought the Russian reaction that they would support the Syrian Government forces, arming them as necessary, and this has brought an immediate reaction by Israel, which has threatened to attack the Russian supply of arms. This could be even more harmful, as it can bring on consequences which so far were not considered to form part of the equation. A war between Russia and Israel can have devastating consequences. What pressures will Russia find itself under if it faces the loss of Russian lives as a result of Israel’s retaliation to their participating in the supply of arms?
However, the issue remains Syria, while the other factors, at this stage, are peripheral. The arming of both sides will lead this country into more turmoil, it will lead it into a state of anarchy even worse than exists today, and it also will lead to factions such as Hezbollah gaining more ground in Syria, given the country’s current state of confusion.
The question we should be asking each other and the powers that be is ‘Where will the lifting of the embargo lead the country?’. Will it resolve the civil war? Are we arming to prevent more Government abuse? Are we arming to promote democracy? With the consequences of the above, are we arming for more people to die?
The other question we should be asking ourselves is: ‘what kind of Syria will we have post-Assad?’. Do we know who we will be putting up with, who we are pushing into the seat of power? Some are now arguing that the situation that existed before, with the Assad regime, was a case of ‘better the devil you know...’
The reality is that we have this internal conflict in Syria and it needs to be resolved. At this stage, it is difficult to try and map its future, as the way forward is so uncertain. A proposal to organise a peace conference has been floated but do we really believe, after all this in-fighting and the hatred that has surfaced, that the factions will participate peacefully and accept a peace plan and recommendations, other than paying lip-service to them?
In response to my observations on social media, an observer objected to some of the conclusions I reached. He objected to my contention that social media is an invasion of privacy, claiming that no one out there is holding a gun to people’s heads to join Twitter. The point that he missed in his observation is the difference between voluntary participation in social media and the abuse of this media through unwanted participation and the defamatory use of these social networks to spread venom and false defamatory information.
It is not a question of a person’s decision to divulge personal data; it is the controlling of data that third parties, some of them innocently, divulge in these media that then remain there and cannot be totally erased. An expert in this field should be fully aware of this abuse.
The writer defends his observations by claiming that Twitter and Facebook are not anonymous. Here again he misses the point but, worse still, he seems oblivious to the many fake or manipulated profiles and to the multitude of pages and websites that are used, even locally, to harm people’s reputations. Not being aware of these sites equates to not being on the ball in the field.
He takes to task my comments on blogging – we are all aware of the difficulties in enforcing the ideal and that the positive outweighs the negative, but this does not prohibit us from committing ourselves to minimising the negative. Incidentally, for those who follow international news, these concerns are the subject of much debate both in Italy and in America at the moment.