Syrian people must not be failed again
Syria has weighed on my mind for a long time: 15 years of trauma for its people and 15 years of failure in international engagement
Syria has weighed on my mind for a long time: 15 years of trauma for its people and 15 years of failure in international engagement. I was directly involved in the latter – as a senior member of the United Nations’ Special Envoy’s Office, and later as head of UN OCHA – and so I cannot claim innocence before the Syrian people. In my time at the UN, I had to attend numerous meetings with senior officials of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, including the Syrian president himself. Some would accuse me and the UN of maintaining this engagement as part of a trade to get better humanitarian access. The truth is different. Humanitarian agencies and their officials always meet anyone who can either help or impede humanitarian assistance. It’s not a trade. It’s a necessity – as is also true of mediators always meeting the parties to conflict in their efforts to end it. All of my many meetings with al-Assad were to press for the decisions he needed to take for the welfare of his people. He was one of many people with deplorable power to create and sustain suffering whom I had to meet in my five decades working as a diplomat. On one occasion, back near the beginning of al-Assad’s hideous war in 2012, I was living in Damascus and conducting daily futile negotiations with the government on behalf of the UN.
I always raised the issue of detentions. One day, the man across the table stopped the clock. “Switch off the microphones,” he said, “and put down your pens.” Then turned to me and said very simply: “Stop wasting your time on this. We will never let them out. Nor will we ever admit to this truth.” In 2022, in a private meeting with al-Assad, I suggested that he should empty the jails. “Of course,” he replied. “I have already emptied them. There are no detainees there now!” A year later, in the aftermath of the devastating earthquakes, I met al-Assad three times. My job was to persuade him to do the necessary and obvious things for the welfare and the rights of his people. I can now say that my efforts signally failed. The Syrian people were saved by military action. The takeover of Damascus set the table for peace. As someone who has devoted a lifetime to dialogue and negotiation, I find it a bitter truth that action, not talk, was what was needed – and that it was required all those years earlier. I now understand that the international community’s original sin was to set aside regime change from the outset as the route to end Syria’s suffering. Instead, we had “Friends of Syria” – a grouping of mainly Western powers and regional allies – supporting the opposition to al-Assad but making almost no difference to the daily toll of detentions and deaths affecting almost every Syrian family.
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