As Syria slides further into a full-fledged civil war and the violence throughout the country continues to escalate, pressure for intervention is mounting. The international community’s immediate priority should be to stop the bloodshed. What needs to be considered is whether such measures can be achieved within the legal normative framework supplied by the United Nations Charter, given the current political backdrop.
Although the Security Council may authorize (non-)military enforcement measures under Chapter VII, all enforcement measures taken thus far have been fruitless. Diplomacy is obviously not working. The Six Point Plan from Kofi Annan which garnered full Security Council member support for a cease-fire, along with the subsequent Council resolutions adopted to implement the Plan, practically came to an end overnight after the Houla massacre.
Syrian sanctions have not been working either. The Arab League, US and EU have imposed sanctions against the purchase of Syrian oil, technologies and strategic goods that can be utilized by the government to suppress Syrians, and have added Syrian officials on their sanctions list, i.e. freezing assets and imposing travel bans. Not only have these measures failed to change al-Assad’s behavior, but they might have even negatively affected the living conditions of Syrian citizens, due to the price rise of certain necessary commodities.
As for military measures, given that Russia vetoed a resolution on Syria in February that did not authorize a Libya-style intervention or even threaten an arms embargo and sanctions, I am of the opinion that a compromise acceptable to Russia is unlikely to be reached in the immediate future. This removes the option of taking UN Security Council-sanctioned military enforcement measures, such as the Responsibility to Protect, from the table.
In the absence of an explicit Security Council resolution, the only other exemption to Article 2(4)’s prohibition on the use of force is when a state invokes its right to self-defense after having suffered an armed attack – limited to acts necessary and proportionate. Turkey asserted that it may consider invoking Art. 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, i.e. the collective security clause, after a cross-border shooting by Syrian security forces killed two Turkish officials and left three injured. But it did not. Any attempt to justify the use of force against Syria in response to the shootings as self-defense, with the amount of time that has elapsed, would lack credibility. It is also clear that any use of force by Turkey, or by its allies in NATO will not be proportionate to the degree of force employed by Syria in this particular incident. Furthermore, the use of force by Turkey must only be directed to restore the status quo ante, that is, limited to restoring security along the Syrian border.
It seems that there are no viable legal options. Having ruled out collective intervention and self defense, states or NATO could justify their actions when unilaterally intervening without Security Council authorization by pointing at numerous contextual considerations. Although a claim to legality will not be possible, a claim to legitimacy could definitely be made – a position which NATO held when describing its action over Kosovo. Given the current paralysis of the Security Council, the intervening states or NATO must present a clear message that they are discharging their responsibilities by attempting to put an end to the violence. The burden is on them to persuade other governments that their actions are legitimate and will be tolerated among most UN members.
In conclusion, there are four arguments that might warrant legitimate armed intervention in Syria. First, that Assad continues to commit widespread, systematic and gross human rights violations against its civilians, and that there is grave concern over the plight of refugees in neighboring countries, i.e. there is an existence of a real humanitarian emergency. Second, that peace and security in the region is further threatened by the risk that the conflict will spillover into other countries such as Lebanon and Iraq. Third, that all peaceful remedies have been exhausted, diplomacy and sanctions have not worked, and the only means to prevent further human misery is military intervention. And fourth, that the General Assembly and Arab League have condemned the violations of human rights by Syrian authorities, demanding that the Syrian government put an end to the violence.
Ramin Daniel Rezai is an editor of atlantic-community.org.
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June 11, 2012
Florian Broschk, Security Advisor, Northern Afghanistan, Platinum Contributor (197)
Here, I would like to sum up that existing international law (which banned war, as we all know, for a good reason) does not justify an act of war against Syria, but we could still do it and find excuses. The widespread abuses against Syrian civilians, which dominate the Western press as the "latest fad" (a dozen dead Syrians, reported by one ewarring party, are big news, a dozen dead Afghans are not) are seen much more in the context of civil-war worldwide. While the government has a special responsibility and as I, without full knowledge of the situation, would carefully agree, a driving factor of the violence, it can hardly be blamed for everything happening in the context of a violent rebellion/counterrebellion. This seems to be much better understood in countries with a certain own experience of this kind of war than in the West. The threat to peace and security in the region does not, to say the least, appear to diminish with a foreign intervention, specifically if one or the other side were to be (as seems to be the mood in the West) decisively defeated with the other brought to power. Again, I would like to point out that a military is a crude instrument, designed to achieve negative political goals (destroying things and people) and not well-suited for positive goals (achieving political endstates other than certain things or people being destroyed). While it can deter and press actors into accptance of certain processes, we saw that this spectacularly failed twice in the region (and Lybia does not look like a success either). Thus, while "diplomacy and sanctions" are also only partly able to influence other parties, the seeming might of the military should not entice observers to believe it an all-powerful instrument to achieve political goals. It is not. And it is per definition a quite implausible instrument "to prevent human misery" (unless it is used outside its primary field, say, in a natural disaster). Condemnations of violene in a certain country, lastly, and pressure on a government (which does have a higher responsibility or at least visibility in a civil war) to bring an end to a civil war raging do NOT amount to a declaration of war or even the consent of other countries attacking the mentioned countries (...as we all know, the UN General Assembly as well as the Arab League have regularly condemned Israel for various reasons. This is no authorization of War by any other country against Israel, either - or is it?)
If we are to follow the arguments of this article, I would suggest that at the very least we then drop our moral and legal pretenses, just as our democratic forefathers so admirably did before attacking the Medians. The problem with us openly admitting that "right is only in question between equals in power while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must" (and the arguments you suggested are just thin veils in my opinion for this) is of course that we could hardly claim outrage when - say - the Russians invade Georgia ("to end suffering") or China invades Taiwan ("to avert bloodshed"). Or Sudan the South Sudan. Whatever.
Of course, us this time not opting to invade yet another Middle Eastern country would not cement war being officially outlawed nor deter other countries from using shaky excuses for interventions they are eager to undertake. However, by sparing us (to say nothing of the population involved) a potentially disastrous intervention, threatening to spread to neighbouring countries which then has to be deterred again (and all this in the middle of a certain financial crisis), we would probably also be able to uphold the position where we as the West have globally the position of the strong, doing what they can, for much longer. And thus we would also be able to deter other powers (who by wisely chosing not to intervene militarily in adventures abroad whose complexity they do not grasp preserve their power and thus gain power relatively from every Western intervention slowly but steadily) from doing what they can, as long as it contravenes our interests.
While I personally appreciate your seemingly unlimited trust in the ability of Western militaries not to mess up an intervention in the Middle East (at least not this time), I am somewhat frightened (as I perceive this more or less the general mood among educated Western Foreign-policy elites) that we seem to resemble Bart Simpson, not the hamster, in the famous piece on how to learn from failure (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-SXkNbyiPI).