Beirut: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who assumed his job on January 1, inherits a paralysed Security Council for his predecessor Ban Ki-moon, and a world torn to pieces by the many wars of the Middle East. High on his priorities will be a basket of issues that Ban failed to address during his tenure that ended last December.
Guterres’ ‘to-do-list’ likely includes dealing with the Syrian refugee crisis, handling North Korea’s nuclear warheads, figuring out what to do with Daesh, and ending the devastating wars in Yemen, Iraq, Libya, and Syria.
On Syria he needs the guns to go silent, at any cost. The UN has repeatedly failed on that account, due to three vetoes by Russia at the Security Council since early 2012, drowning resolutions put forth by France, Britain, and Saudi Arabia. The UN passed Security Council Resolution 2254 in December 2015, and it was supposed to herald the start of political talks followed by a “transition period” that was due to start last August. The UN-mandated Syria talks, known as the Geneva Process, were launched in January 2015 and collapsed last April. The Russians insisted that the “transition period” meant transition from war to peace, and from one-party rule to a power-sharing formula with the Syrian opposition. The opposition, however, stuck by a 2012 agreement reached in Switzerland, known as Geneva I, which called for a Transitional Government Body (TGB) that replaces Bashar Al Assad.
Days after Gutteres takes power at the UN, Russian President Vladimir Putin plans to hold a new round of talks in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, attended by top diplomats and officers from Syria, Turkey, Iran, and Russia. The US has not been invited to Kazakhstan, and nor have the Saudis or Qataris. Not surprisingly, nor has the United Nations.
Moscow is not pleased with the UN’s Syria envoy Staffan De Mistura and has repeatedly accused the Swedish-Italian diplomat of taking sides with the Syrian opposition. It is lobbying Guterres to have him dismissed and replaced by a new mediator tailor-picked to suit the political ambitions of the Kremlin — as part of the “new blood” that Guterres is supposed to bring with him to the UN. The Russians and Syrian officialdom are peddling Sigrid Kaag, a Dutch diplomat, as a possible replacement to De Mistura. She currently serves as the UN Special Coordinator for Lebanon and was head of the UN mission to destroy Syria’s chemical arsenal two years ago.
Russian diplomats believe that De Mistura needs to go for a deal to pass on Syria. If he does he would be the third UN diplomat to abandon the Syria dossier without bringing the war to an end, after former secretary-general Kofi Annan who handled it from February to August 2012, and his successor, the Algerian diplomat Al Akhdar Brahimi, who was in-charge of it from the summer of 2012 until De Mistura took over in June 2014.
Guterres realises, like most international diplomats do, that Putin is now calling the shots in Syria and for any deal to pass it has to be signed off fully by the Kremlin. This means accepting his interpretation of the “transition period” and calling for early presidential elections, under UN auspices, where Al Assad gets to run for another term in office. If he agrees to that he runs the risk of infuriating states with influence in Syria, like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and two members of the Security Council, France and Britain.
Along with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Putin hammered out a nationwide ceasefire for Syria, which went into effect on December 30 and was put into an unanimous UN resolution in the very last hours of 2016. Later this month, however, Donald Trump will enter the Oval Office and he has signalled his readiness to work with Vladimir Putin on Syria and on the war on Daesh. He has been fairly consistent on Syria both during and after the US presidential elections, claiming that his enemy is Daesh and not Al Assad.
In an interview with The New York Times last November, Trump said: “I think going in [the Syria war] was a terrible, terrible mistake. We have to solve that problem because we are going to just keep fighting, fighting forever. I have a different view on Syria than everybody else.” He then added; “We have to end that craziness that’s going on in Syria.”
Many believe that this means that Trump, not unlike Gutteres, may surrender completely to Putin when it comes to Syria. The new US president, however, has been vocally outspoken when it comes to the UN, accusing the international organisation of being toothless and costing the US too much money.
Last March, he said: “We get nothing out of the United Nations. They don’t respect us; they don’t do what we want, and yet we fund them disproportionately.” He promised to cut back on funds and if he does this would spell out serious trouble for the new UN Secretary General. It would kill whatever programs he might have had on combating the refugee crisis and undermines his efforts in other costly projects like peacekeepers, humanitarian corridors, and human rights violations.
US historian David Lesch, an author of two books about Syria and a professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, disagrees, telling Gulf News: “The UN will continue to be needed for things it does well, such as election monitoring and peacekeeping forces. But in terms of peacemaking, its utility may be diminished if countries start getting in the business of shaping peace themselves, such as Russia, Turkey, and Iran in Syria.”
Any detente that emerges at the Security Council, however, between Russia and the US after Trump is sworn-in as president might make the passing of resolutions easier, but he runs the high risk of Putin and Trump taking the law into their own hands and taking unilateral action on Syria without going through the United Nations — as George W. Bush attempted before invading Iraq in 2003.
A Trump-Putin alliance might actually weaken the UN, rather than empower it.
