Have we reached Syria’s Srebrenica Moment?

…are there sufficient grounds for foreign intervention on the part of the Free Syrian Army, as there were (or were there?) in Libya?

Last week news emerged of a fresh atrocity in Syria, the new focus of the Arab Spring that continues to teeter on the brink of civil war. More than a hundred people, most of them women and children, were summarily executed at close range in several villages in the Houla region north of the city Homs, the scene of much of the violence of the revolution. This week, a similar attack in the city of Hama was reported. Responsibility for both of these attacks has been attributed to militias known as Shabiha who are loyal to the Assad regime, according to the U.N. At the time of writing, the Syrian government is reported to having prevented the U.N. from entering a village called Qubair, where another massacre (as yet unconfirmed) is reported to have happened.

Following the attacks in Houla Syrian ambassadors were ejected from the US and several other European countries, and there have been murmurs of banning the Syrian delegation from the forthcoming Olympics. The incident has been compared to the 1995 massacre of Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica by Serbian soldiers. This has also prompted the question once again: are there sufficient grounds for foreign intervention on the part of the Free Syrian Army, as there were (or were there?) in Libya?

In Libya, Colonel Gaddafi was more explicit in his venom for his opponents, as his out-and-out threats against the rebels in Benghazi and Misrata were taken to be just cause for equipping and advising the rebels and enforcing a no-fly zone through NATO airstrikes. Bashar al-Assad has maintained a business-like air of concern and willingness to cooperate with ex-U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, who seems more and more desperate to broker his peace plan. The latest episode of Channel 4’s Dispatches also points to his connections through his British-born wife, Asma, and his training as an ophthalmologist in the UK, that conferred and reinforced his public persona as a conciliator, and, what the international community values most in petty dictators, a moderniser.

So, Bashar al-Assad seems saner and savvier and, supposedly, more willing to try to find a compromise. The influence of the characterisation of each individual Arab Spring dictator upon the international reaction is an interesting thing to consider. Gaddaffi was  the most eccentric, while the others – Mubarak, Ben Ali, Saleh, al-Assad – were and are variations on be-suited elder statesmen or scions of such elders, and hence it is perhaps easier for the international community to persuade themselves that they would listen to reason. Indeed, Gaddafi was one of the few Arab leaders who did not offer concessions to their people such as new constitutions, growth plans, and what amount to bribes to quell dissent. Bashar al-Assad also has rather more geopolitical connections than had the isolated Gaddafi, as president of the only Arab state that maintains a close alliance with Iran. Negotiations with that country over its stated plans to develop domestic nuclear energy, and its presumed intentions to build nuclear weapons and launch them at everyone and their mother, are ongoing and an attack on what is Iran’s closest ally could jeopardise this process.

Commentators note the dim possibility of getting a new U.N. resolution authorising action in Syria as there was in Libya. The main problem is Russia and China stonewalling in the U.N. Security Council; both made the appropriate noises after the massacre in Houla, but are well-known to be more equivocal on human rights abuses than the other permanent members of the council, and both abstained from the vote on Resolution 1973 for Libya. Moreover, Russia still maintains a Soviet-era navy base at Tartus, Syria’s second largest port city, and is the largest supplier of weapons to the country. Another route is the possibility of an indictment for al-Assad in the International Criminal Court, something with which Gaddafi could count among his accolades, but that does not appear to be forthcoming.

One of the contrasts posed between the cases of the two countries, that might have factored into the diplomatic decision-making, has been their reserves of oil. As the civil war sparked in Libya, oil prices climbed in Europe as Libyan wells and refineries shut down. Prices eased off – though not by much – as oil production in Libya began to approach something resembling normality again. The situation in Syria has a negligible impact on oil production and oil prices, so whether or not oil was a factor for intervention in Libya, it will not be so in Syria.

It is unlikely that anyone went into Libya thinking that the National Transitional Council would be able to restore stability immediately upon the defeat of Gaddaffi’s forces. However, as The Economist reported and Channel 4’s Unreported World showed, post-revolutionary Libya is a place riven by tribalism, drawn along ethnic and family lines as well as between rival militias who fought in the revolution. Overspill from the conflict has already been implicated in the Malian coup earlier this year, and violence continues away from the Mediterranean coast, in the oil-fields of the Sahara and populated, though sparsely, by the Toubou and Tuareg peoples, who have been battling for control with Libyan Arabs for control of the few towns there. It is not impossible that the conflict could spread to already war-weary neighbours, such as Sudan and Chad. Could the same situation arise with a successful revolution or transition of power in Syria? There are similar splits there along ethnic and sectarian lines; such divides have shown themselves to be horribly apparent in many Arab Spring countries, not just Libya. It may be that such discord can only be mitigated, and not avoided completely, an uncomfortable idea that tarnishes the hope engendered by Arab Spring revolutions.

The international community has on many occasions prioritised stability over concern for the rights of oppressed peoples. Yet the latter cause has been invoked by misguidance and self-interest; witness the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as those cases with better (or perhaps just better disguised) motives – such a debate continues over foreign intervention in Libya. Inevitably, it seems that violence must always be partner to revolution; the role of outsiders is a tricky one, to defuse such violence without compromising the desire for liberty and democracy that, without exception, ignited the Arab Spring. Whether the atrocities at Houla, Hama, and possibly more in Qubair, in addition to all the other abuses perpetrated in Syria thus far, will provide an impetus for meaningful change of Syria’s government remains to be seen.