Operation Ostrava: Month 2, Week 4, Day 1.

With the annual Arab League Heads of Government/State Summit and the second meeting of the Syrian Contact Group it has been a busy week of diplomatic activity on Syria.

It began on Tuesday (27/3/12) with the Syrian government announcing that it agrees in principle with Kofi Annan's six point plant (S/PRST/2012/6). In the west this has widely been reported as the Syrian government agreeing to implement the plan. This is incorrect because the Syrian government has only accepted the broad aims of the plan and want to do more work to define the exact terms such as the use of "empowered interlocutor" in the first point before agreeing to implement the plan. Even with this important but subtle diplomatic distinction I think it is very risky for the Syrian government to even broadly agree to the plan. In it's current form the plan is so biased against the Syrian government they could no more implement it then the Czechoslovakians could implement the Nazi's Carlsbad Decrees. In fact I'm actually a bit surprised that given their charter the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) feels it's able to endorse the plan. Therefore rather then bringing peace and ending the killing the true intention of the plan is that Syria will fail to implement it and that failure will be used as a justification for further hostile action against Syria. The US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wasted no time in pursuing this approach when on Sunday (1/4/12) she accused Bashar al-Assad of being a liar for failing to implement a plan that he'd never agreed to implement.

On Thursday (29/3/120 the annual Heads of Government/State Arab League Summit took place in Baghdad. Although this was a routine annual general meeting rather then a meeting specifically on Syria the summit was obviously dominated by the issue. This was the first such meeting to be held in Iraq since the nation was suspended from the body in 1990 following Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. As the new Iraqi government is predominately Shia Muslim the meeting was effectively boycotted by the predominately Sunni Muslim six nations of the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC). As a result the meeting was able to give a clearer indication of what the other 15 members of the 21 member (Syria are suspended) League think about the situation in Syria. They expressed concern about the loss of civilian life and agreed in principle to the Annan plan. However they specifically opposed further foreign military intervention and warned against supplying the insurgents with weapons.

Britain was clearly expecting a different outcome from the Arab League meeting because on the same day they announced that they will be giving USD800,000 to the insurgents bringing their total declared contribution to USD1.4million. This money is to be spent of so-called "non-lethal equipment" such as body armour, battlefield radios and propaganda training. It has also since emerged that the United States will be giving the insurgents USD12million bringing their total declared contribution to USD25million. Officially this money is to be spent on humanitarian assistance however it is clear from the tone of the US announcement that a large proportion of this money is to be spent on re-tasking US military satellites to identify Syrian army positions and then pass that information directly to the insurgents. This raises an important question because under both British and US law if you assist in a crime you at least become an accessory to that crime if not guilty of it yourself. The classic example would be if I lent my car to a friend who I knew was going to murder his wife I would expect to be prosecuted for that murder even though I didn't supply the gun or was present at the killing. So by their own rules because they've admitted that they are providing material support to the insurgency the UNSC should now be preparing a raft of sanctions against Britain and the US for their wilfull blindness. Not on the satellite issue though because I'm sure the US are desperate to engage China in a discussions about satellites especially North Korean ones.

On Sunday (1/4/12) the Syria Contact Group or the "Friends of the Syrian People" group as it's more comically known held it's second meeting in Turkey. Although the meeting did produce an official communique this was only provided to invited members of the media whose invitation appears to have been conditional on them not publishing the document in full. This strange state of affairs seems to be a consequence of a conflict between the US' pretence that they are championing a democratic cause which requires a high degree of openness and public scrutiny and the GCC nation's belief that they are engaged in a war against Syria which requires utter secrecy. It also means that I have not read the document. I gather though that it's main thrust is that the Contact Group now views the Syrian National Council (SNC) as the "leading interlocutor of the Syrian opposition. This is obviously an attempt to change the meaning of the first point in Annan's six point plan because if you accept the Contact Group's definition if it's agrees to implement the plan the Assad government agrees to stand down and appoint the SNC as the Syrian government with no hint of a democratic process and little input from the Syrian people.

The big news from the Contact Group meeting though was not in the communique and it is that Saudi Arabia and Qatar are now to pay the Syrian insurgents a salary. This makes the insurgents an irregular division of the Saudi Arabian army and as such I will now be referring to them as the Saudi Irregular Army (SIA). It also means that Saudi Arabia is now officially at war with Syria. You would expect the UNSC to be summoning them to an emergency session to justify their actions.


Edited at around 22:20 on 2/4/12 to add: While I was writing the above Kofi Annan informed the UNSC that the Syrian government has agreed to implement point 2 of S/PRST/2012/6 and only point 2 which relates to a ceasefire by April 10th 2012 (10/4/12). They have though added the caveat that SIA must also ceasefire within 48 hours (12/4/12). This decision came overnight and is a response to calls from the Contact Group which warned the Syrian government that the six point plan was a time limited offer.

Also while I was writing the above at around 17:50GMT/10:50 local a Korean man went on a shooting spree at a privately run Korean Christian medical school in California USA killing at least five. Obviously this is still an ongoing situation but with Obama's health care reforms being severely tested over an obligation it places on religious employers and universities to provide free contraception as part of their health insurance plans there isn't an element of this story that doesn't give you a headache. However as the South Korean government probably shares passport holders amongst the shooter and victims it is impossible for them to ignore. Coming on the start of the second day of the ASEAN conference in Cambodia this seems to be a very unusual way for the Yanks to achieve their stated objective of protecting south-east Asia from an emerging China. So it seems Obama still hasn't cleaned house after the Giffords incident.