Syria: Key to the future may be found in its past

Refugees from Syria fear violence and its aftermath. They need stability, and that calls for bold action from the UN

If the people fleeing Syria are to be persuaded to return, it must be made safe and inhabitable (Reuters)

The Commons decision to endorse the bombing of Syria was a welcome one. While all agree that bombing alone will not defeat Islamic State (IS), control of the air will do much to inhibit its movement and reduce much of the economic activity that funds its operations.

But the vote in the Commons was as important for its diplomatic and political impact as for its military effect. Failure to arrive at this position would have hugely damaged Britain’s standing in the world and our relationship with our neighbours in Europe. Rightly or wrongly, symbols do matter in diplomacy, and Britain needs to show it is doing its bit.

But alongside the military issue is the humanitarian one, which in the media, at least, has taken a back seat in recent weeks. Millions of people have left Syria, and countless more are likely to do so. The UN cannot handle the quantities that currently confront them, and winter has arrived. The situation is simply unsustainable. A tide of humanity is suffering horribly. At the very least, if Europe’s politicians want Syria’s population to stay in Syria, they badly need a political process that will help that to happen.

The issue that Wednesday’s debate came back to again and again was the “end state” for this conflict. In short, what is the plan? To have a glimpse of the future, it is necessary to look at the past. Syria, until the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, was a part of the Ottoman Empire, and from 1923 to 1945 was a League of Nations mandate territory. Like Iraq, Syria has had problems, since becoming a nation state, in demonstrating any real democratic legitimacy. It does not have the cohesion of a modern nation state, with its borders arbitrarily drawn by the great powers at the end of the First World War. With unnatural borders, no natural sense of nation and voting on religious or ethnic lines, the inevitable result has been dictatorship.

Remove the “strong man” and chaos is a certainty. Yet this has been our policy, and it is the pursuit of democracy in this context that makes any settlement so difficult. In thinking about removing one evil – dictatorship – we are finding it difficult to find a way forward.

Given the complexity of the Syrian problem, a political settlement looks very distant. Without a vision of what Syria might look like at the end of the war we are unlikely to get far. Perhaps the best is the enemy of the good, and a breathing space, which almost everyone can agree is the only option. This breathing space might be to once again return to a UN mandate territory. This has the advantage that, as an interim measure, it is hard to disagree with. We can argue about what this mandate might be, whether it should apply to the whole of Syria and for how long. It needs a huge amount of engineering and talking, but at least the talking will have started.

For the past 20 years our military “end states” have described elections and a democracy under the rule of law – what soldiers call “a Surrey in Helmand”. Being unrealistic does no one any favours. We need peace, the return to normal life and then help put together a structure that can make democracy really work, not just set off the next round of violence. The idea of a mandate territory can do this, but it will almost certainly take a UN force to take the ground finally.

Just because the last two major interventions were unwise does not make this one foolish. The fact that Russia is also playing its part in the attempt to defeat IS must give us hope that if a sensible plan can be presented to the UN, there is a decent chance of it being approved. IS is inimical to all nations, Muslim or not, and Wednesday’s vote was just the first step in the UK helping to end the threat to those in Syria and the rest of the world.

Two recent UN interventions were hampered by the absence of a proper post-conflict recovery plan. More recently in Afghanistan, priority was given to long-term aims rather than to short-term needs and to those things likely to be resisted by social conservatism. What matters in the post-conflict weeks and months are the practical and the immediate, those things that within 100 days make life hugely better: electrical power, fuel, potable water, food, shelter.

This is an expensive business that in previous conflicts has been allocated 1 per cent of the military spend. This time, winning the peace has to be as important as winning the war. We are fortunate to have the Department for International Development’s substantial budget to support the process, something that, after the 1995 Dayton Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Britain did best.

The mass migration we have witnessed in recent months is only in part the result of violence; much is despair for the future. Firm, clear foreign policy reduces the uncertainty that is the major driver of mass migration. Swift international consensus on Syria becoming a UN mandate territory might not be the whole solution, but it is better than nothing. It could, however, be the next step to ending the war and providing time to calculate how democracy could work in this unfortunate country. It’s a long way from perfect, but wouldn’t it be a start? At the moment, I see no better plan.

Dr Gilbert Greenall is former adviser to the British government on humanitarian relief, with more than 35 years’ experience in Iraq, Libya, Somalia, East Timor, Afghanistan, Lebanon and the Balkans