In his study of three UN Special Envoys for Syria who tried, between 2012 and 2018, to broker a political settlement for putting an end to the relentless assaults on defenseless civilians by a lawless regime, Nicholas Nassar has done far more than chronicle the catastrophe of Syria and record the doomed diplomatic efforts to mitigate it. If the UN Secretariat is to have any success at all in mediating between parties in armed conflict while the world’s premier threat to peace – Vladimir Putin – remains ensconced in the Security Council, it will study Nassar’s work diligently and devise ways and means to ensure that mediators are properly supervised, thoroughly supported, and held accurately accountable for their actions.
As these words are written, more than twelve years have passed since Syrians in the City of Daraa rose peacefully to protest police brutality inflicted on teenagers. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s decision to eschew the peaceful resolution of popular grievances, opting instead for armed lethality against defenseless demonstrators, led ultimately to the destruction of a country whose citizens once had great hopes in the supposed good intentions of their young president. That leader – no longer young and no longer the repository of hope – retains the title of president. He has, however, acquired the additional title of premier war criminal of the twenty-first century, a distinction Vladimir Putin of Russia now seeks to wrest from his Syrian counterpart.
Indeed, what has happened in Syria since mid-March 2011 has not stayed there. For many observers, including fifty-one courageous State Department officers who, in 2016, put in writing their objections to official American passivity, the violence and terror visited upon Syrian civilians by their own government cried out for protective military steps, albeit well short of invasion and occupation.
Yet even those in the West who still endorse the Obama administration’s failure to defend the Syrian population from mass homicidal state terror must acknowledge that Russia’s Putin drew certain conclusions from the mismatch between official American rhetoric colorfully condemning the Assad regime’s mass murder and the decision of the American president to erase his own “red line” warning with respect to chemical weapons. Inaction in Syria in 2013 and beyond proved every bit as reckless as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, an event that seemed decisively to influence President Barack Obama’s passivity in the face of mass murder and a dangerously defiant and destabilizing challenge to the credibility of the United States.
Today, thanks in large part to what has happened in Syria, the UN faces its greatest crisis since its founding in 1945. The direct descendant of the Concert of Europe and the League of Nations, an organization created to put collective security in the service of international peace, the UN now finds its key component – the Security Council – occupied and neutralized by the political descendant of Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolph Hitler, a person now inflicting mass terror and destruction on a UN member state he wishes to subjugate. One need not define Syria as the sole source of Vladimir Putin’s confidence that the Western response to his invasion of Ukraine would be rhetoric rich and action free. Indeed, it was not the sole source of Putin’s understandable misperception. But Syria was an important factor in Putin’s thinking when he calculated that taking Ukraine would be a military cakewalk.
It is the dilemma faced by the UN today with the world’s premier threat to peace inside the Security Council – with his hands on the steering wheel – that makes the work of Nicholas Nassar so timely. Yes, scholars, statesmen, and stateswomen who have examined the abomination that is Syria will find much in Nassar’s work that is new and illuminating about the conflict during the years 2012 to 2018, when three UN Special Envoy mediators (Kofi Annan, Lakhdar Brahimi, and Staffan de Mistura) tried to mitigate mass murder and take a dying country toward a political cure. Yes, those with a broader interest in diplomacy and mediation will find much in this book that is analytically profound and insightful. But for those scholars, statesmen, and stateswomen focused on the UN as a tool for collective security and peacekeeping, Nassar’s riveting accounts and analyses of the remarkable personal efforts of three extraordinarily talented (if imperfect) mediators provide a brilliant preview of where the UN now finds itself with a war criminal seated in the cockpit.
Indeed, Nassar makes clear at the outset his central purpose: “to expose the agency of mediators in forming critical policies and initiatives. In other words, to not let the challenges of mediation take away from the responsibility of mediators.” Although Nassar’s focus on the agency of mediators has applicability far transcending Syria (and ideally would be the subject of future work by the author), the circumstances underlying the UN’s efforts to mitigate the Syrian catastrophe left the three mediators with unlimited running room to form their own agendas and pursue their own objectives. According to Nassar, on only one occasion did the UN Secretary-General direct a mediator (Staffan de Mistura) to change course. And even in that instance, the specifics of the mandated shift were left to the mediator’s discretion.
Ideally, mediators emerge from nation-states or institutions that contesting parties are loath to offend, much less alienate. Ideally, they represent and convey positions consistent with the policies and objectives of their dispatching authorities. Ideally, they command the respect of parties seeking their help to resolve points of dispute. Indeed, for mediation to happen, conflicting parties customarily either request it from a third party or accept it if offered. None of these circumstances was present during the critical time frame examined by Nicholas Nassar.
Absent Security Council consensus on implementing a political transition in Syria – consensus seemingly but fleetingly achieved by Kofi Annan at Geneva I in June 2012 – there was nothing about the UN institutionally that impressed any party to the Syrian conflict, especially the Assad regime. Even Assad’s enemies in the disjointed Syrian Opposition believed that the UN as an organization, separate from Security Council consensus, meant nothing.
As for UN policies and objectives supposedly defining and guiding the mediator’s mission, there were none beyond the often-disputed words contained in the Geneva I Final Communiqué and Security Council Resolution 2254. Indeed, once Vladimir Putin decided that keeping Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian presidency was a key talking point in his own domestic political argument that he (Putin) had returned Russia to great power status, any Security Council consensus on implementing political transition became impossible. Keeping Assad in power, regardless of the horrific costs of doing so was, for Putin, a domestic political survival imperative.
Whatever grudging personal respect Bashar al-Assad may have had for Annan, Brahimi, or de Mistura, he had no interest at all in anyone mediating a political compromise, one that might remove him from the presidency or oblige him to share power. Assad did not want UN mediation, full stop. He accommodated it (and still does) in deference to Moscow’s tactical diplomatic priorities and used it to buy time for his Russian and Iranian allies to help him make military advances.
Indeed, I recall being told by someone very much in a position to know that, soon after the signing of the Geneva I Final Communiqué, Assad upbraided some visiting senior Russian officials, accusing them of having paved the way for his removal from power. Not only had the Communiqué called for “political transition” from the Assad regime to a “transitional governing body,” but it specified that this interim, national unity governance arrangement would be peopled through negotiations between the Syrian government and the Opposition based on “mutual consent.” The Syrian government, for example, could exercise a veto preventing the head of the Syrian National Council from serving in the transitional governing body. The Opposition, on the other hand, could veto any ongoing governance role for Bashar al-Assad. Is it any wonder that Assad felt betrayed?
It would not take long, however, for Moscow to back away from what had been agreed in Geneva. Kofi Annan would resign and be replaced by Lakhdar Brahimi who, on his own initiative, would state that Assad could be Syria’s kingmaker but not the king, a formulation that did not increase official appetites in Damascus, Moscow, or Tehran for the implementation of the political transition. Undeterred, though undermined by the red line crisis and the regime’s escalating violence, Brahimi – notwithstanding his failure to secure US support for inviting Iran – brought the Syrian government and Opposition together for Geneva II, where he relentlessly highlighted any positive language he could mine from the bellicose statements of hostile delegations. In the end, however, Brahimi recognized that he was getting nowhere with the parties while being no more than humored by the key Security Council permanent members. He too resigned and was succeeded by Staffan de Mistura.
De Mistura recognized immediately that he, like his predecessors, was essentially on his own. There was no Security Council consensus to implement and precious little guidance from the UN Secretariat. Rather than continuing the Annan–Brahimi policy focus on the Syrian political transition, de Mistura launched a series of “ground-up” initiatives aimed at mitigating a growing humanitarian abomination and increasing communications between the government and Opposition at levels far below high officialdom. These initiatives provided Nicholas Nassar much grist to be milled in terms of his analysis of how important the agency of the mediator was in the Syrian context and helped him achieve a central purpose underlying the study: “to clarify the responsibility behind decisions made by mediators in such sensitive situations.”
Nassar’s assessment of de Mistura’s approach to his mediation duties is at times very critical but invariably professional and well sourced, sometimes augmented with the testimony of members of the Special Envoy’s staff. Indeed, de Mistura’s vigorous defense of his various initiatives with respect to Aleppo, the role of women in peacemaking, civil society, seeing the Islamic State (ISIS) as a potential unifying factor, and constitutional discussions are all set forth, as is his reasoning for participating in the Russian-led Astana Process.
Yet one comes away from Nassar’s analysis of de Mistura’s stewardship with the feeling that this Special Envoy, even more than his two predecessors similarly set adrift by a rudderless UN, was engaged in a form of foreign policy entrepreneurialism far transcending conventional mediation. The view here is that de Mistura recognized from the outset that the combination of Russian obduracy and American passivity made ongoing pursuit of Syrian political transition futile; that his tenure as Special Envoy would be measured in weeks, or at best a few months, had he simply picked up where Lakhdar Brahimi had left off. Determined to make an impact and mitigate the catastrophe engulfing Syria he became creative, albeit in ways Nicholas Nassar believes worsened the situation.
Nassar’s central point, however, does not rest on his broad criticism of de Mistura or his more discretely targeted critiques of Annan and Brahimi. To the extent there was any sustained effort to bring about political accommodation and peace in Syria, it was undertaken by UN Special Envoys whose personal judgments and preferences – rather than the Security Council or the UN Secretariat – set agendas and pursued objectives they themselves as individual actors defined. Whereas Annan and Brahimi remained focused on Syrian political transition and insistent on Security Council (meaning Russian–American) consensus, de Mistura all but abandoned the former and tried hard to put a positive spin on the latter. What all three had in common was something not normally associated with diplomatic mediation: They were essentially on their own and left to their own devices.
If senior bureaucrats in the UN system internalize the acutely superb analysis of Nicholas Nassar, they might be motivated to take steps aimed at introducing elements of oversight, guidance, and accountability into the work of UN mediators. One may salute the high intelligence and diligent work habits of each of the Special Envoys examined in this work and still resist the notion that they ought to be essentially free agents, making things up as they go along.
To the extent, therefore, that the UN Secretariat and member states will continue to see value in naming Special Envoys to mediate between disputatious parties, Syria is worth careful study, because the Security Council dysfunction that plagued the mediators in Syria may be indicative of whatever future remains for the UN. The enemy is, after all, no longer at the gates, simply blocking progress in Syria; now he is inside the walls, all but shredding the organization’s Charter.
Nicholas Nassar has presented a compelling case for what needs to be done if the UN’s mediation services are to be relevant and effective, particularly if the Security Council is to be permanently neutralized. It may be that launching seasoned diplomats into the maelstrom and hoping they can, on their own, sort things out is the limit of what the Secretariat can do under such dire circumstances. The danger, however, is that diplomatic “fire and forget” will come to be seen as the empty and useless gesture of an organization from which, fairly or not, much more is expected than merely going through the motions of preserving and promoting peace.
