The Arab League Gets Serious with Syria

Suspending the Assad regime and threatening further sanctions shows the Arab League and Turkey are backing diplomacy up with teeth.

The situation in Syria continues to deteriorate, with Monday being one of the bloodiest days of the eight-month uprising and the Arab League suspending the Assad regime from its proceedings. Shashank Joshi writes in The Telegraph that the League's "newfound gumption" has led to "a diplomatic coalition finally coming together" without the backing of the U.S. or Europe to pressure Bashar al-Assad to step down. "It is remarkable that so many stagnating police states are coming out against the murder of protesters, even if their outrage is neither sincere nor consistent," says Joshi. "They must know that they could be next, and yet they sense that standing by is not an option when 3,500 Syrians have been slaughtered." That Syrian army deserters threaten to pitch the country into a full-blown civil war has surely brought the crisis into sharper focus for the rulers of nearby countries, such as Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan. It's a lot harder to ignore the bad behaviour of one of your allies when their actions threaten to undermine your country, too.

Over in The Globe and Mail, Rami Khouri heralds the League's resurgence as "the rebirth and reassertion of Arab sovereignty and influence within the Arab world" after decades of the U.S., Russia, Israel, and others calling the shots. Writes Khouri:

The Arab League has long been a cross between the forces of fiction and futility, a largely meaningless organization that has enjoyed neither impact nor respect in the Arab arena it’s supposed to represent. The reason for this is that the Arab League is, as its official name indicates, the “League of Arab States.” Arab statehood has been simultaneously one of the great frailties and cruelties of the modern world – for the most part, offering citizens less than a minimum of those things that a successful state is supposed to provide: security, identity, representation, equal opportunity, rights or quality services. A league of dysfunctional states is a monument to immobility and irrelevance, and such has the Arab League been for many decades.

The biggest shift in the League's practices, says Khouri, has been its decision to reach out to members of the Syrian opposition. "It’s now permissible for Arab states to meddle in the internal affairs of other Arab states, when there’s a clear moral or political reason to do so that reflects the sentiments of a majority of Arab public opinion." That is a powerful precedent to set, and must make the heads of state that have escaped uprisings so far realize that their sovereignty isn't as assured as it had been just a year ago. The exception, of course, is Saudi Arabia, where the deep pockets (and oil wells) of the House of Saud remain a healthy deterrent to reform...for now.

The Guardian's typically excellent Simon Tisdall ponders the role of Turkey in the Syrian uprising, and the Arab Spring in general:

Turkey, with its majority Sunni Muslim population, furnishes a role model for the disenfranchised Sunni majority in Syria (and other Arab spring countries). Not only is Ankara encouraging revolution in Damascus, it is also living proof that Assad's politics of fear are outdated, that Syrians have before them a workable alternative paradigm, and that, after the revolution, the country's secular, Islamist and other sectarian traditions could fairly hope to co-exist peacefully, Turkish-style.

Beyond providing a model society to which protesters can aspire, Turkey has played no small role in isolating the Assad regime, especially in recent weeks. The Turkish foreign minister has gone so far as to say that the country can no longer trust Syria, just seven years after launching a free trade agreement with Syria. And that agreement, as Tisdall points out, gives Turkey significant economic leverage to influence the minds of businessmen in Syria's major cities, such as Aleppo and Damascus, that have yet to be hit as hard by the protests as Hara and Deraa. Should trade with Turkey entirely dry up – especially the electricity that it provides Syria – then one can imagine pressure to end the the crackdown will emerge from every corner of Syrian society. One can hope that economic incentives and sanctions can accomplish what words have failed to so far.