Save Syrians from chemical horror

The Arab League is meeting today (Sunday) to discuss the latest outrages committed by the Syrian regime against its defenseless civilians.
Evidence has been mounting, pointing to the Syrian regime’s repeated use of chemical weapons against the civilian population. Time and again, it has deployed outlawed gas as a weapon to reverse gains made by the opposition and terrorize the civilian population in areas under its control.
By far, the largest such attack took place on Aug. 21, 2013, in Ghouta, a district just 10 kilometers from Damascus.
Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain told the House of Commons on Thursday (Aug. 29) that the regime had used chemical weapons at least 14 times during the conflict.
Apparently, failure by the international community in the past to punish the regime for using them has encouraged it to repeat the offense.
US Secretary of State John Kerry revealed on Friday that the chemical attack killed over 1,400 civilians, including over 400 children and women.
The United States declassified an unusual amount of sensitive information that showed that the attack was carried out by government forces. The regime itself indirectly admitted its culpability at the conclusion of the UN fact-finding mission on Saturday. Expecting that the team had found incriminating evidence in Ghouta, an area not under its control, the regime said that it would not accept any “partial” investigation that focused only on Ghouta. It said it wanted the investigation to be extended to other areas under its own control, where it claimed that the opposition carried out chemical attacks.
Syria is one of only five countries that have not signed the Chemical Weapons Convention and it has not renounced its use. In fact, since the conflict started thirty months ago, it has repeatedly resorted to chemical attacks, either to dislodge stubborn resistance by its opponent and lower their morale, or to terrify civilians into fleeing. Once the civilian population had fled, the government used its heavy weapons to completely destroy areas where the opposition was holed up.
Government forces appeared to have resorted to the same tactic in Ghouta. As the opposition made progress in Ghouta, just ten kilometers from the nerve center of the regime, it unleashed its chemical weapons to stop that progress.
The United Nations now estimates that over (100,000) civilians have been killed since the start of the conflict in March 2011. UN fact-finding committees have made it clear that crimes against humanity and other grave breaches of international law have been committed in Syria, to the point that by now there is a clear international consensus about the nature and extent of those crimes.
In fact, gradually the Syrian regime is acting as a sectarian militia supported by like-minded Hezbollah and Iranian forces, and unbound by rules of war or civilized behavior.
With such appalling record of indiscriminate killing of civilians, and with the regime’s repeated deployment of chemical weapons, it has become incomprehensible why the international community has yet to move to protect Syrians from annihilation.
It became clear this past weekend, during discussions around the world, that there are still those who believe that Syrian civilians should be left to their own fate, even if they were being exterminated like insects by their own government. Some are willing to intervene, but only if the Security Council sanctioned it, but if the UNSC cannot agree because of the Russian veto, then the world should stay away while civilians are being attacked with disproportionate firepower, including with chemical weapons.
But is it really true that there is nothing else that can be done? Are we really that paralyzed? Or could the international community act, legitimately and legally, to protect civilians in Syria, when the regime appears to be the main culprit in killing them, as the piling evidence shows? What can be done in the face of the government’s responsibility for those crimes and the failure of the UN system to provide quick and effective remedies?
The world has faced a similar situation in Kosovo in 1998-1999. Then, as now, Russia shielded its Serbian allies and blocked the UN Security Council’s action to protect Kosovo civilians from annihilation by Serbia’s killing machine. Then, as now, there was a gross mismatch between the Serbian powerful army and the feeble Kosovo resistance. However, a group of countries went outside the UN Security Council and were able to stop the massacres.
Could the Kosovo example (of international cooperation outside the UN) be repeated? It should, because since Kosovo, the legal basis for humanitarian intervention has been strengthened considerably. The principle of “Responsibility to Protect” has evolved over the past several years and has been invoked in many conflicts, to very good results.
The principle was given international stamp of approval in 2005, when the United Nations resolved that all countries had a shared responsibility to prevent and halt genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Between 2005 and 2010 the principle was invoked in only three UN resolutions or statements. However, since then it has gained wider acceptance. In 2011, for example, it was invoked in at least six resolutions, including four Security Council resolutions on Libya, South Sudan and Yemen. In the same year, action to protect civilians in the Ivory Coast was based on this principle.
The principle is based on the idea that state sovereignty is not absolute, but conditioned by other norms and principles. International law holds certain crimes to be an affront to the international legal and moral systems. They are called “Mass Atrocity Crimes” and include genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. There is a shared international responsibility to protect civilian populations against those crimes. The UN, but not the Security Council, has already determined that the Syrian regime has committed crimes against humanity.
The Ghouta massacre fits perfectly the definition of a “Mass Atrocity Crime,” and should trigger international and regional action under the principle of “responsibility to protect” to stop such crimes from recurring. The fact that the massacre was carried out with chemical weapons, in clear contravention of international law, should make it more imperative to act immediately. UN Security Council consent is useful, but is not necessary.