Algerian diplomat tipped as UN envoy to #Syria

Lakhdar Brahimi has served as a UN special envoy in Iraq after the US invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein [Reuters]

10/08/2012

Diplomats have said  Lakhdar Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign affairs minister, is a strong candidate to replace Kofi Annan as the United Nations’ peace envoy to Syria.

Brahimi’s possible appointment could be announced as early as next week, but the diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said late on Thursday that there could be last-minute changes if a key government has concerns about the choice.

The former Algerian foreign affairs minister has a long history as a diplomatic troubleshooter, and will if appointed face tough challenges in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad is using his security forces to try to crush a 17-month-old uprising.

Brahimi, 78, has served as a UN special envoy in a series of challenging circumstances, including in Iraq after the US invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, and in Afghanistan both before and after the end of Taliban rule. He was posted in South Africa as it emerged from the apartheid era.



Syria, however, may present an unusually vexing assignment, in part because international action to try to end the violence has been stymied by the disagreements between the five veto-holding permanent members of the UN Security Council.

While the security council united in April to approve the deployment of 300 monitors to Syria to observe a failed ceasefire as part of Annan’s peace plan, Russia and China vetoed three other resolutions that criticized Syria and threatened sanctions against Damascus.

‘Finger-pointing’ 

Annan, a former UN secretary-general and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said last week he would step down as the special envoy because he was unable to do his job with the UN Security Council hopelessly deadlocked over Syria.

In announcing his resignation, Annan explicitly blamed “finger-pointing and name-calling” at the Security Council for his decision to quit, but suggested his successor may have better luck.

In accepting Annan’s resignation, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon thanked him for having taken on “this most difficult and potentially thankless of assignments”.

A spokesman for Ban, who is expected to formally name Annan’s successor, was not immediately available for comment.

Source: aljazeera.com

What #Syria Looks Like From Tehran

Iran's Saeed Jalili (left) met President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus on Tuesday.

Sana/Handout/European Pressphoto Agency

Iran’s Saeed Jalili (left) met President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus on Tuesday.


08/08/2012

LONDON — Before rushing to judgment on Iran’s latest expression of solidarity with the embattled regime in Syria, it is worth considering how the conflict looks from Tehran.

In the 33-year history of Iran’s Islamic Republic, Syria is the only state to have consistently stood by it while hostile neighbors and outside powers conspired to bring about its downfall.

Small wonder then that Saeed Jalili, Iran’s visiting head of national security, assured President Bashar al-Assad on Tuesday, “Iran will not tolerate, in any form, the breaking of the axis of the resistance, of which Syria is an intrinsic part.”

Neither is it surprising that Tehran should view the internal conflict in Syria as part of a wider international war — with Iran as the ultimate target.

To understand the roots of Iranian paranoia, just look at the map. Iran has been steadily encircled by a network of U.S. military bases in the decades since the Iranian revolution of 1979.

Its situation was exacerbated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, a development that meant Iran’s leaders could no longer play one superpower against the other and that opened the former Soviet republics across Iran’s northern border to Western influence.

The departure of U.S. forces from Iraq has given Tehran a strategic benefit on its western frontier but that would be outweighed by the emergence of a potentially hostile regime in Damascus.

Iran’s opponents would argue that it has only itself to blame for its present isolation. Decades of hostile rhetoric towards the West and towards Israel have fostered an equally hostile response.

If Iran now faces a possible military assault to destroy its alleged nuclear weapons installations, it is because it has persistently defied international demands to come clean on its nuclear program.

However, Iranian leaders might consider that, in a region where two local powers — Israel and Pakistan — have the bomb, possession of the ultimate weapon is the best way to stay safe.

There have been opportunities over the years to break the cycle of hostility between Iran and the West, but these have invariably foundered, to the benefit of hardliners in Tehran.

Kofi Annan, the outgoing international peace envoy, wanted to bring Iran into discussions on Syria and make it part of the solution, given its historic ties with the regime. The idea was firmly slapped down by the Western powers.

A decade ago in Afghanistan, Iran cooperated with the U.S. in its post-9/11 assault on the Taliban regime. (Tehran had identified the threat posed by the Taliban much earlier than the West). But Washington took the opportunity for rapprochement no further.

Iran could be a natural ally in the war against Sunni fundamentalists such as those of Al Qaeda, who regard the Iranian Shia as heretics. But the West’s key allies in the region are Sunni states that are deeply suspicious of the Shia.

That innate suspicion has been further fueled by Iran’s attempts to portray itself as spiritual godfather of an “Islamic” Arab Spring (after the Tehran regime quashed its own domestic revolt in 2009).

The impact of regime change in the Arab World has in fact been largely negative from Tehran’s perspective. The Muslim Brotherhood leadership in Egypt is closer to Saudi Arabia than it is to Iran. If the Alawite-dominated regime in Damascus were to fall, it would mean the loss of a non-Sunni ally.

So, how far will Iran go towards protecting its long-term partner? It will not be happy if Mr. Assad goes. But beyond cash and supplies and the loan of military advisers, there is not much Tehran can do to determine the outcome.

Its best hope might be the emergence of a post-Assad regime that is not openly hostile to its interests, reserving the option of trying to destabilize a successor regime that was.

Indeed, Mr. Jalili’s assurances to Mr. Assad were ambivalent.

The only solution to the turmoil in Syria is democracy and respect for the choice of the people, he said.

In a sideswipe at Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which are widely reported to be arming the rebels, he said, “How can those who have never held an election in their country be advocates of democracy?”

His conclusion, which could have been penned by the White House or the United Nations, was: “We believe that a new path should be followed, through which the crisis can be resolved based on national and domestic dialogue.”

Support of a kind, but scarcely a declaration that Tehran is prepared to fight for Mr. Assad down to the last Iranian.

Source: The New York Times

Assad Aide Joins Ivy League #Syria

September marks five years since Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was hosted by Columbia University, which went out of its way to offer the notorious leader a prestigious American platform. This September, as students return to the Morningside Heights campus, among them will be a 22-year-old woman linked closely to the atrocities of another infamous world leader: Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad. Now professors, students, donors, and activists are debating again whether academic freedom has limits — and where the latest case of Sheherazad Jaafari falls.

Emails leaked last month revealed that Barbara Walters had helped Jaafari, Assad’s former aide and daughter of Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations, gain admittance into Columbia’s graduate School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), a kind of finishing school for future diplomats. But the controversy at Columbia isn’t about what strings Jaafari pulled. It’s about the fact that she worked closely with the Syrian president for over a year to help him reach out to and spin foreign press as his regime reportedly murdered over 15,000 of its own people and tortured countless others.

News of Jaafari’s admittance shocked various Syrian expatriates, many of whom have been working to raise awareness of Assad’s atrocities in the United States. A petition calling for “Columbia University to adhere to general ethical principles and rescind admission to Jaafari,” has been signed by over 1,900 people. The Syrian Expatriates Organization, a group made up mostly of academics and engineers, released a statement demanding that Columbia revoke Jaafari’s admittance right after news of her acceptance broke. “We feel like accepting an adviser to Assad into a prestigious American university is like accepting a kind of partner to a killer,” Sawsan Jabri, a spokesperson for the expatriate organization, told me. (Columbia hasn’t responded to the organization, according to Jabri.)

SIPA’s lone Syrian member of the class of 2012, Haya Dwiedary, who declined comment to me, told the Daily Beast that she was “disappointed” that the school admitted Assad’s aide. “I’ve been familiar with the kind of work she does for the government and the fact that she’s a supporter of the regime to this moment. And this is a regime that has killed more than 15,000 civilians.”

But Columbia professors are less quick to judge. While stressing that he isn’t privy to the specifics of this “difficult question,” Elazar Barkan, the director of Columbia’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, said he finds the situation troubling. “There are many different people that are admitted to SIPA, and politics is not a component of the process, but having said that, clearly the level of atrocities in Syria this year goes beyond the politics,” Barkan told me. He also said he finds it unlikely that Jaafari would have been admitted if the SIPA admissions office knew of her extensive work within the regime.

Jaafari seems to have participated directly in Assad’s attempt to cover up his regime’s atrocities. Emails obtained by a Syrian opposition group reveal that Jaafari coached Assad for a widely broadcasted interview with Barbara Walters:

It is hugely important and worth mentioning that “mistakes” have been done in the beginning of the crises because we did not have a well-organised “police force.” American psyche can be easily manipulated when they hear that there are “mistakes” done and now we are “fixing it.”

That email was sent in November of 2011. Jaafari continued to work for Assad until at least January of this year.

Other professors I spoke to said they would have admitted the young woman even with knowledge of her role in the regime. They made the case that SIPA could be a positive influence on the 22-year-old Jaafari, allowing her to receive Western-style civic education and hopefully take those lessons back to Syria. “I can’t see any moral issue at all,” said Richard Bulliet, a history professor and director emeritus of SIPA’s Middle East Institute. Bulliet, the professor who played a large role in bringing Ahmadinejad to campus, drew a bright line between key actors and young aides like Jaafari: “There’s a huge difference between a principal and a functionary. If a functionary objects to a policy he can’t really change it.”

For now, SIPA is standing by its decision to admit Jaafari. A spokesperson declined to discuss Jaafari’s case but gave SIPA’s official statement, which defends its decision: “There is nothing about an individual student’s application or admittance that will alter this central academic focus and core civic values of the school.”

That was the tack initially taken by Yale University when it was revealed that Taliban spokesman Rahmatullah Hashemi was attending Yale as a non-degree student in February 2006. Like SIPA, Yale defended the decision, stating: “We hope that his courses help him understand the broader context for the conflicts around the world.” But when Hashemi applied as a full-time student in a degree-granting program later that year he was denied.

So far, unlike at Yale, no great outcry has emerged from SIPA’s powerful alumni community, which supports the school with annual donations. Columbia alum Jay Lefkowitz, former United States’ special envoy for human rights in North Korea and a prominent supporter of the university, thinks that Jaafari’s admittance is not the most major issue facing SIPA. “Given that liberal universities should be devoted to educating students,” the former Bush Administration official said, “I would be concerned about imposing litmus tests based on ideology in the admissions process.”

For Lefkowitz, the real issue facing schools like SIPA is not the students it admits, but rather the teachers it hires to educate them. “It’s more problematic that many universities seem to relish the idea of promoting faculty members who harbor their own radical ideologies — especially since they are the ones entrusted with doing the educating.”

Source: The Huffington Post