On Thursday 6 February at the Frontline Club, Dan Smith, secretary general of International Alert, chaired a panel which discussed the impact of the war in Syria on the surrounding states.

Dan Smith, Victoria Stamadianou, Martin Chulov, Julien Barnes-Dacey and Nadim Shehadi discuss Syria and the surrounding region at the Frontline Club. Photo: @mattmencarelli

Smith asked the panel what could be done to improve the situation in the region?

Julien Barnes-Dacey, who was based in Syria as a journalist from 2007 to 2010, said:

“Clearly the only solution is a Syrian solution. Syria is sucking the life out of the region. It’s Syria that is promoting a refugee crisis and until that situation is resolved you’re not going to get a regional resolution to all of the accompanying issues.”

http://twitter.com/maggieinlondon/status/431517865490259969

Lebanon is absorbing many of Syria’s six million displaced people but the country has many of its own existing problems. An audience member asked if these problems had got worse since the influx of refugees.

Nadim Shehadi, an associate fellow for the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham, said:

“. . . You would consider it as a failed 20th century state as compared to Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Libya who were successful. These components that we thought were the failure of Lebanon are what’s holding it together now. . . . Lebanon as a society can live without a state because it never had any.”

But the influx of people, while being supported by Lebanon’s ability for self-preservation without the structure of a state, is not sustainable, said Victoria Stamadianou, Lebanon country manager for International Alert:

“It’s important to remember that resilience is depletable. . . . We’ve seen a lot of refugees being hosted by communities, everyone expected that there would be massive conflict across the country and that hasn’t happened . . . they’ve managed to be resilient but that’s something that can be depleted and needs to be strengthened.”

From the audience, Sarah Williams, who spent six months in Jordan last year, asked how the country has been stabilised by the Syrian conflict.

Barnes-Dacey:

“[In 2011-2012] things were really rough. . . . There was a lot of unprecedented domestic pressure against the king . . . you had unrest in the south . . . I think that what Syria has done is to quell that. . . . In a general sense in Jordan at the moment, ‘This is better than what’s happening in Syria at the moment and we don’t want to risk that.’

“It’s worth saying that this is a short-term thing. Long term you’ve got the refugees, you’ve got Islamists . . . the king [still] has huge economic problems.”

The panel agreed that the battle lines may seem to be drawn along religious and ideological lines but they are in fact political.
Shehadi said:

“I think the Shia–Sunni rift is overplayed, when Erdogan of Turkey and Hamad of Qatar and also Abdullah of Saudi Arabia were supporting Assad, it was not because he was Shia or because he was Sunni, it was because they thought they could do business with him.”

Martin Chulov, Middle East correspondent for The Guardian, said that they do however sustain the conflict:

“While I agree with that analysis and the cause of this conflict wasn’t sectarian, what’s sustains it in part certainly is.”

Barnes-Dacey agreed:

“Very deliberately. . . . [It’s about] regional power play and regional alliances but those alliances are using sectarian networks to achieve their political ambitions.”

Syria the arena for contest between regional powers #peacetalks @intalert

— Phil Champain (@BigPhil127) February 6, 2014

An audience member asked, what is the long-term solution?

Chulov:

“I don’t put any faith at all in the feckless political class in Lebanon. I think that the issues are far bigger than them even if they wanted to confront them. I do think there has to be a point, an intersection of the strategic interests of the key players – the Saudis, the Iranians in particular, but also the Russians and to some extent the Americans.”

Barnes-Dacey: Parties to conflict must accept no "winning" option – including opposition, who must negotiate with Assad #peacetalks

— International Alert (@intalert) February 6, 2014

Carol Allen-Storey, a photojournalist in the audience asked, where are the visionaries of the future, who is going to inspire?

Chulov and Shehadi said that they couldn’t come up with many suggestions for the future leaders in the region, however Stamadianou was more optimistic:

“You can’t just hope that you’re going to find this new breed of people that didn’t exist there and they’re going to solve all the issues. . . . What you can do is . . . see if you can find ways to model different approaches to doing politics and supporting them to change the grain – working with the grain to change the grain.”

Barnes-Dacey:

“Today in a sense the Syrian population has been unleashed, so one can say there are no distinct ‘Mandelas’ that one can see on the horizon but there’s a whole people that have discovered a political awakening which was kept away from them for so long.”

Watch and listen to the full discussion below:

Paddy O’Connell started this month’s First Wednesday with a tribute to Marie Colvin who was killed in Homs a year a ago.

After introducing the panel O’Connell got straight on to the news announced today by Foreign Secretary William Hague that the UK will be sending a £13m package of logistical and humanitarian support to Syria and asked the panel what they thought.

Julien Barnes-Dacey, policy fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations, was the first to give his reaction to the news:

“I think it’s insignificant…I don’t think a few 4x4s and bullet proof jackets are really going to make [a difference]. There’s a big jump between that and providing weapons… What’s significant is that they’ve begun a direct conversation with the opposition…It points to a the trajectory of where things are going, that we are drip feeding more and more and eventually you’ll see an escalation.”

Julien Barnes-Dacey on UK contribution announced today: "It's too little too late. They're always 5-6 months behind." #FrontlineClub #Syria

— Sally Ashley–Cound (@AllyAsh) March 6, 2013

On the US Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent tour to the Middle East Sakhr Al-Makhadhi, a journalist who has covered Syria for the past decade said: “[The US is] trying to salvage its reputation and no more… America started this revolution with credit, it had a good reputation; Obama had fans among the Syrian people and there were Syrians who were counting on him… It just went on too long and the Syrians were left dangling for far too long.”

Dr Rim Turkmani, a founder member of Building the Syrian State movement, added that Syrian people want international discussions between the US, Russia and the international community:

“It is now an international conflict, the root of this conflict started in Syria… social, political, sectarian, deeply history roots, completely justified conflict however right now it has been internationalised there are international interests. If they don’t sort out their matters I don’t see this conflict being resolved.”

Turkmani on how international powers should approach discussions with a problem solving attitude:

Al-Makhadhi said that there was little chance that political negotiations would take place with Bashar al-Assad and that it is now up to the international powers:

“What should the UK and the US do? Pour in humanitarian aid… I don’t support the militarisation of the war, but if you’re going to do it, do it properly. Send in enough weapons to overthrow Bashar al-Assad or don’t do it at all and support political negotiations. Don’t sit on the fence and do neither because that’s just going to prolong the war.”

Firas Abi Ali the Head of Middle East and North Africa Forecasting at Exclusive Analysis failed to see what the international powers would actually talk about in the event of political talks happening to which Turkmani impressed that they could reach a peaceful reconciliation between the many sides present in Syria and not through a gradual military takeover:

“I don’t want Iran and Russia to support the regime and on the other side the Americans and the UK to support another party… I want support of a solution on the table not somebody around the table.”

Abi Ali added that the regional powers including Qatar, Iran and Saudi Arabia are continually threatened by each other and he feared that the lines between the conflict in the region would soon be incomprehensibly blurred:

“It is a series of localised civil wars rather than Iraq declaring war on Lebanon or something like that…These conflicts are becoming one big conflict.”

Dr Rim Turkmani on the Syrian conflict involving surrounding countries "it's spilling and it's going to spill more and more." #FrontlineClub

— Sally Ashley–Cound (@AllyAsh) March 6, 2013

Firas Abi Ali on the spread of conflict in Syria and its surrounding countries

Al-Makhadhi on how a solution for Syria must come from the west:

Watch the event back here: