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.”

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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:

In a bloody coincidence with Frontline’s First Wednesday talk about the divisive issue of international intervention in Syria, yet another massacre of women, children, civilians has been charged at the Assad regime.

Less than a fortnight after the Houla massacre in the Homs province of Syria, in which 108 people were killed, opposition activist report that a further 78 people were killed on June 6 by pro-government forces in Qubair and Maarzaf in the Hama province.

Media reports increasingly talk about Syria’s ‘tipping point’ – but last night’s talk illustrated the variety of perspectives on this contentious fulcrum.

Chaired by the Guardian’s Ian Black, the panel began by explaining their own perspective on the country’s current crisis. Charles Glass, recently returned from Syria, began by telling the  audience about the striking polarity in opinions he heard advocated by ordinary Syrians – “either dramatically for or dramatically against the regime.”

Rim Turkmani, founder of secular opposition group Building the Syrian State, said that the Western powers had contributed to such polarity, whilst underestimating the complexities of Syrian society. She said that all too often, external powers had ignored “how to help Syrians”, focusing instead on “how to harm the regime”.

Christopher Phillips, of Queen Mary’s University reminded the audience that ‘we’ the international community are already involved in the Syrian conflict as the past year has seen the externalisation of conflict and a reliance on the outside world for resolution.

Ian Black introduced the final panelist, Nadim Shehadi, an associate fellow of Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa programme, as “openly interventionist”. Shehadi qualified this by saying that at the moment the international powers are paralysed because they are falling into the trap of Bashar al-Assad’s mind game – that it’s either him or civil war.

The evening quickly moved to audience questions: What kind of deal can really be done? What kind of intervention can occur? What is the role of the external actors? But the issue to which the panellist kept returning was raised by Dr Ghada Karmi: Foreign media coverage has too often relied upon “so-called spokesmen for the opposition without any critical analysis of … who they are”.

As yet the opposition groups in Syria have remained, in Shehadi’s words, “leaderless”. Perhaps it is this lack of leadership, organisation, and the presentation of a viable alternative to the Assad regime which has delayed the ‘tipping point’. Is this the regime narrative succeeding over the opposition?

Shehadi said:

“There is an information war… The revolution started as a non-violent, peaceful opposition to the regime… and now it’s perceived as a violent civil war with bad leadership. The perception now is something the regime is very comfortable with. The regime can do violent civil war for the next ten years – it will win and flourish… The regime is winning the mind game and most of what you see in the press is buying that regime narrative.”

More questions included the threats of ethnic cleansing and of sectarianism, the pivotal role of Russia, and the failing Anan plan. Jonathan Steele asked about another tipping point: “At what point do you think the opposition will be willing to talk to the regime?”

It was an evening that posed far more questions than it answered. Despite some cautious optimism that negotiations and resolutions should not be discredited and dismissed as futile, the talk’s conclusion echoed Ian Black’s own question: “Fifteen months and 15,000 dead; can [that compromise] still happen?”

Watch the full event here: