The UN's plan to save Assad, or the Great Settlement?

The Syrian revolution, which suffered a rupture after the Assad regime's violent response to the civilian population's democratic mass demonstrations, turned into a civil war after the regime's inhuman acts, such as its use of chemical and biological weapons, its massacres on the scale of genocide, and the mass rapes by regime forces. The UN, which claims to be responsible for ensuring international peace and security, pretended several times, through the United Nations Security Council, the sole executive organ of this organisation, to take responsibility for ending the tragedy in this country, but since there was no belief in the aim of ending it, the initiatives came to nothing.

In particular, the Western world's indecisive policies and the inconsistencies in its rhetoric on the Syrian crisis caused the Syrian crisis to turn first into a regional fault line and then into a global one. The Arab Revolutions' turning into a counter-revolutionary process and the emergence of pathological structures like Daesh must also be seen as a consequence of the inconsistency of Western countries' foreign policy rhetoric. The Western world, which did not develop a moral and principled stance against the coup carried out by antidemocratic forces against Muhammad Morsi, the first democratically elected President in Egypt's history, prepared the ground that would cause pathological structures like Daesh to emerge in Islamic societies undergoing a serious transition.

Russia's direct invasion of Syria was the direct result of the Western world's failure to respond to the faits accomplis Russia carried out in Georgia, in Chechnya and in Ukraine. The attitude of the Western world, which remains indifferent to Russian jets slaughtering the civilian population almost every day, drives all of us to despair over whether it will really make an effort in Syria based on human rights, the rule of law and democratic values to reach peace.

The content of the draft ceasefire proposal that the UN planned to bring into effect from the new year also reinforces this conviction. The draft served by a news agency, if true, contains three ceasefire proposals. The first of these envisages the continuation of the fight against terrorist groups, first defining the terrorist groups and then proposing that the other groups observe the ceasefire. The second proposes a ceasefire open to all groups that accept the basic principles; the third envisages achieving a partial ceasefire with the prohibition of the use of certain weapons.

As will be noticed, none of the proposals looks likely to be a balm for the heart. Opinions may differ as to which of these proposals is the most monstrous, but everyone will agree that none of them will bring peace and stability to Syria.

As we have stated repeatedly, the Western world's fundamental mistake on Syria is to leave the swamp and deal with the mosquitoes the swamp produces. Moreover, to do so by trying to distinguish between female and male among these mosquitoes, as in Kemal Sunal's film Korkusuz Korkak. The Western world, which has declared Daesh a terrorist organisation and carries out operations against it, thinks it can solve this problem by supporting groups like the YPG, which commit acts at least as criminal as Daesh, which carry out forced displacement to change the demographic structure of the region, which are alleged to have committed mass rapes in some places, and whose relationship with Bashar al-Assad, the almost sole financier of terrorism in the country, is by now an open secret.

When all these developments are put together, the picture that emerges is roughly this: the Western world says, albeit in somewhat bashful language, that Bashar al-Assad must go, but continues to do everything in its power to keep him from going. They say he must go because they think appearing to support a criminal who has openly carried out massacres against his own people could put them in a difficult position at home against certain liberal-libertarian outbursts. But they make efforts for him to stay, because the distribution in Syria, especially after Russia's intervention, appears to have reached a deadlock.

Or, another scenario: since the Westerners have reached a consensus on handing Syria over to Russia, all of this is a sham fight. They say Assad should go because they think they cannot explain to themselves or to their publics, which they have mobilised for years against the "communist threat," that they have given Syria to Russia. On one side, they also do not want to look as though they have licked up what they spat out. They do everything to keep Assad because Russia wants it so.

The draft plan claimed to be proposed by the UN may be a product of the second alternative. That is, Russia is being given a share. But they are making a great mistake in thinking that the Islamic world is passive as it was in the years of the First World War. I fear that the UN too, with its stance on Syria, will be remembered in the future with an event like the comical situation the League of Nations found itself in over Italy's invasion of Abyssinia.