The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Saturday 4 August 2012

KOFI ANNAN LEAVES THE SYRIAN MISSION – THE SILLY INTERNATIONAL GEOPOLITICS AGAIN


A sluggish international response overlooking Bashar al-Assad butchering thousands of his own countrymen

Syria is a small county not so rich in resources including oil

Syria is not a question of national pride as Afghanistan had become for the US.

World political ecology is dotted with many closed regimes tightly controlled by groups or individuals. Many of them are members of world bodies like the United Nations or the World Trade Organization.

Two of the five permanent UN Security Council (that claims to be the apex decision making body on matters of international peace and security) members are despotic regimes – China is an established fact while Russia is pacing fast with Putin cracking down on his opponents with a vengeance.

The above five observations sum-up the deadlock that Syria has become, killing scores of its own people every passing day. Resignation of Kofi Annan from his assignment as the international peace envoy in Syria is an ominous development out of treacherous web.

It tells nothing has moved in Syria in-spite of so-called international efforts and the violent situation is getting more and more hopeless.

Kofi Annan was appointed the UN-Arab League peace envoy on Syria February this year to mediate and work out a peace solution. He worked consistently but we never came across any development that could tell us the international community was heading towards a positive solution on Syria.

Instead, what all happened was the contrary to the expectations. Midst the international flip-flops, Assad continued with his killing machines. The international community never looked united, was never able to put significant pressure on Assads. Annan blamed he never got the support from the responsible international community members that was required to effect a Syrian peace solution.

Annan has blasted the UN and the international community on it's sluggishness and on increasing local militarization in Syria as he steps down. And it is well founded. In fact, the United Nations Supervision Mission In Syria (UNSMIS) had to suspend its operations this June attributing it to the intensifying violence. The 300-member strong group that was mandated for three months April this year under the former UN-Arab League Peace Envoy Kofi Annan mediated plan to monitor the ceasefire  League(that was never there), found the violence too extreme and was not ready to risk the lives of the members of the UNSMIS.

The UNSMIS was supposed to work on the peace plan and promote the ceasefire leading to a political transition in the country. But halting the operation midway called the international community’s bluff. It's field activities already suspended, UNSMIS term is expiring on August 20.

Libya was to pay dividend with oil once it was liberated from Gaddafi, but, even then, the sluggish international geopolitics delayed the international intervention resulting in thousands of killings. Syria is not lucrative enough to pay the oil dividend.

Also, developments in China and Russia have only added to the sluggishness of the international community. China, in the year of its supreme political body power transition, is being very cautious. Putin has comfortably reinstated him as the Russian President once again and in a way has qualified to the high scales of the dictator-in-making tag. He is busy in crushing the voice of dissent.

These two countries are never going to be part of any active mandate to dislodge another despot – Bashar al-Assad. In fact, Russian ships carrying warfare for Syria have been traced and sent back. Russia and China have vetoed thrice a UN Security Council resolution aimed at imposing more sanctions on Syria.

And in absence of any UN mandate, it is foolish to expect that Obama would let the US or NATO be part of any military initiative against the Assads in the presidential election year.

True, Assad’s regime has to come to an end sooner or later. Everyone is talking about it in certain terms now. It is a growing conclusion among the observing analysts. Even Kofi Annan emphatically opined it while lambasting the international community. But no one can say when. And therefore what about the human lives lost? While the rebellion has made in-roads to Damascus, Assad is threatening to use every mean including the chemical weapons to defeat the rebels.

Who is to blame if that indeed happens? Some major international powers claimed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and launched a massive attack though presence of the Iraqi WMDs could never be established. And here, Assad is threatening to use chemical weapons openly and nothing seems to move. Amid all this, the dead-count is rising every day. 

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/