WASHINGTON -- The resignation Thursday of veteran diplomat Kofi
Annan and the collapse of diplomatic efforts on Syria by the United
Nations and the Arab League all but assure a bloody finish to the
uprising against President Bashar Assad.
Annan’s tenure as mediator yielded several abortive attempts to
wring a peaceful transition from what’s become a civil war with dire
regional implications, including an expanding refugee crisis and a
new battleground for militant Islamists.
The envoy’s pleas for both sides to stop fighting and start
negotiating were seen as so ineffective that Syrian activists on
Twitter joked Thursday, “Annan resigned? From what?” Both U.N.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to
the U.N., issued statements that used the word “thankless” to
describe Annan’s unenviable position between the warring parties.
Annan told a news conference in Geneva that some had dubbed his
task “Mission Impossible.” He blamed all sides for the breakdown in
diplomacy, which he said rendered his role ineffective.
“The bloodshed continues, most of all because of the Syrian
government’s intransigence and continuing refusal to implement the
six-point plan,” Annan said, “and also because of the escalating
military campaign of the opposition – all of which is compounded by
the disunity of the international community.”
Through 17 months of political isolation, harsh sanctions and
insurgent attacks, Assad has clung to power. Annan’s departure,
coupled with the refusal so far of the United States and other
powers to intervene militarily, turns the fight to unseat him into a
war of attrition between the ragtag rebels and the regime’s
bloodied-but-resilient forces.
Thursday brought continued fighting across the country, including
in the capital, Damascus, and in Aleppo, the country’s largest city
and its economic hub. The Syrian government reportedly was sending
reinforcements to Aleppo as it attempted to dislodge rebels there
from a number of neighborhoods that had been used to launch attacks
on security forces across the city.
“The conflict continues to spiral out of control, with shocking
atrocities and human rights abuses coming to light almost every day
and now being committed by both sides,” Suzanne Nossel, the U.S.
director of the human rights group Amnesty International, said in a
statement.
Nossel called Annan’s resignation the “culmination of a string of
failures” by the international community to rein in the violence.
Secretary-General Ban announced Annan’s departure in a brief
statement that praised him for “the selfless way in which he has put
his formidable skills and prestige to this most difficult and
potentially thankless of assignments.” The statement added that Ban
and Arab League chief Nabil al Araby were in talks to pick a
successor.
Many Syrian opposition activists criticized Annan’s plan from Day
One, calling it a ploy to buy more time for both Assad’s regime and
the U.S. administration, which is loath to take risky action in
Syria with a presidential election looming.
Most Syrians who are opposed to Assad’s government never held
much faith in Annan’s efforts to reach a peaceful agreement with a
government in which they’d long ago lost trust. Others feared that
Syria finally had fully become a proxy battleground for the
interests of outside countries.
"No one cares about Annan and his plan," said Ammar Dandash, an
anti-government activist in northern Syria who said that no one
around him had even remarked on the envoy’s resignation.
Rice, the U.S. ambassador, blamed the failure of diplomacy on
both an Assad regime that “continuously broke its pledges” and on
unnamed U.N. Security Council members – a reference to Russia and
China – that vetoed international sanctions against the Damascus
government on three occasions.
“Those members who blocked this action effectively made Mr.
Annan’s mission impossible,” Rice said in her statement.
Political analysts, journalists on the ground and Russian allies
of Assad all have noted that the opposition camp also failed to
implement its side of the Annan-brokered agreement. Opposition
forces refused to negotiate while Assad was president, broke the
cease-fire first on some occasions and harassed U.N. monitors who
were visiting opposition enclaves, according to analysts and news
reports.
“The opposition didn’t want anything but the removal of the
regime, and the regime didn’t want anything but the removal of the
opposition, so Annan was irrelevant from the beginning,” said
Azzedine Layachi, a Middle East specialist and professor of
government at St. John’s University in New York. “By deciding now
that it’s time to leave, he’s trying to save as much as he can of
his prestige.”
Already, cartoons have circulated depicting Syria as Annan’s
“second Rwanda,” a reference to the African genocide that Annan
publicly has said he could’ve done more to prevent during his time
as head of U.N. peacekeeping forces in the mid-1990s.
As the fighting has intensified in the last two weeks with
sustained rebel offensives in Damascus and Aleppo, civilian and
rebel death tolls of more than 100 a day have become common. The
Syrian government stopped reporting military and security forces’
deaths in June, when rebels killed at least 649 soldiers, according
the government.
Executions have become commonplace, with each side accusing the
other of atrocities this week. Residents of southern Damascus said
26 people were executed on Wednesday in Yalda, while rebels posted
video of executions of government supporters in Aleppo earlier this
week. Heavy shelling and casualties were reported by anti-government
activists across the country, including in Damascus.
Allam reported from Washington;
Enders, a McClatchy special correspondent, reported from Beirut.