Arab League Punishes Syria Over Violent Crackdown
Reuters
Demonstrators marched against President Bashar al-Assad of Syria near Homs on Sunday.
Khaled Elfiqi/European Pressphoto Agency
Sheik Hamad bin Jassem al-Thani
Reuters
Demonstrators marched against President Bashar al-Assad of Syria near Homs on Sunday.
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR and NADA BAKRI
Published: November 27, 2011
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BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Arab League deepened Syria’s international isolation on Sunday by imposing a battery of economic sanctions meant to sever most trade and investment from the Arab world, an unprecedented step against a member state.
Published: November 27, 2011
======================================================
BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Arab League deepened Syria’s international isolation on Sunday by imposing a battery of economic sanctions meant to sever most trade and investment from the Arab world, an unprecedented step against a member state.
Khaled Elfiqi/European Pressphoto Agency
Sheik Hamad bin Jassem al-Thani
is the foreign minister of Qatar and
the Arab League’s current chairman.
The tough measures, aimed at stopping Syria’s bloody crackdown on dissidents, constitute another blow to the Syrian economy, already reeling from sanctions imposed by the European Union and the United States.
They were a psychological jab as much as an economic one, further eroding Syria’s longstanding claim to be the heart of Arabism, a claim already battered by the country’s suspension from the league two weeks ago.
For the Arab League, an organization long ridiculed as toothless, it was the second time since the Arab Spring protests began that it had acted against a member country to protect a threatened population. But while the group invited international military intervention in Libya in March, this time its leaders made clear that sanctions were intended to avoid it.
The action capped a momentous week in a region that has been pummeled by a year of historic change. President Ali Abdullah Saleh stepped down in Yemen, Libya formed a new government, Morocco elected one and Egyptians prepared to vote in their first post-revolutionary elections on Monday.
The sanctions against Syria, backed by 19 member states meeting in Cairo, reflected widespread frustration among Arab governments that Damascus has refused to put in place a peace treaty it accepted three weeks ago even as the toll from its crackdown on antigovernment demonstrators continues to mount.
“The position of the people, and the Arab position, is that we must end this situation urgently,” said Sheik Hamad bin Jassem al-Thani, the foreign minister of Qatar and the league’s current chairman. “It has been almost a year that the Syrian people have been killed.”
The immediate catalyst was Syria’s refusal to admit Arab civilian and military observers to oversee the peace agreement and end a military crackdown that the United Nations says has claimed more than 3,500 lives since March.
The stated aim of the sanctions was not regime change, but to press Syria to comply with the peace plan it had ostensibly accepted.
“It is trying its best to get the Syrians to accept the political solution that it is offering them,” said one diplomat involved, speaking anonymously in line with his government’s guidelines. “But the Syrians keep maneuvering and haggling, and it is just not going to work. They don’t get it. They still want to play as if they are in the driver’s seat.”
The sanctions include a travel ban against scores of senior officials, a freeze on Syrian government assets in Arab countries, a ban on transactions with Syria’s central bank and an end to all commercial exchanges with the Syrian government.
They carve out an exception for important consumer goods, to try to lessen the impact on ordinary Syrians, although those exceptions were not yet spelled out. A ban on all flights from Arab nations will not be enforced yet because of objections from Algeria, diplomats said. The league said it would reconsider that measure in a week.
The sanctions are due to take effect immediately, the Qatari foreign minister said, and the resolution encouraged similar action by the United Nations.
Turkey also threw its support behind the sanctions. “Nobody can expect Turkey and the Arab League to remain silent on the killings of civilians and the Syrian regime’s increasing oppression of innocent people,” said Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who attended the Arab League meeting.
But two other neighbors, Iraq and Lebanon, two of Syria’s largest trading partners, signaled that they would not participate, opening potentially significant gaps in the restrictions.
Iraq abstained from the vote, and Lebanon “disassociated” itself from the resolution.
Economists estimate that about 50 percent of Syria’s exports go to the Arab world and 25 percent of its imports originate there, much of that from its immediate neighbors. Iran and Russia would also probably provide aid to Syria to compensate for lost government revenues.
Syria and its supporters denounced the sanctions as yet another attempt by outsiders to topple the government and break up the country.
Syria made no public comment on the vote on Sunday, but its foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, sent a letter to the league on Saturday, after a draft of the sanctions was circulated, accusing the league of seeking to turn Syria’s crisis into an international one and “to interfere in Syria’s internal affairs.”
The sanctions and other measures against Syria are meant “to deconstruct Syria, not to reform Syria,” a Lebanese analyst who is close to the government said Sunday, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “In the war against Syria, the economic will take the place of the limited possibility of military intervention.”
League officials took pains to point out that they saw the resolution adopted Sunday — at a luxury hotel on the outskirts of Cairo rather than amid the tumult at the league’s Tahrir Square headquarters — as an alternative to military intervention.
The sanctions “demonstrate the need for an Arab solution rather than any foreign intervention,” said Nabil el-Araby, the league’s secretary general. “That should be clear."
Officials also insisted that the league was not interested in overthrowing President Bashar al-Assad, whose family has ruled Syria for four decades. But analysts speculated that damaging sanctions were inevitably heading toward that end.
Under sanctions already applied by the United States and the European Union, Syria’s two most vital sectors, tourism and oil, have ground to a halt in recent months. Electricity cuts trouble Damascus and critical products like heating oil and staples like milk powder are becoming scarce.
“There is this notion that more sanctions would facilitate a transition,” said Peter Harling, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, which just issued a pessimistic report about the situation. “It is unclear that it is bringing the regime to compromise. It could complicate any transition, for example, if the banking sector collapses.”
Analysts said the sanctions also aimed to propel the business class and the elite in Syria’s two biggest cities, Damascus and Aleppo, to publicly break with the government. The upper class has remained largely quiet since the uprising began in March, but cutting off access to deals through banks in places like Kuwait and Dubai will hurt.
George Lopez, a sanctions expert at the University of Notre Dame, said the measures would curtail short-term financial flexibility, produce dramatic monetary losses and “show there is little future in investing in Syria.”
“The freezing of both government and personal assets of high level officials, a combination that had high impact in Libya, now poses a moment of decision to the elites regarding their continued support for Assad,” he said.
In Syria, the Local Coordinating Committees, which guide the antigovernment demonstrations, issued a statement hailing the move as further pressure, but worried that the government would find a way to cheat.
Ordinary people worried that the sanctions would mostly hurt the poor and the middle class, further decreasing their income.
“I think it is time the world realized that economic sanctions are not affecting anyone but the Syrian people,” said a 23-year-old Damascus resident who did not want to be identified for fear of reprisal. “Those who couldn’t afford buying bread, now can’t afford even smelling bread.”
But many Syrians face far worse. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition rights group operating in exile, reported clashes between army defectors and security forces loyal to the government in northwestern and central Syria over the weekend. It said 59 civilians were killed.
Sheik Hamad, the Qatari minister, said Muslim nations had a religious obligation to stop such deaths, and that he hoped sanctions could do the job without the need for foreign intervention.
“But if the international community does not take us seriously in this,” he said, “then I cannot guarantee that there will be no foreign interference."
The tough measures, aimed at stopping Syria’s bloody crackdown on dissidents, constitute another blow to the Syrian economy, already reeling from sanctions imposed by the European Union and the United States.
They were a psychological jab as much as an economic one, further eroding Syria’s longstanding claim to be the heart of Arabism, a claim already battered by the country’s suspension from the league two weeks ago.
For the Arab League, an organization long ridiculed as toothless, it was the second time since the Arab Spring protests began that it had acted against a member country to protect a threatened population. But while the group invited international military intervention in Libya in March, this time its leaders made clear that sanctions were intended to avoid it.
The action capped a momentous week in a region that has been pummeled by a year of historic change. President Ali Abdullah Saleh stepped down in Yemen, Libya formed a new government, Morocco elected one and Egyptians prepared to vote in their first post-revolutionary elections on Monday.
The sanctions against Syria, backed by 19 member states meeting in Cairo, reflected widespread frustration among Arab governments that Damascus has refused to put in place a peace treaty it accepted three weeks ago even as the toll from its crackdown on antigovernment demonstrators continues to mount.
“The position of the people, and the Arab position, is that we must end this situation urgently,” said Sheik Hamad bin Jassem al-Thani, the foreign minister of Qatar and the league’s current chairman. “It has been almost a year that the Syrian people have been killed.”
The immediate catalyst was Syria’s refusal to admit Arab civilian and military observers to oversee the peace agreement and end a military crackdown that the United Nations says has claimed more than 3,500 lives since March.
The stated aim of the sanctions was not regime change, but to press Syria to comply with the peace plan it had ostensibly accepted.
“It is trying its best to get the Syrians to accept the political solution that it is offering them,” said one diplomat involved, speaking anonymously in line with his government’s guidelines. “But the Syrians keep maneuvering and haggling, and it is just not going to work. They don’t get it. They still want to play as if they are in the driver’s seat.”
The sanctions include a travel ban against scores of senior officials, a freeze on Syrian government assets in Arab countries, a ban on transactions with Syria’s central bank and an end to all commercial exchanges with the Syrian government.
They carve out an exception for important consumer goods, to try to lessen the impact on ordinary Syrians, although those exceptions were not yet spelled out. A ban on all flights from Arab nations will not be enforced yet because of objections from Algeria, diplomats said. The league said it would reconsider that measure in a week.
The sanctions are due to take effect immediately, the Qatari foreign minister said, and the resolution encouraged similar action by the United Nations.
Turkey also threw its support behind the sanctions. “Nobody can expect Turkey and the Arab League to remain silent on the killings of civilians and the Syrian regime’s increasing oppression of innocent people,” said Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who attended the Arab League meeting.
But two other neighbors, Iraq and Lebanon, two of Syria’s largest trading partners, signaled that they would not participate, opening potentially significant gaps in the restrictions.
Iraq abstained from the vote, and Lebanon “disassociated” itself from the resolution.
Economists estimate that about 50 percent of Syria’s exports go to the Arab world and 25 percent of its imports originate there, much of that from its immediate neighbors. Iran and Russia would also probably provide aid to Syria to compensate for lost government revenues.
Syria and its supporters denounced the sanctions as yet another attempt by outsiders to topple the government and break up the country.
Syria made no public comment on the vote on Sunday, but its foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, sent a letter to the league on Saturday, after a draft of the sanctions was circulated, accusing the league of seeking to turn Syria’s crisis into an international one and “to interfere in Syria’s internal affairs.”
The sanctions and other measures against Syria are meant “to deconstruct Syria, not to reform Syria,” a Lebanese analyst who is close to the government said Sunday, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “In the war against Syria, the economic will take the place of the limited possibility of military intervention.”
League officials took pains to point out that they saw the resolution adopted Sunday — at a luxury hotel on the outskirts of Cairo rather than amid the tumult at the league’s Tahrir Square headquarters — as an alternative to military intervention.
The sanctions “demonstrate the need for an Arab solution rather than any foreign intervention,” said Nabil el-Araby, the league’s secretary general. “That should be clear."
Officials also insisted that the league was not interested in overthrowing President Bashar al-Assad, whose family has ruled Syria for four decades. But analysts speculated that damaging sanctions were inevitably heading toward that end.
Under sanctions already applied by the United States and the European Union, Syria’s two most vital sectors, tourism and oil, have ground to a halt in recent months. Electricity cuts trouble Damascus and critical products like heating oil and staples like milk powder are becoming scarce.
“There is this notion that more sanctions would facilitate a transition,” said Peter Harling, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, which just issued a pessimistic report about the situation. “It is unclear that it is bringing the regime to compromise. It could complicate any transition, for example, if the banking sector collapses.”
Analysts said the sanctions also aimed to propel the business class and the elite in Syria’s two biggest cities, Damascus and Aleppo, to publicly break with the government. The upper class has remained largely quiet since the uprising began in March, but cutting off access to deals through banks in places like Kuwait and Dubai will hurt.
George Lopez, a sanctions expert at the University of Notre Dame, said the measures would curtail short-term financial flexibility, produce dramatic monetary losses and “show there is little future in investing in Syria.”
“The freezing of both government and personal assets of high level officials, a combination that had high impact in Libya, now poses a moment of decision to the elites regarding their continued support for Assad,” he said.
In Syria, the Local Coordinating Committees, which guide the antigovernment demonstrations, issued a statement hailing the move as further pressure, but worried that the government would find a way to cheat.
Ordinary people worried that the sanctions would mostly hurt the poor and the middle class, further decreasing their income.
“I think it is time the world realized that economic sanctions are not affecting anyone but the Syrian people,” said a 23-year-old Damascus resident who did not want to be identified for fear of reprisal. “Those who couldn’t afford buying bread, now can’t afford even smelling bread.”
But many Syrians face far worse. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition rights group operating in exile, reported clashes between army defectors and security forces loyal to the government in northwestern and central Syria over the weekend. It said 59 civilians were killed.
Sheik Hamad, the Qatari minister, said Muslim nations had a religious obligation to stop such deaths, and that he hoped sanctions could do the job without the need for foreign intervention.
“But if the international community does not take us seriously in this,” he said, “then I cannot guarantee that there will be no foreign interference."
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nytimes.com/2011/11/28/world/middleeast/arab-league-prepares-to-vote-on-syrian-sanctions.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2
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