Recently, something dramatic happened in the British parliament at Westminster. Since the American war of independence in 1782, no British Prime Minister had lost a motion on war in the British parliament.
David Cameron’s motion for military intervention in Syria was voted down by a whisker, 285 to 272. The first time in decades, the UK will not be sending its military following orders from Washington. Cameron’s desire to side with Obama to fuel the burning in Syria was squashed. During the debate, Cameron had given a passionate speech about how devastated he was to see civilians and children struck by chemical agents. [break]
He was already sure that it was the Syrian government which did that. Of course, waiting for the UN report to confirm would not have served his cause to maintain the ‘special relationship’ with the US.
Bluntly, Cameron’s motivation for war was not a case of humanitarian intervention or responsibility to protect civilians. Were it so, he would have initiated an intervention in Egypt, where the Egyptian army had killed about a thousand protestors within a couple days of ousting a democratically elected government. Then, the humanitarian doctrine did not come into play in the dark rooms of White House and White Hall, because the regime was relatively friendly to the western empire. The Sri Lankan government killed tens of thousands of civilians a few years ago. But the west did not think this condemnable enough for militarily intervention. Or maybe South Asian life is still not that important.
The open secret is that western countries want to attack Syria not with any altruistic aim, but to achieve regime change, much like in Libya and Iraq. If it was for peace, the US and the UK governments could have used their leverage with rebel forces and worked on a ceasefire, or taken an initiative to ask Russia and Iran to bring the Assad government in Syria to dialogue.
This is not to say that Assad is on the right side–he has been a dictator for more than a decade now. However, the intervention from western governments is bound to increase civilian deaths, weaken the current government, and thereby empower groups like Al Nusra, an ally of Al Qaeda.
During the parliamentary debate before the decision, I could not help but be amazed by the opinions expressed by the MPS from left, right and centre. On the left were the members of Labour party who would never intervene because they saw intervention as modern day imperialism.
The nationalist non-interventionists of UKIP said “this is not our problem, we are not the world’s policemen.” The soft interventionists of Labour stated that intervention in itself is not wrong if it happens through the UN. Mainstream conservatives were interventionists because of their new found humanitarianism. Such was the diversity of political thoughts that I was left wishing the Constituent Assembly in Nepal allowed full blown debates on issues of national importance, rather than conspiring in groups outside the assembly with no conclusion.
There are still a few important questions that remain to be answered after the non-intervention vote. A friend wrote to me, “What do you think should be done about the 100,000 people killed by their own government then?” It was a war, where both the parties have killed civilians, but I think further 100,000 would be saved if the west does not launch its ‘peace keeping’ missiles. We have already seen what the military attack can do in Iraq and Lebanon. The military missions did not bring peace, but opened up the Pandora’s Box of sectarian violence. Interestingly, the Mau-mau rebels of Kenya in 2012 had to fight in court for compensation for the atrocities that the UK had committed after World War II in the 1950s.
There has to be a political solution, followed by ceasefire, if the guiding idea is peace. Rightly, Iraq’s ghost did not possess the British parliament when it voted, and nor does it possess people in general. The You Gov poll, an online survey, showed that the majority of British people were against the government’s possible military strike.
Another question: Who bears the responsibility for the deaths until now? That is for the Syrian courts, politics, and even international courts to decide. A commonsense answer is that violence instigators should be trialled, and if found guilty, they should bear the consequences. But this has proved to be unworkably idealistic in the real world. We know what happens to the perpetrators. From Bush, Blair, Prachanda to the emergency era military authority of Nepal – the former king Gyanendra. Nothing. But at least, more civilians in Syria would not die.
To conclude, I am borrowing the words of Simon Jenkins from The Guardian, “In Syria, the human misery is intense and agonising to watch. It merits extremes of diplomatic engagement and humanitarian relief, to which outside attention and expense should surely be directed. Bombs are irrelevant. They make a bang and hit a headline. They puff up the political chest and dust their advocates in glory. They are the dumbest manifestation of modern politics.”
The author is President of Students’ Union at Middlesex University, London
shreya.paudel2010@gmail.com
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