World View: Dayton Accord offers a possible route out of Syrian disaster

Could Russia's military intervention in Syria be the prelude to – or even enable – a regional peace deal similar to the 1995 Dayton Agreement, which brought an end to fighting in the former Yugoslavia?

That Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian civil war killed 100,000 people and was stoked by regional and global powers. Dayton was an imperfect peace deal, based on exhaustion and impasse rather than justice. But its terms stabilised the region and inserted human rights norms, transitional political arrangements, refugee resettlement and mediation instead of war.

The Russian question is conventionally answered in the negative by those who interpret Vladimir Putin’s motives as intended to thwart US-led policy in Syria, which makes Bashar al-Assad’s departure from power a pre-condition of talks.

The commotion that followed last week’s Russian bombing of so-called “moderate” opposition targets in northern Syria assumed this was Putin’s motive, even though this opposition is known by experts to be largely fanciful, having been corrupted or absorbed into more radical Islamist movements by now.

Realistically, most of the non-Islamist opposition is now recognised by the US military as revolving around the Syrian Kurds, with whom they have just reached an agreement to fight Islamic State militants who now control large swaths of Syria and Iraq.

In an interview with Foreign Affairs, US Secretary of Defence Ashton Carter implicitly acknowledged American responsibility for the growth of IS in the sectarian structure of the Iraqi state. Its largely Sunni Baathist military and bureaucracy, ejected from power after the 2003 US invasion, form the backbone of IS's emerging new regime. Only a newly non- sectarian and decentralised Iraq, less dominated by Shias, can encourage them to abandon the extreme Islamist IS, Carter said.

Regional coalition

In the meantime, Iraq is part of a new regional coalition with

Russia

and Syria against IS. It has the support of

Jordan

and

Egypt

, whose governments fear that an Islamic State victory would empower their domestic opponents in the

Muslim Brotherhood

.

This Russian military and diplomatic activism has confused and blindsided the US-led coalition with regional allies such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which have all armed IS.

Framing the conflict as one of Assad versus IS and disregarding “moderate” opponents is one of the deep games at play in this military- political drama. How long that will take in military terms, and whether Russia’s intervention (intentionally or unintentionally) outruns its initial limited political purpose by becoming embroiled in a wider war, are the great uncertainties.

In analysing the contradictory motives and positions of Syrian, regional and global powers must be taken into account. Assad now controls about 20 per cent of Syrian territory, but seems secure in his coastal enclave and has widespread support there, not least because nearly 50,000 Syrian troops have died in the fighting.

The regime’s cynical brutality ensures its opponents continue to fight; but more and more Syrians from both sides despair and flee, as Europeans are belatedly learning.

Longtime presence

Russia has been involved in Syria since the 1950s and in the region for far longer. It fears Islamic State’s appeal in

Chechnya

and among its 20 million Muslim population, and so initially targeted

Chechen

groups in northern Syria. It also fears a collapse of the Assad regime into a Libyan-style anarchy. Russian intervention can be read as preventing that happening and ensuring that Assad is part of the transition.

Turkish, Saudi and even US leaders are prepared to relax the pre-condition that Assad must go before talks, even if they insist he cannot be part of an peace agreement, other than transitionally. They all have reasons to fear Islamic State increasingly more than a Balkan deal for Syria. And the Obama administration knows its own interests in the region are not best served by depending so much on rebalancing support for the Saudis and Israel in compensation for the nuclear deal with Iran this summer.

So the stage might indeed be set for a Dayton-type deal, which Obama could still orchestrate before he leaves office. It would bring together Syrian, regional and global actors under United Nations auspices to agree a transition and elections in a loose federal or confederal Syria divided between an Alawite coastal entity, a Syrian Kurdish one and a Sunni component shorn of IS control.

As in Bosnia, there would be human rights components, provision for return of refugees, mediation mechanisms and massive international aid.

It is surely worth imagining and willing such an outcome in the midst of this military and humanitarian catastrophe.

pegillespie@gmail.com