Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
BY JIM FLINK
Did the U.N. fail in its mission to stop the violence in Syria? Did it ever really have
a chance to succeed? Those are two of the questions swirling around
the U.N. withdrawal from Syria. A correspondent for CBS says the 300 or so observers never
got to accomplish their mission.
“The main role of these observers was essentially to watch over or look after the cease-fire
that was one of the points of Kofi Annan's six point peace plan. That cease-fire was
never really actually implemented.”
And, because of that, the U.N. observers were never able to keep the peace, or more importantly,
prevent mass killings ... two of which happened in the last week. In the first, 60 people
were found bound and burned in a Damascus landfill. As U.N. observers packed up to leave,
the New York Times reports, another grisly discovery was made.
“Initial reports by activists suggested that the dead had been killed by government
shells … But the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group based in
Britain that has a network of contacts in Syria, later said that all the bodies had
bullet wounds, suggesting that they either had died in the fighting or had been executed.”
A reporter for Al Jazeera notes diplomats in New York will continue to debate - not
what's happening on the ground - but what is up in the air, namely Syrian jets, that
are preventing peace.
“So certainly, this is something that’s going to be discussed in the Security Council.
It’s going to be facing, certainly, opposition from Russia and China who’ve always said,
they don’t want a no fly zone, they don’t want foreign military intervention...”
For now, CNN’s Nick Robertson reports, many people are judging this U.N. mission as a
failure. Even as it has had its successes too.
“The U.N. really had nothing to monitor. By halfway through their mission all they
were able to do was to get humanitarian aid into smaller communities, so a success on
that level.”
But others aren’t so kind to the U.N.’s efforts.
The Independent asks...
“...why end the mission now? Because there were some in UN headquarters in New York who
knew from the start that the assignment was not intended to succeed? Or because the Western
nations and Gulf sponsors do not want UN observers snooping into the amount of new and more lethal
weaponry which they may be planning to send to the ‘Free Syrian Army’ and its more
bearded allies in those parts of Syria in which Bashar's writ no longer runs?”