News & Stories

Experts See Cause for Hope in Syria

Posted Oct 10 2013

Bloodshed in Syria has not been slowed by the U.S.-Russia chemical weapons deal, but SIPA professor Jean Marie Guéhenno, the former UN deputy envoy for Syria, says there are some glimmers of hope for an end to the conflict.

After more than two-and-a-half years of civil war, Guéhenno said, the United States and Russia have realized that a military solution is not possible and an interest in a negotiated peace seems to be emerging. The U.S. and Russia brokered late last month a deal to destroy Syria’s chemical arsenal by mid-2014.

While the agreement defused prospects of an American military intervention that could have accelerated the end of the conflict, major powers now fear that if the war drags on, it will spread through the region, threating their strategic interests, he said.

Guéhenno spoke as part of the October 9 panel event “Syria: From the Ground Up.” The event was organized by SIPA student Erin Banco, a journalist who traveled into Syria to report from Aleppo in 2012, and sponsored by the Human Rights concentration and the International Media, Advocacy and Communication specialization.

Guéhenno also identified as a positive sign the election in June of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani , who is seen as more willing than his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to compromise with the West on contentious issues like Syria, where Iran is supporting the regime.

“Iran is important as part of the solution as it has been a part of the problem,” the former UN negotiator said.

Michael Oppenheimer, a clinical professor at New York University´s Center for Global Affairs, agreed these developments are positive, expressing guarded optimism and suggesting that parties of the conflict should even contemplate drastic solutions.

“The stalemate we have now is not stable, but it has some territorial patterns that may be the basis for a partition,” he said.

Syria´s war has killed more than 120,000 people and forced around 9 million people from their homes into refugee camps within Syria and in neighboring countries. Another participant, Carolyn Miles—who is the president and CEO for Save the Children—called it “a humanitarian disaster like we haven´t seen in decades.”

Miles lamented that awareness in the United States about the scale of the disaster was so limited. “Just imagine that in the United States we had one third of the population, 100 million people, internally displaced,” Miles said.

Lara Setrakian, founder of Syria Deeply, a news website covering the civil war, said that most of U.S. news outlets are failing to capture the complexity of the conflict.

“I´ve never seen a case in the history of U.S. journalism where the consequence of an issue is so high and the comprehension is so low,” she said. “That is a very dangerous gap for everyone involved.”

Setrakian said that while major news media outlets in Syria don´t have correspondents in the country, Syria Deeply features stories, in part, from Syrian reporters on the ground.

Syria Deeply aims to provide “a 360-degree view, so that Americans coming to the story for the first time can see the history, and the background and the who is who¨, she said.

Another journalist on the panel, Liam Stack, who curates citizen videos for the New York Times, agreed that understanding of the conflict is scarce. Stack works for “Watching Syria´s War,” a Times video project that aims to provide context to the Syrian civil war.

“We identify videos that are meaningful and can teach us from what´s happening,” Stack said.

— Fernando Peinado MIA ’14