While approaching the fifth anniversary of the Syrian civil war on March 15 -- which claimed more than 300,000 lives, approximately 700,000 wounded, 4 million fled the country, and another 6 million displaced within Syria -- the international community has failed to put an end to bloodshed in this war-torn country. During the first days of the conference, the Russian and the regime's air forces have systematically carpeted Aleppo and the besieged towns of southern Damascus with barrels of explosives, killing hundreds of civilians, even before the beginning of the peace talks, where most of them have been killed indiscriminately. It is disgraceful that the international community has successfully concluded an agreement with the regime in a very short period of time to remove its chemical weapons while completely failed to save the lives of millions of innocent children, women, and elderly people throughout Syria in the past five years!
After five years of mass killing in Syria, and instead of prosecuting and bringing perpetrators to justice, the international community has invited the Syrian regime, which relies heavily on the division of the international community on Syria, and on the unwavering support of Russia, to negotiate peace with the opposition leaders in Geneva. This recalls a cynical statement by Haris Siladžic, at that time the Bosnian foreign minister and head of the Bosnian delegation to the Vance-Owen peace talks in Geneva in October 1992 to negotiate peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina, saying: "If you kill one person, you're prosecuted; if you kill 10 people, you're a celebrity; if you kill a quarter of a million people, you're invited to a peace conference." Siladžic was referring to Radovan Karadžic, the wartime Bosnian-Serb leader, who was invited together with Slobodan Miloševic, as official guests of the United Nations and the EC. Because of rigidity in the Serb leaders' position, peace talks had failed to stop war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, while killing continued for another three years, claiming the lives of more than three-hundred thousands of Bosnian civilians.
The recent failure of Geneva III affirms what has been believed that the international community is doomed to repeat its failure in protecting civilians from mass slaughter. Since the outbreak of the recent violence in Syria, Russia and China have vetoed three UN Security Council resolutions on Syria, preventing several attempts by the UN Security Council to take a decision that might have put a stop to the war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated against Syrian civilians by state agents. It is clear that Russia and China are playing the same role played by the United States administration in the UN Security Council during the Rwandan Genocide. The lack of attention paid to the Rwandan catastrophe by the United States government and high-ranking officials was remarkable. On 20 August 2001, seven years after the genocide, the United States National Security Archive (USNSA) released sixteen declassified government documents under the US Freedom of Information Act (USFIA). These documents clarified what US officials in Clinton's administration knew about the genocide, and why they chose to avoid military intervention to stop the slaughter. These documents explicitly indicated that Clinton's administration, in contrast with public statements, had pressured the UN Security Council to withdraw the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) troops after the breakout of violence. It was uncooperative in other areas as well: Warren Christopher, the then Secretary of State, did not authorize the use of the term "genocide" until the first week of June 1994; the administration refused to shut down the Hutu extremist radio station, which was inciting the killings and sexual violence; and finally, the administration received early warning of and was alerted to mass killings that would take place shortly thereafter. Moreover, when General Roméo Dallaire asked an American officer why the United States did not move to halt genocide in Rwanda, the officer said "The lives of 800,000 Rwandans were only worth risking the lives of ten American troops," referring to the ten Belgian troops who were massacred by Hutu militiamen at the beginning of the Rwandan Genocide.
However, the laxity on the part of the UN Security Council to pass a resolution under chapter VII to stop war and to refer the situation in Syria to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, pursuant to Article 13(b) of the Rome Statute, is due to several factors, most importantly, failure of international political will and lack of interest on the part of the major players. Remembering the marginal and negative role of the international community in stopping the Rwandan genocide of 1994, one may recall a statement by an American diplomat who justified the negligent American role by saying: "we didn't have a dog in that fight." It is true that advancing human rights is not, and has never been, the major players' main concern! A case in point is while the Iranian minister of foreign affairs was shaking hands and celebrating the interim six-month nuclear deal in Geneva, a hanged body of a young man was swaying from a crane in a public squire in Tehran, the capital of a country known of having the world's highest per capita rate of executions, as Shirin Ebadi and Payam Akhavan provide. In the same vein, while the US and European governments have utterly failed to condemn the bloody coup d'état of July 2013 against the first ever democratically-elected civilian president of Egypt, led by the minister of defence, they took firm stances against the Ukrainian government and threatened to impose sanctions, a travel ban, and asset freeze on Ukrainians involved in killing protesters; un acceptable double standard!
The world's conspiracy of silence on mass killings in Syria must stop! It encourages the culture of impunity, and reminds one of General Roméo Dallaire's critical question: "Are we all human, or are some more human than others?"