The repression of Bashar al-Assad is beneath condemnation. Visuals of the bodies of children “writhing, choking, gasping or foaming at the mouth,” to summon the evocative expressions of The New York Times, portray horrendous inhumanity six years after the Arab Spring. And the state-sponsored disaster has happened in a country where the upheaval of 2011 was long ago reduced to irrelevance. These children are among the 70 who have been killed through the use of a nerve agent, probably Sarin gas, in Syria’s Idlib province.
The world is scarcely convinced by the strenuous efforts of the Syrian security forces to deny its involvement, let alone whether the military was acting under orders from the Presidential palace in Damascus. Suffice it to register that the palace still possesses prohibited ammunition in its armoury despite the fact that Syria, officially at least, had joined the Chemical Weapons Convention and turned over its chemical arsenal in 2013, as part of a deal to avert US military action.
Even the “red line” set by President Obama as a precaution against chemical attacks has not been adhered to ~ a fact that appears to have given Donald Trump another handle against his predecessor. Judging by the presentations of the British Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, and the EU foreign affairs chief, Federica Mogherini, at the European Parliament in Brussels last Wednesday, “all evidence points to the Syrian President being behind the attack”. And it shall not be easy for the Kremlin to counter the very obvious. Of course, the comity of nations needs to be united against Assad at this juncture, and above all lend an impetus to the “peace talks” in Geneva. But this isn’t the moment for another bout of pow-wow.
Almost certainly, the world knows who did it. And the world, pre-eminently the United Nations, must now act. The official version strains credulity. Syria has blamed the rebels who hold the town of Khan Sheikhoun.
And the spin-doctors among Assad’s friends in Moscow claim that Syrian planes had struck a rebel stockpile of nerve agents, accidentally releasing them into the atmosphere. For all the inherent strength of the insurgents and the Caliphate, the “stockpile of nerve agents” remains the preserve of the establishment.
To put it bluntly, the Assad regime has used illegal weapons against its own people. Ergo, the Syrian government has committed a war crime, going by the certitudes of international law. It is a crime that is embedded in the regime’s impunity. Strained efforts to duck the reality are a convoluted exercise in self-deception. It is a terrifying prospect if the use of chemical weapons goes unpunished. Assad being Assad, he may yet wriggle out of the catastrophic crime.