Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky and Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad competed this Friday for photo of the day at the Arab League annual summit. The first, by landing by surprise in the Saudi city of Jeddah and meeting with Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman, ruler de facto and mediator in prisoner exchanges between Moscow and kyiv. The second, by marking with his presence the return of Damascus to the pan-Arab organization 12 years after its suspension for repressing peaceful protests -in the framework of the Arab Spring- that degenerated into an unfinished war that has killed half a million people. and has turned half the population into displaced persons or refugees.
The summit in Jeddah, the most symbolic in a decade of the ossified organization, not only symbolizes the return to the Arab fold of the same El Asad that most member countries tried to overthrow. It also supposes the outline of a new Middle East, less consumed by rivalries, less influenced by Washington and with Saudi Arabia as mediator.
The Syrian president occupied this Friday the seat that the Arab League itself gave a decade ago to the Syrian opposition, something unprecedented since the creation of the organization in 1945. His forces have participated in tens of thousands of disappearances and torture, used chemical weapons and dropped barrel bombs on civilian areas. For this reason, aware of the symbolic triumph that his return represented, he was smiling and relaxed since he got off the plane and was received in the same way as the rest of the leaders. Already in the conclave hotel, Bin Salmán greeted him with a warm gesture and two kisses, while the Egyptian president, Abdelfatá Al Sisi, held a relaxed dialogue with him.
The discordant note was put by the emir of Qatar, Tamim Bin Hamad al Thani. A prominent supporter of the rebels, he called El Asad a “war criminal” five years ago, when his country hosted the summit. This Friday, he left the room when the Syrian president was going to speak and did not want to give a speech or hold bilateral meetings, reports the Reuters agency.
In his address to the plenary, El Asad has interpreted his return to the Arab League as “a historic opportunity” and has expressed his desire that it mark “the beginning of a new phase in common Arab action in favor of solidarity, peace in the region, development and prosperity, instead of war and destruction”. He has also taken a taunt at Turkey, which supports a section of the rebels and controls parts of northern Syria, warning of the “danger of Ottoman expansionist thinking.”
“Assad did not want to pay a price for re-entry, and he has not. The Arab countries need him more than he needs them,” Vali Nasr, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies and International Relations at Johns Hopkins University in the United States, said by phone. Nasr points out that Assad has “the upper hand” because “his survival does not depend on acceptance among the Arab countries, but is guaranteed by Russia and Iran”, while the Arab countries want to resolve the issue of refugees and the drug trafficking from Syria.
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The gesture culminates years of individual approaches to Damascus. Member countries that sided with the rebels now assume that Assad has virtually won the war, want to reduce Iran’s influence in the country, and view the Western path of sanctions as wrong and ineffective. “It is not a total victory, because it will not be accompanied by massive investments, but it is a symbolic political victory. A way of saying ‘The regime is here to stay’, which will also influence the debate in the European Union”, where it could encourage countries like Italy, Poland or Greece to distance themselves from the position of the Franco-German axis, explains why phone Joseph Daher, a Swiss-Syrian analyst and professor at the European University Institute in Florence.
Coexistence in the Middle East
The embrace of Damascus is part of a broader regional dynamic. The rivals in the Middle East have been burying the hatchet in search of a certain coexistence, despite their conflicting strategic interests. “All the players right now share an interest in focusing on their own economic growth, for which they need to reduce instability,” says Daher.
More so now that the United States has its sights set on the war in Ukraine and the rivalry with China. Washington’s Arab allies have perceived for years how, despite public declarations, it has less and less interest and weight in the area. In 2021, it withdrew from Afghanistan and, in 2019, partly from northern Syria. They have also come to see Tehran as a key regional player that is going to maintain its weight. Already in 2019, the United States let go of attacks (attributed to Iran) on oil tankers off the Emirati coast and on Saudi oil facilities, which led Abu Dhabi to reconfigure its policy of alliances.
“The Arab world is ready to re-engage with Syria, and no country in the world can stop this process. Neither Iran nor the United States nor Europe. And it happens at a time when Damascus, which feels isolated and wants to regain legitimacy, desperately needs that outstretched hand,” said Emirati political scientist Abdullah Abduljaleq on Thursday. to the lebanese daily L’Orient Le Jour. Assad, he adds, sees the normalization of relations with the Arab countries “as a first stage before the European one and, eventually, the American one.”
Asad, treated for years as a pariah also in the Arab world, has been invited by the United Arab Emirates (the country most involved in the rehabilitation of the Syrian leader) to the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, which begins in November , Syrian state news agency Sana reported last week. This appointment would mark his first participation in an international event since the start of the war, in which he would come across the same Western leaders who support his fall and keep the country sanctioned.
Earthquake and agreement between Riyadh and Tehran
Two moments this year have a lot to do with the presence of El Asad this Friday in Jeddah. The first, in February, was the earthquake with its epicenter in Turkey that claimed some 6,000 lives in Syria. He gave even more importance to his ability to ensure that humanitarian aid also reached the rebel side, the one most affected by the earthquake. The United States temporarily suspended sanctions against the regime and Arab solidarity was shown: the foreign ministers of Egypt and Jordan, Sameh Shoukry and Ayman Safadi, visited Damascus for the first time in a decade; the Sultan of Oman, Haitham Bin Tariq al Said, received El Asad with a carpet; and the King of Bahrain, Hamad Bin Isa al Khalifa, phoned him.
The other, a month later, was the agreement for the normalization of relations that Iran and Saudi Arabia signed, mediated by Beijing, the two great powers facing each other for regional hegemony and who intensely supported opposing sides in the Syrian war.
The new foreign policy of the host, Saudi Arabia, has been key. Bin Salmán began with a very aggressive towards Iran, in Yemen in particular, and his name was stained by the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. He now remains militarily dependent on the United States, but has developed important economic ties with China, has refrained from taking sides in the Ukraine war, and increasingly seeks to mediate, as recently in Sudan.
“Their attitude towards the West is ‘We are going to sit with each other. We are going to decide who to talk to and we do not follow your interests or your human rights criteria”, explains Professor Nasr.
His invitation to the Ukrainian Volodimir Zelenski is, in fact, another demonstration of his ability to forge alliances with various gangs, once he has left behind his close alignment with Washington and that the West needs his hydrocarbons, as an alternative to the Russians.
It has not been just a coup de effect. North Africa and the Middle East are no strangers to the rise in food prices caused by the war. The clearest case is Egypt ―which imported its grain from Russia and the Ukraine―, with runaway inflation and capital flight.
Other countries, especially in the Gulf, have been moving closer to Moscow, which generally maintains good relations with the Arab world, as a legacy of the Cold War. Russia’s entry into the Syrian conflict in 2015 was also key for El Asad to control a large part of the country today.
For this reason, Zelensky – who arrived by surprise on a French government plane – clearly challenged the Arab countries to review their position in the face of the conflict: “Unfortunately, there are some in the world, and some among you, who look the other way before these cases and illegal annexations. I’m here so everyone can take an honest look at them, no matter how much the Russians try to influence.” Zelensky, who will later address the G-7 summit in the Japanese city of Hiroshima, also played the Muslim solidarity card by traveling with representatives of the Crimean Tatar community, the Ukrainian peninsula that Moscow annexed in 2014.
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