Other Europeans Balk at Bid by Britain and France to Arm Syria’s Rebels
Maysun/European Pressphoto Agency
A Free Syrian Army fighter
with a smoke device intended to blind Syrian Army soldiers during
fighting in Aleppo on Friday. The rebels want arms from abroad.
By ANDREW HIGGINS and ANNE BARNARD
Published: March 15, 2013
BRUSSELS — As the Syrian crisis entered its third year on Friday, the
top rebel military leader declared that the opposition would “never give
up” and asked for more support, even as a push by France and Britain to
arm the outgunned rebels drew heavy resistance from other European
countries.
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Germany, Austria and other countries pushed back hard against a French-British effort to lift a weapons embargo on Syria
to allow the arming of the rebels — who say they desperately need
antiaircraft and other sophisticated weapons to turn the tide of a war
that has killed more than 70,000 people.
After a two-day European Union
summit meeting in Brussels, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany told
reporters she worried such a step would “just fan the flames of
conflict.”
Gen. Salim Idriss, the leader of the Free Syrian Army, sought Friday to
rebut some key arguments marshaled against arming the rebels — fears of
sectarian conflict and extremist Islamist influence — by declaring that
the rebels welcomed all Syrians into their fold, including members of
President Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite sect.
“We, the Free Syrian Army, want freedom and democracy for all Syrians,
whoever they are — Sunni or Shia, Alawi, Christians or Druze,” he said,
naming Syria’s major sects in a video address posted on the Internet.
But two years after Syria’s uprising started with protests over the
arrests of young boys for spraying antigovernment graffiti in the
southern city of Dara’a, supporters and opponents of President Assad
often seem to be describing two different conflicts.
Opponents blame the president for responding to peaceful protests with
overwhelming force and, when the rebellion took up arms, leveling entire
neighborhoods with air and artillery strikes.
Supporters regard the rebels as foreign-financed extremists who threaten
Syria’s minorities. The influence of foreign fighters and donors has
grown with the conflict, and some rebel groups have turned to
indiscriminate weapons like car bombs.
As the two sides dig in militarily across an increasingly divided
country, the human toll mounts, further destabilizing the region.
United Nations officials declared Friday that they had received barely
one-fifth of the money needed to care for Syrian refugees for the first
half of the year — the worst shortfall in recent memory — as their
numbers grow at a staggering rate.
In December, when there were about half a million refugees outside the
country, the number was expected to double by June.
But it surpassed one million last week — and another 126,000 refugees have been registered since.
“It gives us a chilly feeling down our spine,” Amin Awad, the refugee
agency’s Geneva-based emergency director, said in a telephone interview,
explaining that it had committed more than half its stocks for global
emergency responses to its Syrian operation.
“This is the worst crisis in terms of funding in recent history,” he said. “We are basically living week by week.”
Yet with diplomatic efforts to reach a political solution stuck, and the
world divided on whether to provide weapons to the rebels, there is no
end in sight.
The United States said Friday that it would permit Americans to send
money to Syrian rebel groups, modifying sanctions imposed earlier in the
conflict that forbade any transactions with Syrians.
The change was bound to draw criticism from those who worry that money
from the United States could end up financing movements that threaten
American interests.
The divisions at the Brussels meeting highlighted Europe’s difficulties
in speaking with a single voice on international issues, especially
foreign military intervention. France and Britain, former imperial
powers, take a far more activist approach to foreign affairs than do
Germany and Austria, which have sought for decades to shed any hints of
militarism left over from World War II.
Diplomats said France and Britain were largely alone in their push to
allow arms deliveries to opponents of Mr. Assad. Europe’s foreign policy
chief, Catherine Ashton, who is British, joined Mrs. Merkel in
expressing doubts about the wisdom of lifting the arms embargo.
France, which in January sent troops to Mali, a former French colony, to
push back an offensive by Islamist rebels, is frustrated that months
after the European Union expressed support for the operation, it is
struggling to assemble a promised training mission for the Malian armed
forces.
Frances’s president, François Hollande, said he drew hope from the fact
that the Europe’s position on Syria had already “evolved” from an
initial refusal to provide anything but humanitarian aid to the February
decision to funnel nonlethal but quasi-military aid such as flak
jackets and armored vehicles.
Ms. Merkel on Friday left open the possibility of a further shift,
saying that she had “not as yet come to a definitive position” on the
question of arms supplies.
She said that Ms. Ashton had presented a number of cautions about
supplying lethal weapons, including the risk of instability in Lebanon,
the wider Middle East and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, who has for months demanded a
more robust European policy in support of the rebels, told members of
Parliament in London this week that if other European countries
continued to block arms to Syria, Britain would be ready to act
unilaterally.
United Nations officials, meanwhile, have little leverage to pressure
countries that pledged $1.5 billion at a Syria donor conference in
Kuwait a few months ago to make good on their promises.
Jens Laerke, a spokesman for the Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs, told reporters that given the almost daily
headlines on Syria, “we’re a little surprised that this money is not
coming forward.”
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