What To Do?

"The real fear (is) that the level of brutality that Assad is using -- if it doesn't get a response -- is an open invitation for Assad, people in Syria, people elsewhere to use these chemical weapons.
"It cannot be acceptable in the international community for a dictator to use these weapons of mass destruction and kill hundreds of men, women and children.
"The comments (Putin) has made of late, I think, are empty and hollow.
"We hope that rational, sane people, freedom-loving people, people who abhor the use of these weapons, want to work collectively to ensure to the best of our ability that these weapons are not used again."
Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird

Police officers detain a man who tried to protest against the upcoming G20 summit in central St. Petersburg on Wednesday.  Photograph by: Getty Images , The Province

The G20 Summit taking place in St.Petersburg the next few days has a formal agenda that is mostly economics-driven, as all such affairs are. This time, however, the summit is hosting not only world leaders focused in discussing the global economy, but another emergency pressure that has been foisted on the world, the breakdown of social cohesion and restraints against mass murder by a government conducting assaults against its own population. Or a part thereof; where an Alawite Shia-Baathist government is battling a Syrian Sunni opposition.

This time around, national foreign affairs ministers are accompanying the world leaders for gatherings of their own to discuss the critical situation. All feeling that it is incumbent on the international community to somehow advise the Syrian regime that all is not well, and they demand and plead, insist and request that he cease and desist. To urge him to communicate and to meet with his adversaries to hammer out an agreement that might be satisfactory to both sides, rather than continue his annihilation strategy.

Of course President Bashar al-Assad, sweetly and reasonably, reminds his critics that his country is in the process of a battle between legitimacy and terrorism. That his country has been infiltrated by jihadists, Islamist psychopaths who have been encouraged by the West, which has paid them to disrupt the peace and quiet of his realm and his rule. That it was they who mounted a sophisticated, militarily professional attack with deadly chemical weapons -- an act he deplores -- on innocents whose deaths he mourns deeply.

The sideline summit of G20 foreign ministers has a distinct purpose therefore, the matter at hand, to discuss what Canada's foreign minister names "the biggest humanitarian challenge of this century". The grim reality of a government that not only oppresses a majority religious sect, favouring his own minority Muslim sect, and refusing when asked to offer equality of citizenship to all his subjects, then escalating the conflict of opinions to a war of attrition.

Canada, said Mr. Baird has no expectations that Russian President Vladimir Putin will come to the realization that it was the regime that deployed deadly chemical weapons in an attack against his own on a suburb of Damascus, in his determination to dislodge the hold of the rebels who have captured the area. Syria has a steadfast friend in Russia, the supplier of its armaments, its tanks, its attack helicopters and fighter jets all of which have been used against its own population.

And it appears increasingly likely that within the confines of the G20, where U.S. President Barack Obama is attempting to persuade other world leaders to join him in assuming the leadership of a planned deterrent strike against Syria, that there will be paltry few takers. There is France, where Francois Hollande has decided that he too will seek assent from his parliament, just as Mr. Obama seeks assent from Congress. Aside from Canada, which has pledged diplomatic, not military support, all others have held their own counsel.

The international community is dismayed, aghast, horribly upset over the mass brutalities, the atrocities that have taken place in Syria, leaving millions homeless as internal and external refugees, and well over 120,000 Syrians dead from the two-and-a-half-year-old conflict. Above all, the horrific chemical attack has rivetted the attention of the world with abhorrence. So Bashar al-Assad is roundly condemned.

Enter yet another Middle East conflict where each side is determined to slaughter the other by whatever means conceivable and inconceivable to others? Those who have experienced what the outcome of such intervention creates shrug their metaphoric shoulders. It is a travesty of the human experience admittedly, but if and when two sides equally balanced in hatred, both supported by the invaluably-murderous assistance of pathological killers mean to kill, they will kill.



East Indians have a common expression of helplessness and it is a simple expression of human confusion at the dilemma of events overtaking one: "What to do, what to do, what to do?"