Sir, – Your Front page exposure (March 13th) of the latest horrific rape and murder of innocent women and children in Syria demands a very urgent response from our elected representatives, not least because silence amounts to complicity in the face of crimes against humanity.
The international community has failed to make any difference in halting the incredibly brutal crimes being committed by the Assad regime. Indeed, Kofi Annan’s efforts have if anything made the situation worse, by conferring a kind of legitimacy on Assad, implying he must be part of the solution.
As if to underline the folly of that approach, the heartless crimes you commendably gave Front page attention, were committed on the very same day Annan met Assad.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders as well as others have produced enough reports about shocking human rights abuses in Syria to paper all of the walls of Leinster House.
Only by making Assad totally isolated internationally, and thoroughly embarrassing his international backers such as Russia and China, have we any hope of ending one of the worst tyrannies of our time.
We left it too late for countless thousands in Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur, so much so that the phrase “never again” has lost all meaning. Our TDs and Senators must rise to an emergency resolution condemning the crimes against humanity being committed in Syria, and demand Assad’s immediate removal from office and his indictment by the International Criminal Court. – Yours, etc,
Sir, – Minister for Foreign Affairs Eamon Gilmore appears more incensed by the prospect of foreign intervention in reaction to the Assad regime’s systematic murder, rape and torture of its opponents than those acts themselves (“Gilmore opposed to US military action in Syria,” Home News, March 8th). Furthermore, he proposes no credible response, while he implores Ireland’s politicians to advocate that the US not act.
One would have hoped that the lesson of the war in Bosnia – that diplomacy doesn’t end mass atrocities, application of force against their perpetrators does – would have sunk in exactly 20 years after that war, which killed over 100,000, began.
Another lesson of that war should have been that the targets of such brutal campaigns should have a right to defend themselves. The Irish Timeshas reported that the victims of the Assad regime's barbarism include civilian patients in hospital. Yet Mr Gilmore inveighs against direct foreign intervention, but also against allowing Syrians to defend themselves against Assad's onslaught.
Ireland took exactly the same stand on Bosnia as it is now taking on Syria – a position now universally discredited and disowned. In 2010 and 2011, a cross-party group of TDs and Senators demanded that Bosnian Serb military commander and Srebrenica perpetrator Ratko Mladic be transferred for trial to The Hague before Serbia could move any closer toward the EU.
This was among the factors that shifted Belgrade’s cost-benefit analysis and his subsequent “discovery” and apprehension.
We hope that instead of helping pick up the pieces and deliver justice post hoc for Syria, Ireland will take a more active role in pressing the EU to work to prevent atrocities in real time – or at least not try to dissuade those who are so inclined from advocating such action. – Yours, etc,