COULD IRAN PLAY A STABILISING ROLE IN SYRIA?
Brenton Clark
ABC Online
July 19 2012
Australia
In recent days, former UN secretary general Kofi Annan has made
a vocal push to include Iran in any attempt to bring peace to the
current unrest in Syria.
Annan has declared that Iran could play a ‘positive role’ in Syria,
and the success of his proposed six point plan hinges significantly
on Iranian involvement in any internationally brokered agreement.
However, Annan’s proposal for an Iranian role in solving this conflict
has been met with sheer incredulity in the West, particularly in the
United States, where government officials have rebuffed Annan and
sought to further isolate Iran from international talks on Syria.
Such a negative stance should not come as any surprise, and the
constant accusations of Iranian involvement in supporting the Bashar
al-Assad regime, and the country’s alleged past and present attempts to
destabilise the wider Middle Eastern region, give particular credence
to official United States claims that Iran has only a ‘destructive’
role to play in Syria.
However, on closer inspection, Iran’s track record over the past
20 years in attempting to solve regional disputes and instability
potentially undermines the widely held assertion that Iran is incapable
of playing a constructive role in bringing about peace and an end to
violence in Syria.
Iran and regional insecurity: a constructive political actor?
Over the past two decades, Iran has had to deal with perpetual
instability on its borders, from the chaos that followed the fall
of the Soviet Union, to the recent United States’ led invasion of
Afghanistan.
While there is the obvious exception of Lebanon and Palestine, where
Iran has made consistent and ill conceived attempts to undermine
Israel, Iran’s broader regional agendas have been significantly
pragmatic in nature. Iran has consistently attempted to maintain
the political status quo and retain some semblance of stability on
its borders.
Three major examples of Iran’s attempts to broker peace and ensure
stability within its region must be considered in the cases of
Afghanistan, the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute between Armenia and
Azerbaijan, and the civil war which enveloped Tajikistan throughout
the 1990s.
Although all three of these cases are different to the events which
are presently unfolding in Syria, Iran’s efforts in attempting to
bring about peace in all three of these situations does weaken the
argument that Iran could not and should not play a role in any future
peace negotiations between the international community, the Syrian
government, and opposition groups.
Afghanistan Throughout the 1990s, while the Taliban wreaked havoc
in Afghanistan with the explicit support of a number of Gulf Arab
states and Pakistan, Iran along with India, Russia and the post-Soviet
‘stans acted as a bulwark against the Taliban threat, supporting the
Northern Alliance and various other anti-Taliban forces.
While Iran opposed the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, preferring
a UN-sanctioned intervention, Iran was instrumental in the success
of the US-sponsored Bonn Conference, which led to the creation of
Afghanistan’s first post-Taliban government.
Throughout the early parts of the US invasion of Afghanistan, US
and Iranian envoys and intelligence officials worked closely and
fruitfully at the Bonn Conference and on the ground in Afghanistan.
Rather than blocking the US attempts to install Pushtun Hamid Karzai
as Afghanistan’s president, Iran did not stand in the United States
way, and sought cooperation rather than conflict with American policy
planners, preferring stability rather than instability in Afghanistan.
Following the Bonn Conference, Iran provided significant amounts of
aid to Afghanistan, pledging $US560 million at a 2002 international
donor conference, the biggest pledge made by any developing state.
While Iran’s efforts were noted, they meant little in the post-9/11
political environment, in which former United States President George
W Bush declared that Iran was in fact a member of a so-called ‘Axis
of Evil’ which was a threat to global security.
Furthermore, despite Iran’s historical hostility towards the Taliban,
and the effect that instability in Afghanistan has on Iran’s own
national security, the United States continues to declare that Iran
is in fact a supporter of the Taliban and has sought to undermine
Afghan political stability, a claim consistently denied by Iranian
government officials.
Nagorno-Karabakh The conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over
Nagorno-Karabakh continues to be one of the most prolonged and brutal
disputes in the post-Soviet era. To this present day, Armenia and
Azerbaijan continue to engage in sabre rattling over this small but
symbolic territory, which has contributed to the death of almost
30,000 Armenians and Azeris, and led to the displacement of over a
million civilians.
While a full outline of this complex conflict is beyond the scope
of this article, the potential for outside state actors to become
involved in this conflict continues to be of significant risk. Russia
has provided substantial arms and support to the Christian Armenians
and continues to maintain a Russian army base on Armenian soil, while
the Shiite Azeri’s have been heavily supported in this conflict by
Turkey, and continue to receive major arm sales from Israel.
Iran from the outset has been placed in a tricky situation in this
conflict; over 25 per cent of its population are ethnic Azeris,
and it has a small but important population of Armenians. Iran has
made consistent attempts to maintain good relations with Armenia
throughout the post-Soviet era (Iran remains one of Armenia’s biggest
economic partners). While Iran should have been the first to support
its co-religionists in Azerbaijan against the Christian Armenians,
this has not been the case due to a range of geostrategic, economic and
domestic reasons; in particular, Iran’s fears over Azeri secessionism
in its northern regions.
Throughout this conflict, Iran has attempted to balance out and
mediate between the two parties. Iran did not provide weapons to
either side and has attempted to act in an even-handed manner,
with a mixed level of success. Iran from the outset sought to end
the violence in Nagorno-Karabakh with the first cease fire signed
in Tehran in 1993, which was later broken by Armenian offensives,
an act that was severely condemned by the Iranian government.
Over the last decade, however, Iran and Azerbaijan relations have taken
a turn for the worse, and Iran’s ability to mediate in this conflict
has been significantly undermined by its rivalry with Azerbaijan’s
two major allies the United States and Israel, and Iran’s real and
imagined favouritism towards Armenia. While Iran’s initial mediation
efforts failed, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict highlights the nuances
in Iran’s foreign policy agendas and undermines the tautological
accounts of Iran as a solely Islamist and Shia-driven actor.
The Tajik Civil War (1992-1997) The Tajik Civil War, an internationally
forgotten but fratricidal conflict between various tribal groups and
regional clans, neo-communists, Islamists and pro-democracy forces,
killed over 50,000 people and displaced over a million Tajiks.
Throughout this civil war, a number of Western policy planners
declared Iran’s involvement in this conflict as dangerous and said
it would usher in the beginning of greater Iranian Islamist influence
throughout the Central Asian region.
While Iran did provide political sanctuary to a number of Tajik
Islamic figures such as current Tajik senator Akbar Turajonzoda,
Iran did not attempt to destabilise or ‘infect’ Tajikistan with its
revolutionary brand of Islam.
Throughout the conflict Iranian political elites displayed considerable
pragmatism and, along with Russia, negotiated peace between the warring
factions, which won considerable praise by a number of international
organisations including the United Nations.
Whilst alarmist headlines proliferated throughout the West of a war
between communism and Islamism, Iranian political elites were keenly
aware of the regionalist and tribal nature of this conflict, and
forced a number of key opposition parties to the negotiating table,
urging current Tajik president Emomali Rahmon to share power with
both secular and Islamist opposition groups.
This pragmatism, and Iran’s efforts to bring an end to the civil war
in Tajikistan, was welcomed by the Tajik government, and garnered
considerable political capital and goodwill towards Iran from
Tajikistan, and flies in the face of Iran’s apparently overwhelmingly
nefarious foreign policy objectives.
Syria?
Although it is hard to believe that Iran could play a key role in
bringing an end to the bloodshed in Syria, it also seemed far-fetched
at the time that Iran would cooperate with the United States in
Afghanistan, not support Azeri Shiites against a Christian foe, and
bring peace to a small but fractured post-Soviet Central Asian state.
While any Iranian involvement in Syrian negotiations should be viewed
with overwhelming caution, it should also be accepted as a necessary
and potentially helpful development.
We shouldn’t take an ideologically blinkered and value-biased approach
towards Iran which uses the Iranian-Israeli conflict, Iran’s relations
with the United States, or Iran’s nuclear program as straw men for
the rest of Iran’s international interactions.
The merits of Iranian engagement in Syria should be viewed in a
realistic and nuanced fashion. With tens of thousands of Syrians
already dead, every diplomatic option needs to be placed on the table.
Brenton Clark is a postdoctoral researcher at the Australian National
University Centre for Arabic and Islamic Studies (Middle East and
Central Asia) in Canberra.
From: A. Papazian
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4141024.html