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Three years on, has enough been done on Syria?

24 Mar 2014

AIIA Fellows responding to the burning question of the week.

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Expert Panel-Fellows of the AIIA
Hilary Charlesworth FAIIA-Professor, ANU; Director of Centre for International Governance and Justice	Jocelyn Chey AM FAIIA-Visiting Professor, University of Sydney; former Consul-General in Hong Kong	James Cotton FAIIA-Emeritus Professor at the University of NSW	Rawdon Dalrymple AO FAIIA-Former Visiting Professor, University of Sydney; Chairman of ASEAN Focus Group Ltd	Graeme Dobell FAIIA-Journalist Fellow, Australian Strategic Policy Institute	Erika Feller FAIIA-Former UNHCR Assistant High Commissioner for Protection
Janet Hunt FAIIA-Former Head of the Australian Council for Overseas Aid	James Ingram AO FAIIA-Former Diplomat and Head of the UN World Food Program	John McCarthy AO FAIIA-Former Ambassador to Japan, Indonesia, the United States, Thailand, Mexico and Vietnam	Robert O’Neill FAIIA– Former Chichele Professor of the History of War, Oxford University	Garry Woodard FAIIA-Former Diplomat and Senior Fellow, University of Melbourne	Richard Woolcott FAIIA-Former Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade

Question: Three years on, has the international community done enough on Syria?

Rawdon Dalrymple AO FAIIA

Where Syria is concerned, and indeed where a number of other vexed issues are concerned, it makes at best only aspirational sense to speak of an “international community”. Australia cannot avoid having something to say on the Syrian issues because of our temporary membership of the Security Council. But it is very remote from our direct national interests and any views we might express are unlikely to carry significant weight.

Jocelyn Chey AM FAIIA

I think Moir’s cartoon in the Sydney Morning Herald says it all, really. It shows the husband of a Syrian refugee family explaining to his desperate wife that the international community has united to find the missing Malaysian Airlines plane. In a contrasting response to the Syrian crisis, the same international community has been unable to agree on common action. As a result the crisis may well become a perpetual tragedy like the fate of the millions of Palestinian refugees.

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