Amman, November 27, 2013 – The West should have done more to end the crisis in Syria, according to an audience at the New Arab Debates (NAD)- a free speech forum operating in the Middle East and North Africa.
Just over 54 percent of the participants – mostly Jordanian students, political activists and Syrian refugees – supported the motion: “The West has failed the Syrian people”.
The session marked the launch of the third season of the NAD, sponsored by the Norwegian Foreign Ministry to provide a platform for rigorous, political discussion on controversial issues.
Speaking for the motion, Fawaz Tello, Syrian opposition activist who resigned from the Syrian National Council (SNC) in 2012 calling it undemocratic, said the West should have armed civilian and militia groups to oust Assad instead of “feeding the Syrian refugees”.
The international community , he said, had pressured the Gulf States not to send arms to the Syrian opposition, thus allowing the Syrian regime to “shoot and kill people on the streets like birds” .
“The West is part of these massacres. They want to preserve the regime of Assad. The West is helping Syrians go to heaven.”
Tello, who was jailed for six years in Syria, said the opposition should boycott the long-delayed “Geneva 2” conference, set for January 22 if Assad attends. “How can you sit down with a criminal who has killed over 200,000 people?” he asked.
Arguing against the motion, Daoud Kuttab, award-winning journalist and columnist for Al Monitor, said that watching 60 years of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Arabs should have no illusion about the West’s ability to solve the crisis in Syria – or its consistency. “First they tell Assad to go then they start talking to him.”
Kuttab claimed Western governments are providing humanitarian aid to the Syrians “only because of their guilty conscience”. The crisis, he added, could not be ended without a negotiated settlement that stopped the killing and restored the dignity and rights of Syrians.
A Syrian woman in the audience was asked what the West could realistically do to help her country. “Get Bashar out,” she replied. “This can be done and I think America can do it.”
Organizers compared the final audience vote to one they had cast at the beginning of the evening. It showed that 18 percent of participants had changed their mind by the end of the debate and voted against the motion.