The West has failed the Syrian people

The West should have done more to end the crisis in Syria, according to the audience at a debate held in Amman. The event launched the third series of the New Arab Debates.

Just over 54 percent supported the motion: ‘The West has failed the Syrian people’.

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”.

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.

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 were 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.

Comparing the pre-debate vote with the final one revealed that 18 percent of the audience changed their mind during the event. Initially supporting the motion, they decided to oppose it in the final vote.