Washington’s Caesar Act will only intensify Syria’s suffering

The latest round of US sanctions against Syria laid out in the Caesar Act, which came into force last week, is unlikely to help friend or foe. According to experts and witnesses on all sides the law, for all its good intentions of helping opponents of the Assad regime, is likely to make a dire situation even worse.

The law is named after the codename for the agent from Syria’s state security services who passed on a memory stick recording 55,000 images of atrocities committed by the Damascus regime. The sanction is against banking activity of any person, institution or apparatus assisting the Assad family or the military junta.

“It will hit the banks and families in Lebanon, where the situation is very, very bad,” said the UN Special Envoy for Syria and veteran Norwegian diplomat, Geir O’ Pedersen, in a webinar conference this week. “Lebanon is suffering from Covid, and some refugees and displaced are facing starvation. Famine is now knocking on the door in Syria as well.”

Lebanese banks are under severe pressure, having ridden the crisis of the nine-year war. Hezbollah is part of the governing coalition in Beirut, as well as a lynchpin supporter of the Assad regime in Syria, and brings with it the forces and subsidies of Iran, its main sponsor. It will be badly hit by the Caesar Act, which threatens its assets abroad.

Banks in Lebanon had kept going by offering handsome rates on deposits of 10% and above. Now the Lebanese pound is collapsing and depositors cannot get their money out. “It looks a bit of a Ponzi scheme,” says Alan Philps of the Chatham House think-tank.

Today nearly a third of Lebanon’s population of around seven million are refugees. Some have little or no access to aid, but very few of the 1.5 million Syrian refugees are prepared to risk returning to Syria, according to Ambassador Pedersen. Desperation has led to violence. Fighting in the refugee camps has been reported from the northern port city of Tripoli in Lebanon on June 18, the day the Caesar Act took effect.

Pederson says Syria is now suffering badly from a “news fatigue”, which has taken it out of world media headlines. There is very little good news to sift from the ash piles of dreadful tidings. He calculates that at least 700,000 have been killed in the nine years and two months of fighting. Well over half of Syria’s inhabitants at the beginning of 2011 have been driven from their homes. The World Food Programme says  at least nine million displaced inside the country are now on the breadline and in need of food aid.

Just short of seven million are now in the neighbouring countries, Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. Turkey is hosting around 3.6 million – with over half children and adolescents receiving no schooling whatsoever. Jordan and Lebanon have the highest proportion of refugees to resident population of any countries in the world. And now comes Covid-19. Only now is it beginning to make its mark in both countries – and for Pedersen the pressures on social stability in Jordan are not too far behind those in Lebanon.

The faint glimmer of good news in Syria is that there has been little of the heavy fighting with area shelling, barrel bombs from helicopters and aerial strikes in recent months. Islamic State, or Daesh, has been pushed from its urban heartlands, but there has been a resurgence of guerrilla skirmishes in eastern Syria and across into Iraq since the beginning of the year, with more than 500 incidents recorded. Daesh and IS cells have been reforming, though quite what the new format of the movement will be is far from clear.

“One of the most worrying elements is the number – tens of thousands – who have just disappeared altogether. There is no trace of them.”

Throughout the country there is mistrust on all sides, says Pedersen, which is made worse by the collapse of the Damascus economy. This week the exchange rate is 3,000 Syrian pounds to the dollar . On the eve of the insurgency in 2011 it was about 8 pounds to the dollar. Now there is not even the money to pay wages and salaries.

“The effect of the crisis is everywhere – it is really sad to see, in the environment, infrastructure, the fabric of society and trust across the board. All of this is compounded by government corruption and mismanagement, plus the crisis in Lebanon and Covid-19. Now you have more sanctions.”

The target for the Caesar Syria Civil Protection Act – to give the bill its full congressional title – is the business operations of the Assad clan. Key to those is the first lady of Damascus, Asma al-Assad, one of 39 individuals named in the bill. A former merchant banker, she is credited with running cross-border money laundering operations via the Lebanese banks.

Now Bashar al-Assad has turned on his richest relative, his first cousin and childhood playground buddy, the billionaire Rami Makhlouf. He has accused him of corruption and tried to sequester his wealth, made largely from telecommunications. Makhlouf says it’s part of an intra-clan feud and that his, family, not the Assads, are the rightful leaders of the Alawite sect.

No-one expects Bashar to fall very soon. But he has few friends at home and abroad. He is Russia’s man, but Moscow doesn’t want to write him a blank cheque. “At home there is no single coalition that can bring peace, and there is no single outside power or alliance that can do so, either,” says Pedersen.

The aim is still to achieve agreement for a new constitution, through the UN sponsored talks in Geneva, and then go to elections, all under the terms of UN Security Council Resolution 2254. “It’s difficult, but then they said the Oslo accords were impossible,” says Pedersen , referring to the 1993-1995 Israel-Palestine peace talks, in which he was instrumental.

Hardest to read, but potentially decisive, is the relationship between Turkey and Russia – cool friendship in Syria, and cool rivalry in Libya.

“In Libya, though on opposite sides, they have been careful not to clash directly.”

Syria and Libya now mirror each other. The forces on the ground in both countries are needed to deliver a solution, but neither country can rely on any single outside power or sponsor to deliver the winning blow.