Former Special Envoy to Syria Lakhdar Brahimi: I resigned in protest

By Henry Hullah,

Once Special Envoy to Syria for the Arab League and the U.N., Lakhdar Brahimi left his post on May 14th of this year.

He went out with a bang, telling Amanpour he resigned in protesting f the world’s refusal to act in Syria.

“I resigned because I was getting nowhere and it was the only way for me to protest the total inattention of the international community and the region to the situation in Syria”

It was a move that echoed the resignation of Former US Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford in February.

“I was no longer in a position where I felt I could defend the American policy”, said Ford just last week.

Another consequence of this ineffectual policy is what is known as blowback; a term used by spymasters to describe the unintended rebound of violence from one area to another. Peter Neumann, head of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization, told Amanpour Syria was “more significant than every other instance of foreign fighter mobilization since the Afghanistan war in the 1980s”.

Mr. Brahimi stated, “If you ignore a problem like this, it's like an infected wound. If you don't do anything to prevent it from spreading it will spread and it will not only spread inside the country it will spill all over the place.”

In the same way he is warning about Syria now he also raised the red flag about Afghanistan “This is what I said in September 1999 and nobody was listening. In 2001, I think people understood what I was talking about.”

Brahimi’s time in Syria has no doubt influenced his impassioned pleas for action as he saw first-hand how the Syrian government feigned ignorance of the brutality present in their own county.

While Special Envoy, he confronted the Syrian leader, Bashar Al-Assad, with a list of thousands of political prisoners and refused to believe he could be ignorant to the plight of his own people.

"Do you really believe that he doesn't know about these barrel bombs that are being dropped almost every day by his air force. The cannons, the tanks that are shelling the cities. It's impossible that he doesn't know."