Arbak Khachatryan: A serious new player has emerged in Syria

Independent human rights defender and geopolitical expert Arbak Khachatryan is a regular commentator for our newspaper. All his gloomy predictions come true—about problems in Russia’s relations with Georgia, Ukraine and Turkey, the danger of ISIS, and the economic crisis: he warned of all the significant challenges to civilisation long before they emerged. But Khachatryan does more than predict; he never stops repeating that there is a way out of this nightmare. That way lies in the principles of “People’s Diplomacy” that he advocates.

We asked Arbak Shaumyanovich to comment on the latest geopolitical events. — The news from Syria is not encouraging. Is it a dead end there, or the beginning of the end? I recall that (“On the Threshold of Nuclear Winter,” AN No. 47 (488), 10 December 2015) you warned that “with carpet bombing, we are only bringing the world closer to the destruction of humanity. Instead of bombing, all sides of our fragile multipolar world must agree to change the principles of the global economy, because the root of poverty and terrorism lies in treating third countries as raw-material appendages.

An entire generation has already grown up in the East that knows how to earn its bread only by killing ‘infidels.’ How many more terrorist attacks must occur in Europe and America before the civilised world finally understands what needs to be done?” — But how can agreement on Syria actually be reached? Every player has its own interests there. — Yes, Pandora’s box is already open, and the situation in Syria, and throughout the world, is much more frightening than it was in December 2015. But I still believe partial agreement can be reached over this conflict.

For that, however, several facts must be recognised and accepted. First, we must stop paying attention to Europe; there are no real politicians there now, people with a genuinely state-oriented, global, humanitarian approach to the matter. A diplomat like Hans-Dietrich Genscher, for example, who, as you remember, managed to create conditions acceptable to everyone for Khodorkovsky’s pardon. Why did he do it? What interest did he have in that story? None at all! European politicians of the twentieth century simply thought first of universal human values.

Now European Community politicians are trying to solve their own refugee problems in Syria, failing to understand that a “banking” approach to a humanitarian conflict will not work. Germany could have mediated between Russia and America, but in my opinion Merkel has already missed that opportunity. No matter how often Putin meets European leaders today—and this is a diplomatic norm that will be observed—it will produce no result. Tension is rising to the limit. I think that soon, to achieve a local advantage, China will become the mediator and principal player for the first time.

In the long term this is dangerous, considering their enormous financial and human resources worldwide. So expect Chinese diplomacy to begin active involvement in the negotiating process very soon. China is precisely the mediator everyone will listen to. Third, Iran has not yet had its say; after decades under UN sanctions it has preserved its dignity and statehood. Everything they are doing in the region now is only a warm-up; the thousand-year-old Eastern tradition of “digesting” invaders has not disappeared—they are, after all, descendants of the great Persians.

The time has come; the world is changing. Nobody previously expected these states to play such a role on a global scale, but that will begin very soon. I think the world banking and financial system will also be fundamentally changed. The combination of all these factors will make it possible to start a real process in Syria. Of course, that former united Syria cannot be restored; the map will be radically redrawn and peace will be relative. Generations have grown up amid war and destruction: what must be done, and how much time is needed, for them to feel like citizens of a state and return to peaceful life?

It is almost impossible. — And relations between Russia and the United States are more heated than ever… — Yes, for the first time since the United States’ “victory” over the USSR in the Cold War, Russia has to be reckoned with. Russia’s resistance, its own interests and its firm defence of them came as a complete surprise to the global economic octopus whose interests the United States protects. Yet everything had begun so successfully for them: all those actions of the Russian Federation’s first president, his entourage and family, kickbacks, the unpunished transfer of trillions abroad, the squandering of historically Russian lands and spheres of influence—we could talk about this at length, and I have written about it repeatedly in my articles.

All that created the appearance that Russia was a weak country, fit only to be a raw-material base wholly controlled by so-called “Western Democracy.” As a consequence of that external control, the entire lawlessness of these “Yeltsin–Gaidar metastases” takes place even more criminally and with greater impunity in the former Soviet republics that depended on Russia politically and economically. And in Russia itself, small and medium-sized business has still not developed. To this day, only people and organisations with good credit histories can receive loans.

But consider this: people took out loans at enormous interest rates, and even working honestly they cannot repay them. Yet that money still remained in Russia—food, medicine, education and so on—and worked for the Russian economy. Meanwhile, bank owners, major-company shareholders, officials and others whose credit histories are impeccable took enormous amounts of capital out of Russia, thousands of times greater than the population’s unpaid loans. — But the “clean-up” has already begun… — Yes, but this is a very small percentage… A clear mechanism must be developed to forgive these loans for the population, and loans must also be offered on reasonable terms to develop small businesses.

We see the enormous economic and political pressure being exerted on Russia today. Analysing the situation concerning foreign policy, armaments, the restoration of military bases and the domestic laws being passed, I come to the view that mobilisation is taking place in Russia. It is necessary to overcome the global-scale difficulties now facing the country. Although the world is already “burning,” may God grant that reason prevails and nobody reaches for the nuclear button.