Ana Maria Luca

The Council of the European Union decided to impose sanctions on exports to Syria of arms and equipment that could be used for internal repression, as well as institute a visa ban and freeze the assets of 13 officials and associates of the Syrian regime.
After two weeks of silent negotiations between the 27 member countries of the EU, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s name was deleted from the suggested “list of infamy.” The EU ambassadors agreed last Friday that the list should be headed by Maher al-Assad, the president’s brother and commander of the army’s 4th division, who is believed to be overseeing the violence against anti-regime demonstrators.

The list also includes the head of the General Intelligence Services, Ali Mamlouk, and businessman and Assad’s maternal cousin, Rami Makhlouf, who “bankrolls the regime in Damascus,” according to the EU Council decision. The head of Syrian Military Intelligence Abd Al Fatah Qudsiyah and several security officials in Daraa and Banias are also being targeted by the asset freeze and travel ban.

 “The aim of these measures is to achieve a change of policy by the Syrian leadership without further delay,” said Catherine Ashton, the EU’s high representative for foreign relations, in a statement released by her press office on Monday. “The EU urges Syria to put an immediate end to violence and swiftly introduce genuine and comprehensive political reform, the only way to provide peace and stability for Syria in the long term,” the statement added.
Ashton also said that if the Syrian leadership fails to stop the violence and introduce political reform, “The EU will consider extending the restrictive measures in light of the developments, including at the highest level of leadership.” EU foreign ministers will discuss situation in Syria at their meeting later this month, Ashton added.
The reaction from Brussels is vague, analysts say, but they also point out that getting 27 countries with different interests to agree on a sensitive and complicated point like their relationship with Syria is very difficult, if not impossible.

“I don’t think they were too happy to move on too quickly, first of all because they are involved in a conflict in Libya,” Heiko Wimmen, a fellow with the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told NOW Lebanon. In his opinion the Libyan conflict already took some European states by surprise, as they were not expecting such resistance from Moammar Qaddafi’s fighters. “Getting involved in another place, such as Syria, seems very complicated to them right now.”

“I am also thinking about the European obsession about immigration and refugees,” he added, referring to Italy, which is dealing with an influx of Libyan and Tunisian refugees. He said that Cyprus and Greece might fear they will experience the same.
Nadim Shehadi, associate fellow at the London-based think tank Chatham House, told NOW Lebanon that the Arab Spring came at the wrong time for the EU.

He believes that the Europeans were very enthusiastic about democratic change in the Arab world in 2003, when Javier Solana was the head of foreign policy in Brussels. EU member states decided to put together Association Agreements designed to give financial assistance to countries surrounding Europe so they could solve problems related to human rights, freedom of the press, free elections and corruption.
“I remember Solana saying that “European security depends on a Europe surrounded by a ring of well-governed states,” Shehadi said.

Syria was in negotiations to sign an Association Agreement, but in 2005 the EU stopped its relationship with Damascus after Syria was accused of involvement in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, while the EU supported the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon. But Brussels signed the agreement in 2009, after Catherine Ashton, the new head of EU’s diplomacy, visited Damascus, and put it on the table for Syria to sign. However, Damascus never expressed intentions to sign the agreement.

Syria is still part of the European Neighborhood Policy, which was launched in 2004, through which the country received financial assistance worth 130 million Euros between 2007 and 2010, and was to receive another 129 million Euros between 2010 and 2013. Moreover, until the sanctions talk began in the EU in late April, the EU countries were willing to help Syria overcome its financial troubles by giving it micro-finance assistance loans.
 
But Shehadi says that the EU’s relationship with Syria could be even more complicated than that, as European Union members started arguing if they should follow Solana’s idealistic democratization policy or switch to a more drastic realist stance. “The Arab Spring came when the realists had won, when the EU had decided that economic relations and money was more important than the democratization. But the Arabs decided all of a sudden that they wanted democracy,” he said.

In this context, the Europeans became worried after some countries such as Cyprus, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Spain and Portugal signed their own partnerships with the Assad regime right before the uprising began, and the regime retaliated and killed over 600 people.

Apart from the economic side of the story, “There is this north-south problem in the EU. Northern countries can afford to sit on a high horse because they are not concerned with a wave of refugees,” Wimmen said. “The southern countries are not only concerned about the refugees, but also security. Nobody knows what is going to happen in this region. Many of the countries in the south would have preferred that things had stayed the same and that the Arab Spring never happened.”