Syria’s War Engulfs Aleppo, America’s Ambassador Is Killed in Benghazi, Jamaica’s Sprinters Dominate London and Europe’s Debt Crisis Deepens

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review | Published 3 October 2012 | Reporting Period: 3 July – 2 October 2012

Quarterly Briefing

• Fighting engulfs Aleppo, Syria’s second city, in late July and August as rebel forces launch a major offensive; the battle marks the war’s expansion from a rural insurgency into an urban conflict; the UN suspends its observer mission on July 20.
• Islamist militants attack the US consulate and a CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, killing US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans; the attack triggers a fierce political controversy in Washington over the Obama administration’s initial characterisation of events.
• Usain Bolt of Jamaica retains both his 100m and 200m Olympic titles at the London Games, and the Jamaican relay team wins gold; Jamaica’s sprint dominance, including Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce’s 100m gold, generates enormous national pride and global visibility.
• Spain formally requests access to the European Stability Mechanism for its banking sector in June; the eurozone crisis continues to generate market volatility throughout the quarter as yields on Spanish and Italian sovereign bonds repeatedly test critical thresholds.
• The United Nations’ Joint Special Envoy Kofi Annan resigns on August 2, citing the lack of international unity on Syria; his successor Lakhdar Brahimi takes the role with no clearer path toward a political settlement.
• Islamists in northern Mali, who seized a vast area of the country following the March 2012 military coup in Bamako, implement sharia law, destroy ancient Sufi shrines in Timbuktu and consolidate control over the region; France and the African Union are discussing intervention options.

Prologue: The Arab Spring Turns Dark

The third quarter of 2012 saw the Arab Spring’s consequences multiplying beyond the optimistic scenarios that had accompanied its outbreak eighteen months earlier. Syria was no longer a series of protests met with security force violence; it was an urban war in which the country’s second-largest city was being systematically destroyed. Libya, which had seemed to achieve the cleanest transition, produced the killing of an American ambassador by Islamist militants in the very city from which the revolution had launched. Mali, whose 2012 coup was itself partly a consequence of the Libyan weapons flood following Gaddafi’s fall, now had an Islamist statelet in its north that was destroying irreplaceable cultural heritage. Against this backdrop, Europe’s debt crisis continued to sap the economic vitality of the continent that provides the Caribbean’s most important tourist source markets. The quarter did produce one moment of uncomplicated joy: Usain Bolt’s London double, which announced Jamaica to the world in the finest possible terms.

Aleppo’s Battle and Syria’s Darkening War

The battle for Aleppo, which began in late July when Free Syrian Army units moved into the city from surrounding rural areas, was the largest urban military engagement of Syria’s sixteen-month war. Government forces responding with artillery, helicopter gunships and eventually fixed-wing aircraft reduced entire residential districts to rubble. The UN suspended its 300-strong observer mission on 20 July, citing the impossibility of operating in active combat conditions. By the end of the quarter, neither side had achieved decisive control; Aleppo was divided, damaged and haemorrhaging civilian population. The war had killed an estimated 30,000 people by early October and generated over 300,000 refugees; UN officials were warning that the humanitarian system was approaching collapse.

The UN envoy Kofi Annan’s resignation on 2 August reflected the failure of his six-point peace plan and the impossibility of securing Security Council unity when Russia and China continued to veto resolutions. His successor, Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, took the role under no illusion that a political solution was near. Syria’s war was becoming a proxy conflict in which regional powers — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Iran, Hezbollah — were all investing in their preferred factions, making a negotiated settlement progressively harder to achieve.

Benghazi and the Libyan Aftermath

The killing of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi on the eleventh anniversary of the September 11 attacks was both a security failure and a political flashpoint. Stevens, who had played a key role in supporting the Libyan revolution, died in a CIA annex after the main consulate compound was overrun; the attack was carried out by Ansar al-Sharia, an Islamist militia that had exploited the security vacuum in post-Gaddafi Libya. The Obama administration’s initial suggestion that the attack was a spontaneous response to an anti-Islam video rather than a planned terrorist operation became a major political controversy, with Republicans accusing the administration of deliberate mischaracterisation for electoral reasons two months before the presidential election.

The broader lesson — that post-revolution Libya had become a proliferation zone for weapons and fighters with regional consequences — was illustrated simultaneously by the situation in Mali, where Islamist groups including AQIM and MUJAO had used the chaos following the March coup to seize territory larger than France. The destruction of Sufi shrines in Timbuktu — ancient structures of extraordinary cultural and religious significance — was being prosecuted as a war crime by the International Criminal Court.

Jamaica at the London Olympics and Europe’s Debt Crisis

Against the grim backdrop of the quarter’s wars and economic anxieties, the London Olympic Games offered a genuine interlude. Jamaica’s sprint team delivered one of the finest performances in Olympic history: Usain Bolt retained his 100m and 200m titles with winning times of 9.63 and 19.32 seconds respectively, both Olympic records. Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce successfully defended her 100m crown. The men’s 4x100m relay team set a new world record of 36.84 seconds. For a small island nation of under three million people, the visibility and pride generated by these achievements was extraordinary; Jamaica became one of the most discussed countries on earth for a fortnight in a context entirely divorced from the usual narratives of debt, crime and natural disaster.

Europe’s debt crisis continued to shadow the quarter. European Central Bank President Mario Draghi’s statement in late July that the ECB would do “whatever it takes” to preserve the euro, and the subsequent announcement of the Outright Monetary Transactions programme, eased market pressure on Spain and Italy without resolving the underlying structural problems. Spain’s banking sector was being recapitalised with European funds; Greece was negotiating its second bailout tranche. The European recession that these dynamics were generating was directly damaging to Caribbean tourism and export revenues.

Looking Ahead

Syria’s war has no exit ramp visible from October 2012. The Benghazi attack will feature in the US presidential campaign through November’s election; its consequences for American policy toward Libya and the broader Islamist threat landscape will depend on who wins and how they interpret the lessons of the attack. Mali’s Islamist statelet is growing in capability and confidence; the international community has not yet assembled a credible intervention plan. Europe’s ECB backstop has reduced acute crisis risk but not removed it; Spanish and Italian growth outlooks remain poor. And Venezuela’s Chávez, who won re-election on 7 October — just after this period ends — faces questions about his health and his country’s economic sustainability that will shape PETROCARIBE’s future. The Caribbean enters the fourth quarter of 2012 with its athletes celebrated and its economy under continuing external pressure.

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Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review is published quarterly, examining how wars, geopolitical tensions and major international crises have shaped Jamaica, the Caribbean and their economies.

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