From 793d334a3fba2f78b882e5cf021d605cb2d2ec6b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Holden Rohrer Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2020 14:41:39 -0500 Subject: added recent ugamunc paper --- ugamunc_oic_saudi-arabia | 93 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 93 insertions(+) create mode 100644 ugamunc_oic_saudi-arabia (limited to 'ugamunc_oic_saudi-arabia') diff --git a/ugamunc_oic_saudi-arabia b/ugamunc_oic_saudi-arabia new file mode 100644 index 0000000..17199f6 --- /dev/null +++ b/ugamunc_oic_saudi-arabia @@ -0,0 +1,93 @@ +FORENOTE: This paper isn't very good. + +I. Syrian Civil War +------------------- +The Syrian War has displaced millions of Syrians, internally and externally, and greatly damaged the human rights condition within the region. +For the international community, the primary international concern is humanitarian aid---trapped Syrians require costly and extensive aid (food, water, medicine) just to survive. +However, this goes hand-in-hand with supranational politics. +Terrorist groups like Daesh, dozens of freedom fighter groups, the Assad regime and foreign nations all have different goals within the region---destabilizing it regardless repeat attempts to preserve human rights and cease the conflict. +The current ceasefire, while Saudi Arabia remains hopeful, likely won't last unless power transitions away from Assad's reign. +Saudi Arabia thanks Kurdish rebellion groups and the US for their efforts to prevent terrorism in the region and believes that, in cooperation with regional powers, such groups may be able to foster a sustainable, stable Syria. +However, a steady balance between providing for Syrian citizens' stable environment and placing the land under more humane leadership must be struck. + +During the heat of the conflict, Saudi Arabia’s involvement primarily consisted of supplying pro-freedom citizen resistance groups to undermine Assad's offensive government and provide exit paths for endangered persons (Sly and DeYoung). +Saudi Arabia believes that more peaceful options should be explored promptly in order to prevent terrorist insurgency and restore international usability of the territory. +This should be primarily to limit and reverse strain on neighboring countries from Syrian refugees, including Saudi Arabia's half million (Doanvo). +Saudi Arabia considers its locality and stability relevant to Syria: humanitarian aid can be channeled more cheaply than through other nations, meaning that those 2 million still residing in the country would be able to obtain long shelf-life goods and clean water in case the conflict resumes. +In order to ensure sustainable provisions for refugees, Saudi Arabia encourages its allies to adopt Syrians as temporary workers, as Saudi Arabia is doing itself---and reducing economic stress (Culbertson and Kumar). +On the front of terrorism, the majority of these migrants are and can be productive members of society. +However, a small portion are helping to fund terrorists, are drawn into terrorist cells themselves, or are state-backed purveyors of terror. +The two issues which need to be managed are first protecting the refugees themselves from these acts, which can be approached as another form of humanitarian aid (the same provisions preventing famine and disease contributing to prevention of terrorism in Syria), and second quashing terrorist cells at the first occurrence. +Saudi Arabia has helped greatly in the fight against terrorism because, as evidenced by the now-extinct Da’esh, taking advantaged of its arms arsenal and global intelligence partners, terrorism is readily dispersed to small, isolated incidents. + +The OIC and other supranational bodies should not interfere with these strategies except to ensure continuation of agreements such as the ceasefire. +However, the involvement of member nations in the Refugee Crisis is critical. +Many nations simply cannot support camps at their current levels of infrastructure, so the international community should provide clear pathways for refugees to cross borders, because those refugees have demonstrated the ability and desire to seek better conditions [cite and provide earlier mention]. +Saudi Arabia further recommends more aggressive international peaceful intervention---especially with respect to limiting the power of Assad’s regime. +While Saudi Arabia would not want to provoke conflict within the region, Syria provides potential for developing a deal with Assad which would maintain his privileged status while phasing in a stronger constitution and promoting semi-independent governance of certain regions without complete detachment from the government. + +II. Crisis in Yemen +------------------- +The Arab Spring’s anti-government protests have not, in many cases, improved their regional governments, instead creating situations ripe for exploitation by terror groups and corrupt governments. +In Yemen, this is the case. +The Iran-backed Houthi Rebels have brought down the Yemeni republic through a series of public, religiously-motivated deposals. +This has sent Yemen’s population reeling into an inaccessible crisis, with 10 million famished persons and 1.5 million affected by cholera (Gardner, “Yemen War: Has Anything Been Achieved?”). +Restabilization of the internationally recognized government within Yemen is clearly the most reasonable path---The Organization of Islamic Cooperation must put more effort into restabilizing an internationally recognized government within the Yemen region + +It is simply untenable for the international community to let the Houthi Rebels completely destabilize the government. +However, due to the previous duration of the conflict, mitigatory actions must be taken. +The primary concern is distributing aid to the innocents within the country, but this is very managerially difficult. +Several options have been explored, and the current most popular is on-the-ground support (“Yemen.”). +However, these systems are highly vulnerable to terrorist attacks and manipulation. +Daesh and al-Qaeda have begun to attempt to stake their hold in the region. +To prevent this, specific regional intervention is required---singular NGOs are incapable of defending against terrorist organizations, as evidenced by terrorist attacks on the IRC in Yemen on December 22. +Terrorist groups can often be removed most effectively by providing for sufficient economic and social alternatives for the population---the Yemeni economy is failing, so if international corporate investment became more common, via systemic incentivization and encouragement, money, resources, and mitigation of the humanitarian crisis flow into the country while terroristic incentives diminish in comparison. +However, it is difficult to solely ascribe this as an economic issue because the war is partially about religious rights: the UN’s efforts to maintain peace between religious minorities and mediate ceasefires are admirable but ineffective because eliminating conflict in an “unwinnable” war, as the UN puts it, is a secondary and resultant concern. +Tension can be mostly stable, even if it’s suboptimal like in the Israel-Palestine condition. +As long as that stability is restored, many of the issues in Yemen become an implicit fact: 3.3 million displaced people don’t need refugee camps, or at least not in as large numbers (instead, they can use temporary labor camps and external housing because those options become available). + +Saudi Arabia proposes an EAR prioritization strategy. +Starting from the most important and chronologically first step, economic improvements are critical. +Saudi Arabia would recommend promotion of corporate actors backed by nation states. +The type of promotion is malleable, but subsidies on Yemeni workers by nation states could provide the proper incentive for a company to enter into the market and create jobs which would help Yemen’s economy and reduce load on aid agencies. +Direct aid, given by NGOs or nearby nations directly to the people, serves to eliminate harm to innocents and provide room for the final stage or lowest priority step. +Direct aid, if implemented properly, should continue existing solutions, but the OIC would hopefully negotiate improved agreements to reduce middlemen. +The final stage, restoration and resolution of the conflict doesn’t need to be and shouldn’t be a “win” for either side. +Instead, if deescalation is possible with possible reinstatement of smaller regional governments, at least at first, attempts at deescalation should continue under UN guidance. + +III. Kurdish Conflict +--------------------- +The Kurdish Nation is one of the most turbulent amongst the Middle East, as it lacks official statehood. +Due to the Kurds’ nomadic origins and poorly drawn imperialist borders, they now seek independence in the countries they inhabit as a minority group in each---Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria (“A Look at the Kurds”). +Of these, the most successful independence movement has been in Syria. +With the rapidly disintegrating government in the region and terrorist groups such as Daesh gaining footholds across the least policed portions, the Kurds have successfully displaced the majority of Daesh territory, which Saudi Arabia is grateful for, and hopes will be repaid in future reconstitution of the region (Taspinar). +In more established states, the Kurds are often treated as simply an ethnic group like Arabs or Israelis and lack special rights considering their situation or are oppressed. +But as evidenced by the (often misguided) independence referendums run on behalf of Kurdistan, these people clearly desire to become a separate state. +This has been fought by Turkey (with active attacks on Kurds in their borders and Syria), Iran (by oppression and limitation of their rights within the borders), and in Syria (which, despite the near-defunct government, continues to attack Kurds within their borders). + +These are, in many cases, justifiable, at least from a strategic standpoint. +The creation of new states necessarily weakens existing states in two ways: land claims are impossible to assign without removing them from another state, so without the loss of land by some state, there can be no Kurdistan, and no state will willingly or should unwillingly lose land. +This is affirmed by Article 2(1) of the UN Charter. +The other sort is an inability to play the game of restricting rights for minority groups as was done in 1991 by Iraq (to the Kurds) and subsequently denied in SC/688, which ensured the Kurds voting rights and demanded Iraq provide sufficient foreign access to both verify this and provide humanitarian aid. +However, from a humanitarian and civil standpoint, the UN can justifiably and successfully interfere with land claims, as has been seen in Palestine’s status of control over its land despite Israeli claims therein. +Saudi Arabia believes that Kurdistan is one of these cases: while referendums or UN demands are inefficient at execution, the Kurds need to receive international recognition and some form of immunity and separation from their host countries, comparable to other native groups like the US’s Native Americans. + +Saudi Arabia recommends Kurdistan remaining a stateless entity, but is against the preservation of the status quo. +The OIC is responsible to step in and create incentive structures and design international treaties for existing states which would provision sufficient legal freedoms of the Kurds. +The CARD plan, if enacted, advocates for these legal freedoms by the use of UN funds and cooperation with pro-Kurd NGOs like KURDS, a UN-endorsed humanitarian group which acts for Kurdish freedoms and stability. +These groups would create new legislation that reflects UN goals, such as the preservation of human rights, composing the C in CARD. +The CARD plan also recommends the amplification of Kurdish voices in these decisions and in general: Arab awareness of the condition of the Kurds is imperfect, which may be helped by a well-designed PR campaign to spread the historical and modern pride of the Kurds, which would do well to include the recent near-defeat of Daesh. +With respect to these decisions about international treatises, a representative from the Kurds would need to be included in deliberations to balance them against narrow extranational interests. +This is the third pillar of the CARD plan, representation. +Finally, these agreements and legislation would optimally be designed to detach the Kurds from a particular nation. +Ideally, these governments could negotiate with Kurds a limited set of rights of self-governance that exists agnostic of its containing state. + +Works Cited +----------- +“A Look at the Kurds, a Stateless Nation in a Restive Region.” Associated Press, 25 Sept. 2017, https://apnews.com/a5f111ce84bd4e41a27f0ff2289efa1c. +Culbertson, Shelly, and Krishna B. Kumar. “Jobs Can Improve the Lives of Syrian Refugees and Their Host Communities—and Support Stability in the Middle East.” Rand.Org, 11 Mar. 2019, https://www.rand.org/blog/2019/03/jobs-can-improve-the-lives-of-syrian-refugees-and-their.html. +Doanvo, Anhvinh. “Western Media’s Miscount of Saudi Arabia’s Syrian Refugees.” Huffington Post, 6 Dec. 2017, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/europes-crisis-refugees_b_8175924. +Gardner, Frank. “Yemen War: Has Anything Been Achieved?” BBC, 1 Aug. 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-49179146. +Sly, Liz, and Kareaaan DeYoung. “In Syria, New Influx of Weapons to Rebels Tilts the Battle against Assad.” The Washington Post, 23 Feb. 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/in-syria-new-influx-of-weapons-to-rebels-tilts-the-battle-against-assad/2013/02/23/a6bf2bc0-7dfb-11e2-9073-e9dda4ac6a66_story.html. +Taspinar, Omer. “Daesh and the False Dawn of Kurdish Statehood.” Arab News, 12 Dec. 2019, https://www.arabnews.com/node/1598036. +“Yemen.” Rescue.Org, https://www.rescue.org/country/yemen. -- cgit