Syrian guarantees hold little value for deadlines

"We, the undersigned armed terrorist groups, hereby promise to stop all violence in Syria and surrender all our weapons to the Syrian regime. We will no longer carry out the orders of Israel, the United States, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, who have been financing our campaign of armed terrorism against the Syrian people. Love, the terrorists of the Free Syrian Army."

As soon as Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria gets "written guarantees" from the "armed terrorist groups" of surrender, announced the Syrian foreign ministry on April 8, it will comply with its promise to withdraw its tanks and artillery from rebellious Syrian cities. Sorry, no, there's more. The regime also wants "guarantees of commitment by the governments of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey to stop financing the armed terrorist groups".

The United Nations and the Arab League thought they had a deal. The Syrian government had promised the mediator, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, that it would remove all its heavy weapons from urban areas by April 10, and accept a complete ceasefire by the 12th. But then Damascus announced that the international community had been "mistaken" to think that it was really going to pull its troops out.

"Kofi Annan has until now not furnished to the Syrian government written guarantees about the acceptance of the armed terrorist groups to stop violence in all its forms, and their readiness to surrender their weapons so that state authority can spread on all territory," the statement said.

In other words, as soon as the pro-democracy side surrenders unconditionally, "peace" - i.e. the tyranny of the Baath regime - will be restored.

Kofi Annan, the United Nations and the Arab League were doing the best they could but with no member country willing to use military force against Syria, they had no leverage whatever.

If Bashar al-Assad really pulled all his troops out of Syrian cities, they would immediately fall into the hands of the opposition, so he wasn't going to do that.

The senior people at the UN and the Arab League who approved the deal were hoping at least to end to the regime's use of massive force against civilians.

Assad was obviously not going to meekly give up power but many innocent lives would be saved if he could be persuaded to stop using tanks and artillery against cities. He would probably continue killing his opponents on a retail basis but the wholesale killing would stop.

It was worth trying to de-escalate the conflict but it isn't going to happen. Shelling cities is a highly inefficient way of restoring government control over them but it keeps the casualties down on the regime side.

So has the Assad regime won despite the deaths of 9000 protesters? Probably. Non-violent resistance to tyranny is a powerful tool but no political technique works every time without fail and Syria's Baath Party was always a hard target.

It is a single-party regime that mainly serves the interests of a minority, the Alawites (only 10 per cent of the population), who fear catastrophic revenge by the majority if they lose power. However, it also has significant support from other minorities, notably the Christians and the Druze.