by Zheng Jianghua
BRUSSELS, June 21 (Xinhua) -- The refugee crisis that has plagued the European Union (EU) since the summer of 2015 is the upshot of mistakes Western countries have made since 2003, a British pundit on Middle East affairs told Xinhua in a recent interview.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), EU countries in 2016 received some 1.2 million new asylum applications. Most of the applicants originated from Syria and Iraq, countries beleaguered by conflicts and wars.
"What happens both in Syria and Iraq is that you have domestic divisions which are sectarian and political. But what makes them so explosive and difficult to stop is that these domestic divisions get linked up to regional and global rivalries and confrontations," said Patrick Cockburn, an award-winning writer for British newspaper The Independent who specializes in analysis of Iraq, Syria and wars in the Middle East.
"One of the reasons that it is difficult to restore peace in Iraq, and the same is true in Syria, is that you have different communities, different political parties that are supported and, to some degree, controlled by foreign countries, and when you put the two together -- domestic divisions and foreign support -- this creates an explosive mixture," he said.
Asked about the underlying cause of the mass exodus of Iraqi refugees, the veteran correspondent said: "The United States should take a great deal of blame. It's difficult to imagine the exodus of refugees happening unless the United States and its allies, including Britain, had invaded Iraq (in 2003) and overthrew (then Iraqi leader) Saddam Hussein."
"Iraq has never really had a government which entirely controlled the country ever since, and obviously the country is also being ruined by war," he said.
"Iraq was always a country with sectarian divisions, but really the sectarian divisions that opened up after 2003 were much wider than before and have never been bridged."
As regards the situation in Syria, Cockburn said the armed opposition inside the country has been dominated by jihad groups under different names, such as the Islamic State (ISIS), al Nusra front, and groups like Ahrar al-Sham (the Islamic Army).
"These are groups that have beliefs and methods very similar to Al Qaeda. The length of the war has increased the refugee problem, you know that in Syria probably the current population, if there had been no war, would be about 22 million, but because of the refugees, it's probably about 16 million," said Cockburn, who forecast in 2014 the rise of IS before it became well known.
He noted that these refugees would probably not return to Syria if the war continued, because they were in dread of not only physical danger and economic ruin, but also military conscription.
"They don't want their sons -- any man of military age is likely to be called up to the Syrian army, or in Syrian Kurdish areas, to the local military forces -- and this is a major reason why people become refugees, they want to keep the male members of their family out of the armed forces," Cockburn said.
He said Western countries once had "wishful thinking" that they could get rid of the Syrian government under President Bashar al-Assad and replace him with a democratic government.
But the real situation on the ground is that "either it's the Assad government or it will be the armed opposition, and there isn't really a neutral force on the ground that would really replace Assad, or even significantly share power with Assad".
"I'm sure that the European and American governments, both Obama and Trump, have realized this over the last few years whatever that nominal position," he said.
When it comes to Libya, which, according to the UNHCR has become a springboard for 95 percent of refugees from Africa to reach Italy, Cockburn said NATO's military intervention in 2011 sowed the seeds of anarchy in Libya and opened the floodgates to the mass exodus of refugees.
"This didn't happen before when Gaddafi was leader of Libya, when a Libyan state existed. The Libyan state was destroyed in 2011 and has never been rebuilt, so really the NATO intervention was responsible," he said.
"In theory, the NATO intervention was at first to prevent the fall of Benghazi, but it expanded to regime change, and this was very much a consequence of NATO and not of the domestic armed opposition, I was in Libya at that time, and there was no question that the armed opposition on the ground had no chance of overthrowing (Muammar) Gaddafi without the strong, continuous support from NATO and finance from the Gulf states."
He noted that Western countries intervened in the wars in the Middle East purporting to spread democracy, but "there was always a contradiction here, because the allies of the U.S. and European states was Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies which are obviously not democracies and not secular states, so they had no interest in spreading their secular democracy".
"In these countries, the U.S. and Europe were intervening in local civil wars in favor of one side, but all these civil wars had domestic support and opposition, and it was always naive to think that all the problems of Iraq came from Saddam, or in Syria from Assad, or in Libya from Gaddafi," he said.
"This is a point I make in these books that, when these rulers were overthrown, the problems didn't disappear, they got worse. It's true that these rulers had many things wrong with them, they were dictatorships, they were family dictatorships, but in general, what happened thereafter, has been as bad, if not worse than what happened before," said Cockburn.
Cockburn's books "The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution" was published in 2015 and "The Age of Jihad: Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East" was published in 2016.
Cockburn has degrees from Trinity College and Oxford University, and did graduate work at the Institute of Irish Studies, Queen's University Belfast before shifting to journalism in 1978.
He joined the Financial Times, covering the Middle East, and was later Moscow correspondent. He joined The Independent in 1990, reporting on the First Gulf War from Baghdad, and has written largely on the Middle East ever since.
