Covid-19 als Chance für den Frieden?: Ernüchternde Erfahrungen aus Kolumbien und Syrien

Given the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic, UN General Secretary Guterres called for ceasefires around the globe in late March 2020. Even though this initiative was welcomed by 171 governments, not even a short-term violence reduction has happened in central conflict areas. This contribution examines the effects of the Corona pandemic in two regionally and globally significant conflict countries, Colombia with its fragile pacification and Syria with its militarily almost decided war. The article asks how the Corona crisis influences the dynamics of violence and peace after respectively at the end of civil wars. Colombia is a prominent example of a comprehensive peace agreement in complex conflicts. Nonetheless, the short-term, peace-related trend in times of the pandemic is ambivalent at best: While the absolute number of murders has declined, it is human right defenders and demobilized ex-combatants who remain the main victims of violence - and the number of massacres has increased again. The still-active guerilla Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) initially called for a one-sided truce, yet ended again in late April. In Syria, the consequences of the pandemic on the conflict dynamic have ranged from contradictory to negative: In the last rebel stronghold Idlib COVID-19 directly contributed to the months-long stabilization of the Russian-Turkish truce from March 2020. In Northeastern Syria, which is partly controlled by Turkey and partly by the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the humanitarian situation has clearly worsened since the beginning of the pandemic. The Assad regime does not allow international aid to pass through to the opposition territory. Despite diverse differences between Colombia and Syria, one crucial similarity is that the respective governments instrumentalize the crisis on the ground for the often violent consolidation of the political agenda. In the bigger picture, the experience from the two countries suggests that COVID-19 works locally less as a “game-changer”, but rather as intensifier or accelerator of pre-pandemic dynamics.