Afghanistan: Kofi Annan: Syrians pay with their lives while regional powers wage proxy wars --- The world has let down the people of Syria, leaving tens of thousands to die as neighbouring nations wage proxy wars instead of working to prevent the bloodshed that has engulfed the country for the past three years, according to the former UN secretary general, Kofi Annan. -- In a bleak assessment of the global response to the crisis in Syria, but also those in South Sudan, the Central African Republic, Ukraine and Nigeria, Annan said the international community seemed unable to focus on more than one emergency at a time and had become increasingly loath to stage military interventions. -- Annan resigned as UN envoy to Syria in August 2012, describing his role as a "mission impossible" because of growing militarisation and a lack of unity among world powers. -- The 76-year-old Ghanaian diplomat, who led the UN between 1997 and 2006, said the unwillingness or inability of the regional powers – Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey – to co-operate with the UN security council, and the "almost proxy war" being conducted between Riyadh and Tehran, were jeopardising the search for peace. -- The UN can be as strong as the international community wants it to be and it means if they want it to be strong, they need to make the resources available, take the decisions and follow through," he said. -- "We used to complain about proxy wars, funded and encouraged by the US and Russia, now we are seeing proxy wars being undertaken by regional powers; as I look around, you have countries that are more afraid of the regional powers than the superpowers because the superpowers are far away – they are not as closely involved – and the regional powers can play a very disruptive role in any country when they decide to." -- Although Annan stressed that armed interventions were not the solution to every internal conflict – including in Syria – he said individual nations had become more reluctant to pledge troops. -- Despite the long and bloody campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, many countries had come to the conclusion that UN peacekeeping operations had to be risk-free enterprises, he said. -- "When you get into a situation like Syria, no country wants to go in," said Annan. "I haven't seen armies lining up, saying, 'We are volunteering'. And their own populations are telling them – the US in particular – 'No more military adventures'. And so your intervention has to be short of military." -- The problem, he said, was that diplomatic and political attempts to end the fighting in Syria were going nowhere either. "They have been stymied because of the divisions at the national level, the regional level, and the level of the UN security council," he said. -- "So we've let the people of Syria down. While we are divided and pointing fingers and accusing each other, they are paying with their lives." -- Speaking to mark the launch of a book of his key speeches as secretary general, Annan said the series of emergencies facing the international community reminded him of the mid-1990s, when violence erupted in Somalia, the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. -- The US's decision to pull its troops from Somalia after the killing of 18 American soldiers during a UN-sanctioned mission to capture warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed, he added, had contributed to international hesitation amid the growing carnage and genocide. -- "The US decided to withdraw and [then] all the western troops withdrew," said Annan. "They had the best capacity, so in a way, the operations in Somalia collapsed. And it was when they were withdrawing that the crisis in Rwanda started, so if you're running away from risk in Somalia, you're not going to rush into Rwanda and nobody wanted to go, so we had Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Somalia and then of course Kosovo came on top of that." -- He pointed out that, like Syria, all the current crises were further complicated by their regional dimensions. "The Central African Republic is close to [DR] Congo, which has very serious problems, and then of course, you have South Sudan and Sudan," he said. "And then you have Ukraine, which also is very serious." -- This month, Annan's successor, Ban Ki-moon, warned that if the conflict continued in South Sudan, half of its 12 million people would be either "displaced internally, refugees abroad, starving or dead by the year's end".