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3 Russia
and China Mull Syria ... and Saudi
Arabia By Peter
Lee
After World War II, when decolonization
was clearly in the cards, Alawi leaders
fruitlessly agitated for the creation of another
Lebanon - another island, in other words, of
protected non-Sunni minorities - encompassing the
Alawi heartland along the Syrian coastal range or,
at the very least, autonomy. However, the French
stood aside, and the Damascus regime reasserted
control over the Alawi areas after a series of
skirmishes that were little more than bandit
suppression exercises.
With their dreams
of independence dashed, Alawite religious and
political leaders began the difficult process of
affirming their Arab identity and loyalty in an
environment of intense Arab and Syrian
nationalism, after an inglorious interval serving
as France's colonial assets, and the even dicier
task of redefining their religion so that their
faith and its adherents would be accepted by the
greater Syrian
community, which is overwhelmingly Sunni. Syrian
Sunni acceptance was slow and grudging. Only in
1952 did the Syrian state extend even partial
recognition of the Islamic character of Alawi
religious observance. [3]
In response to
their difficulties, Alawite religious leaders
unilaterally identified themselves as part of the
"Twelver" strain of Shi'ism, a claim that was only
fitfully and incompletely acknowledged by the
Twelver hierarchy in Lebanon over 40 years, until
ties were formalized in 1973 by the renowned
Twelver leader Musa al-Sadr (whose subsequent
disappearance in Libya and apparent murder at the
hands of Gaddafi still roils Libya-Lebanese
relations). [4]
Alawi re-invention was
completed as Alawi soldiers leveraged their
leading position in the French and early Syrian
armies and came to dominate the officer corps as
well. When the time came for a coup in 1971, the
Alawites - in the form of Hafez al-Assad - were
there to take control of Syria's central
government, beginning the unlikely 40-year reign
of a sect that was almost totally marginalized 25
years before.
If, as Thomas Wolfe said,
you can't go home again, this probably rings truer
for the Alawis than any other group in Syria. The
legitimacy and authority of the Alawi elite is
embedded in the matrix of Syrian nationalism and
centralism, and not the abandoned flirtations with
local independence or autonomy. Add to that the
fact that the major cities of Latakia and Tartus
still have sizable and demonstrably restive Sunni
populations, the prospects for retreating to a
defendable haven in western Syria appear extremely
remote.
Finally, it is unlikely that
Russia, China, or even Iran would defy
international sanctions to prop up the Assad
regime with economic and military aid if it shrank
to an Alawite coastal enclave.
The Assad
regime's political strategy, in other words, is
predicated upon clinging to central political
power and some legitimacy, not trying to leverage
its dubious separatist option.
If the
example of Lebanon resonates with Syria's Alawite
leadership, it is probably in the context of the
1989 Taif Agreement, an episode of externally
negotiated power sharing led by Saudi Arabia and
Syria that brought an end to the most violent
phase of the Lebanese civil war - one that
demonstrated the bloody futility of efforts by
Lebanon's close analogue to the Alawites, the
overly-represented and heavily-armed Christian
minority, to protect and assert its privileges
through the establishment of sectarian enclaves.
Under the accord, the various foreign
sponsors persuaded their respective Sunni,
Shi'ite, Christian, and Druze clients to get off
each other's throats and instead divvy up powers
and offices based on their respective power and
inclination to do mischief (as a conflict
avoidance measure, Lebanon has refrained from
conducting an official national census, which
would demonstrate that the dwindling Christian
population still enjoyed offices and parliamentary
seats vastly disproportionate to its current share
of the population).
The Taif process
enjoyed across-the-board support from the Arab
world, the United States, and the Soviet Union.
Syria, which had traditionally called the shots in
Lebanon, accepted a diminution of its clout
(though it honored its obligations to withdraw its
troops from Lebanon "in the breach", as it were)
and leadership of the Sunni interest by Saudi
Arabia's anointed choice, Rafik Hariri.
It
is safe to say that, post-Arab Spring and with the
explosion of domestic dissent, Bashar al-Assad
recognized the futility of trying to suppress the
aspirations of Syria's Sunni majority, and hoped
for some smooth Taif-esque exercise in power
sharing enabled by the good offices of Saudi
Arabia and the United States, that would give the
political representatives of the Sunnis greater
access to offices and power while preserving a
healthy amount of Alawite privilege.
Not
to be, clearly. Saudi intransigence on the issue
of political transition in Syria is the big and
largely unreported story of the Syrian conflict.
It has its roots in the political
fragmentation of the Arab realm in the modern era,
and the unending opportunities it offers for
mutual meddling by the dozen or so compromised and
ethnically fractured states that compose it today.
Since the fall of the Ottoman empire in
1921, there has been a strong if frustrated
impulse toward Sunni Arab nation-building in the
"Fertile Crescent", at least the Sunni-majority
portions that encompass western Iraq, Syria, and
Jordan. The heartland of the Muslim religion is
Mecca and Medina; but the spiritual core of
Islamic empire lies in the agricultural lands to
the north and its heart is, arguably, Damascus,
capital of the Umayyad Caliphate - a period
regarded as a golden age both for the political
and military advance of Islam and for the unity
and righteousness of the Islamic umma.
The dream of pan-Arab nationalism in World
War I, cynically incited by the British and
sincerely encouraged by T E Lawrence, was to
replace detested Ottoman rule with a united Arab
nation stretching from Aleppo to Aden under the
rule of the family of the Sharif of Mecca, the
Hashimites.
Famously, soon after Prince
Feisal joined the triumphant liberation of
Damascus in 1918 (commemorated in the closing
scenes of the film Lawrence of Arabia), a
secret French-British agreement jobbed him out of
the Kingdom of Greater Syria - which would have
encompassed the Arab remnants of the Ottoman
empire all the way from the Turkish border down to
the Sinai - and he ended up ruling the newly
created Kingdom of Iraq instead as a consolation
prize. The British government subsequently
installed Feisal's brother Abdullah as King of
Transjordan (the area beyond Palestine and west of
the Jordan River that the British didn't want to
govern themselves); the Hashimite family still
rules there today in the person of King Abdullah
II of Jordan.
People with long and grim
memories of Western shenanigans leading up to the
war to remove Saddam Hussein may recall that the
idea was floated of installing a disgruntled uncle
of King Abdullah II as Saddam's successor, thereby
reintroducing the glories of Hashimite rule to the
people of Iraq while removing a troublemaker from
the Jordanian scene.
In any case, after
all this imperial slicing and dicing all that was
left of "Greater Syria" after the French grabbed
Lebanon, the British set up shop in Palestine, and
various sandy interior reaches were turned over to
the Hashimites, was "Lesser Syria", the Syria we
know today.
Geopolitically, Syria had a
Goldilocks problem: it simply wasn't the right
size or shape to satisfy its Greater Syria
aspirations or find a happy role in pan-Arab
nationalism.
In 1947, Syria haltingly
participated in the disastrous pan-Arab campaign
against Israel. In the 1950s, it feared subversion
from Transjordan, whose king contemplated grabbing
a slice of Syria as compensation for his own
Palestine-related setbacks. In the early 1960s,
Syria drank deeply from the well of pan-Arabism
and rushed into a misguided political union with
Nasser's Egypt (forming the short-lived United
Arab Republic) and came close to a similar tie-up
with Iraq.
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