Syrian butchery casts dark
shadow By Victor Kotsev
TEL AVIV - News of Osama Bin Laden's
assassination, still shrouded in some mystery, has
temporarily eclipsed all the other big stories in
the Middle East. Meanwhile, the region's turmoil
is not going anywhere, and there are very strong
reasons beyond the numerous conspiracy theories
that are bound to emerge [1] to draw connections
between the al-Qaeda leader's death and the Arab
uprisings (see Osama
a casualty of the Arab revolt, Asia Times
Online, May 2, 2011).
The situation in
Syria stands out as a particular headache for the
Barack Obama administration and the international
community, greater than that presented by other
hot spots such as Libya or Yemen. Bin Laden's
assassination may not have been specifically
engineered as a distraction, but it is most
certainly a welcome
opportunity for the embattled
policymakers to divert some attention. Last
Thursday, P J Crowley, until recently spokesman of
the US Department of State, joined the chorus of
critics of his former boss.
''As the
crackdown in Syria escalates, it is increasingly
difficult to distinguish [Libyan leader Muammar]
Gaddafi's sins from those of [Syrian President
Bashar] Assad,'' Crowley wrote in a blog post.
''Having publicly called for Gaddafi's departure,
the administration is hesitating to do the same
with Assad. It shouldn't."
By all
accounts, the situation in the country is
untenable, even though an international
intervention is nowhere in sight. Patchy reports
coming from different cities reveal a grim
picture. The death toll is uncertain, but is
estimated at more than 500 people since the start
of the protests. Hundreds are missing. Thousands
have been arrested and charged with anything from
"degrading the prestige of the state" to
terrorism. Most foreign journalists have been
expelled; some, such as al-Jazeera's Dorothy
Parvaz, have disappeared.
In the city of
Daraa, where the protests started a month and a
half ago and which is widely perceived as the
epicenter of the uprising, soldiers are reportedly
arresting all males over the age of 14 in
door-to-door searches. The city has been locked
down by the army for over a week, split into
sections and left largely without water and
electricity. Residents, however, have not given up
the fight, and have resorted to creative tactics
of resistance.
"Our houses are close to
each other, so even though we can't go outside, we
stand by the windows and chant," one resident told
The Associated Press by satellite phone. "Our
neighbors can hear us and they respond."
Last weekend was particularly bloody.
Friday became the second-deadliest day in the
unrest so far, with over 65 protesters reportedly
killed in different parts of the country.
According to a summary in Israeli daily Ha'aretz,
''Large demonstrations were reporte ... in
Damascus, the central city of Homs, the coastal
cities of Banias and Latakia, the northern cities
of Raqqa and Hama, and the northeastern town of
Qamishli near the Turkish border.''
On
Saturday, government troops stormed Daraa's main
Omari mosque, and, an al-Jazeera report has it,
shot dead the son of the imam, not being able to
find the imam himself. Protest leaders are being
targeted with particular force, and many have been
arrested. Syrian state television is airing
confessions of people admitting to membership of
terrorist organizations, presumably extracted
under torture. On Sunday, Syria's interior
ministry offered amnesty to citizens who were
''misled'' to take part in the demonstrations, on
condition that they turned themselves in before
May 15.
The opposition rejected renewed
promises of reform; Farid Ghadry, a Syrian
dissident living in the US, told The Jerusalem
Post that the Syrian president was ''a dead man
walking". Such bravado seems a bit premature -
despite that the regime is gravely distressed,
what stands out is its apparent efficiency in
making arrests. By contrast, in Egypt (where
protests succeeded in ousting the president
despite hard-to-believe odds) the government had
until the end a very difficult time identifying
and arresting the protest leaders.
However, evidence has started to emerge of
army units defecting - in Daraa, one report has
it, elements of the fifth division, made up mostly
of conscripts sympathetic to the protesters,
exchanged fire late last week with the hard-line
fourth division, commanded by the president's
brother Maher Assad. If confirmed, these would
count as relatively small-scale defections, but
they bode worse to come for the regime if the
protests continue. Political defections have also
escalated, and more than a hundred Ba'ath party
members reportedly resigned over the weekend.
There is a serious, if not yet imminent,
danger of a collapse of Syria into chaos. At this
point, it is not entirely clear who runs the show,
and while this lack of transparency is in part due
to the regime's games of good cop and bad cop in
an attempt by the president to insulate himself
from criticism, at least some of the confusion
seems genuine. ''Syria is a coalition between
diverse, and often divergent, economic and
military interests,'' a report in the British
Channel 4 explained.
The Channel 4 report
points to three power brokers: the president's
brother, Maher, known as ''Syria's all-powerful
security man''; brother-in-law Assef Shawkat, in
charge of the secret police, and cousin, the
alleged corruption czar Rami ''Mr 10 Per Cent''
Makhlouf. The tensions between these men are
illustrated by a 1999 incident in which Maher is
believed to have shot Assef in the stomach during
a moment of uncontrollable rage. Besides, other
power brokers presumably exist: for example, more
speculative reports have suggested heavy Iranian
meddling at the top, spurred by dissatisfaction
with Bashar Assad's ''soft'' approach vis-a-vis
the demonstrators.
That the Obama
administration did not name the Syrian president
in its latest round of sanctions against the
regime both adds credibility to the reports of
divisions inside the ruling circle and attests to
the predicament in which the White House finds
itself. [2] While the ongoing human rights
violations (which Department of State spokesman
Mark Toner on Tuesday characterized as
''barbaric'') cannot be overlooked, nobody in
Washington wants to see Syria fall apart - a very
real possibility if Assad is deposed, and a
scenario that threatens to destabilize key parts
of the Middle East such as Lebanon, Israel,
Jordan, and Turkey.
Robert Kaplan, writing
for Foreign Policy, explains:
Pan-Arabism - of which the
post-World War II independent state of Syria
claimed to constitute the "throbbing-heart" -
became a substitute for Syria's very weak
national identity. Indeed, Syria's self-styled
"steadfast" hatred of Israel was a way for
Syrians to escape their own internal
contradictions. Those contradictions were born
of the parochial interests of regionally based
ethnic and sectarian groups: Sunni Arabs in the
Damascus-Homs-Hama central corridor; heretical,
Shi'ite-trending Alawites in the mountains of
the northwest; Druze in the south, with their
close tribal links to Jordan; and Kurds,
Christian Arabs, Armenians, and Circassians in
Aleppo. ...
Between 1947 and 1954, Syria
held three national elections that all broke
down more or less according to these regional
and sectarian lines. After 21 changes of
government in 24 years and a failed attempt to
unify with Egypt, the Alawite air force officer
Hafez al-Assad took power in a 1970 coup. By
ruling with utter ruthlessness, he kept the
peace in Syria for three decades. ...
Were central authority in Syria to
substantially weaken or even break down, the
regional impact would be greater than in the
case of Iraq. ...
Yes, the Iraq war
propelled millions of refugees …, but the impact
of Syria becoming a Levantine Yugoslavia might
be even greater. That is because of the
proximity of Syria's major population zones to
Lebanon and Jordan, both of which are unstable
already. [3]
The reluctance of the US
and the international community to replicate the
Libyan scenario in Syria is also due to two other
factors: the failure of the intervention in Libya
to achieve its objectives and the fact that
Assad's forces are much better armed than
Gaddafi's, sporting, among other things, a large
arsenal of medium-range missiles and chemical
warheads.
Moreover, as an alternative to
the scenario in which several new ''fiefdoms''
armed with weapons of mass destruction destabilize
the Levant, Assad is dangling a peace carrot in
front of Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu. On Sunday, news broke out that the
Syrian regime had invited a prominent Israeli
rabbi ''to visit the country where many of his
forefathers are buried, and to pray at their
Damascus gravesites.'' [4] According to the same
report, ''not only was [the small Jewish community
in Syria] doing well, but it backs Assad, and
believes that he is the best possible leader for
them.''
How to interpret this news is
anybody's call, but its timing cannot be
overlooked. In the last months, much has been made
of the possibility of peace between Syria and
Israel. While according to most experts the time
for that is currently not ripe, if Assad weathers
the crisis a peace treaty with the Jewish State
could help him in several ways. It would give him
an important achievement to present to his people
- the return of the contested Golan Heights,
captured by Israel in 1967. It would also allow
him to introduce much needed economic reforms.
Syria would be largely free from the economic
burden of an uphill arms race, it could expect a
generous American aid package, and, last but not
least, it would gain access to an important
aquifer and to innovative Israeli technologies.
As I reported previously, the unrest has
been fueled by an exacerbating water crisis in
Syria. [5] It bears noting that the Golan Heights
contains major water resources which would most
likely be shared by the two countries once peace
is established. Moreover, Israel is a world leader
in innovative irrigation and sea water
desalination technologies, both of which Syria
could well use.
All of this,
unfortunately, is in the realm of speculation. For
now, Assad's regime is teetering on the brink and
butchering large numbers of its citizens, spurred
on by Iran. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, is
allegedly promoting the unrest. The international
community, led by the United States, is watching
helplessly on the sidelines. The future of the
region is uncertain at best.
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