Syrian violence continues to
spiral By Victor Kotsev
TEL AVIV - The fog of war, having
completely engulfed Libya, is thickening in Syria
as well. Even the most basic facts remain
uncertain. Who exactly runs the government? Who is
shooting on behalf of it? Who are the protesters?
What are the casualties? What is going on? What
will happen next? At least two very different
narratives have emerged, and the growing distance
between these reveals the enormous reservoir of
mistrust and hatred that has accumulated in and
around the country.
In the international
diplomatic arena, two camps have formed that have
fired the opening shots of what promises to be a
long campaign. Last week, Russian Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov claimed that what sustains the
Syrian crisis is the possibility of foreign
intervention, and warned the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization not to repeat
the Libyan gamble on the Levant. [1] More
recently, on Tuesday United States Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton and European Union foreign
policy chief Catherine Ashton threatened vague
''new steps'' against the Syrian government.
''This is extremely urgent,'' Ashton said
at a press conference following the meeting with
Clinton. ''If the government really does ... want
to see some kind of change, it's got to be now ...
[We are] now in a situation where we need to
consider all of the options. So I think there will
be a number of moves in the coming hours and days
that you will see.''
At this precise
moment, and specifically after the Libyan debacle,
a military intervention in Syria sounds like an
empty threat. Regardless, Russia, China and other
countries (notably Iran) have become jittery. If
the unrest continues, the Syrian regime would
become increasingly unstable and desperate, and at
some point in the future a violent conflict and a
military intervention of some sort may become
inevitable. Even a regional war with Israel is not
out of the question.
The latest
controversy involving the larger international
community centers on an alleged mass grave found
near the city of Dera'a which has been the
epicenter of the protests alongside similar rumors
elsewhere. The Syrian government promptly denied
the allegations, [2] but international outrage
poured in. ''If true, these reports of multiple
corpses buried in a makeshift grave show an
appalling disregard for humanity,'' an Amnesty
International representative told al-Jazeera on
Tuesday. Clinton’s and Ashton’s statements also
came after the allegations.
Lebanon, too,
is in the spotlight, and one of the reasons for
this is that in the wake of the near-full
informational blackout that the Syrian government
has imposed, it is one of the best places where
information about the unrest can be obtained. Much
of the violence in the last few days has happened
in communities close to the Lebanese border, and
thousands of Syrians have fled using unguarded
crossings in the porous border. According to
recent report, the Syrian army has deployed in
numbers close by, and on Sunday a woman was killed
and several people injured in Lebanon by gunfire
from the Syrian side.
The Lebanese village
of Wadi Khaled, where the shooting happened, is
one of the places at the epicenter of the unrest.
Hanin Ghadar, writing for Foreign Policy,
describes the harrowing tales of some of the
refugees:
"They were shooting at us to
disperse the protests, but it was still
manageable because you can hide as soon as they
start shooting," [''Munther, a 35-year-old
chain-smoker''] said. However, he decided to
flee when Assad sent in tanks on May 7. "I have
children and I have to protect them."
…
But for Mustafa, the most horrific incident
occurred last week when the protesters tried to
establish a camp, modeled after Cairo's Tahrir
Square, in the main square of Homs. He said that
security forces arrived around 1 a.m. and killed
more than a hundred protesters, put the bodies
in garbage trucks, and took them to Tadmur
desert, where they were buried in a mass grave.
[3]
Rumors of secret mass graves are
notably becoming increasingly frequent. If
confirmed, this would raise the death toll way
past 1,000 people (last week the United Nations
human rights office estimated 850 casualties).
According to reports by human rights activists, in
the last few days in the town of Tel Kelakh alone
(close to the border and Wadi Khaled) 27 victims
had been identified, with many more missing and
feared dead. [4]
The Syrian government,
predictably, has another story. Every day the
government-controlled media releases reports of
''scores'' of captured ''terrorists'' and weapons.
[5] The two narratives could not differ more,
except in that they refer to the same geographic
locations. Nevertheless, it is not clear that the
middle ground - a sizeable number of people who do
not buy completely into either narratives - has
been destroyed completely yet. This, by the way,
is a very important sign to watch for.
As
Martin Fletcher, a Western journalist who managed
to sneak into Syria recently, told NPR, the
''outside world'' has been ''presented'' with a
''rather simplistic picture'':
"People hate the people around
[Assad] for their corruption; for their
brutality and so on. Some Syrians still buy into
the idea that he is a reformer and may be
constrained by his coterie. Some like the way he
stands up to the United States and Israel, and
lots of people have a great fear that if
President Assad goes, that Syria will descend
into the sort of sectarian conflict that Syrians
have seen in Iraq to the east and in Lebanon to
the west.'' [6]
According to
influential American think-tank Stratfor, the
Syrian regime rests on four pillars: unity inside
the Assad family (there has been strife
previously, and the uncle of Bashar Assad, Rifaat,
has been exiled for decades); unity of the Alawite
religious minority from which the president and
much of his circle come (Alawites number around
1.5 million people, and Stratfor describes them as
''a fractious bunch''); control of the Alawites
over the military and the intelligence services;
and monopoly for the ruling Ba'ath party on the
political system. According to Stratfor, although
''the insulation to the regime provided by the
Ba'ath party is starting to come into question,''
all four pillars still stand.
Stratfor’s
analysis of the military is particularly
revealing:
Syrian Alawites are stacked in the
military from both the top and the bottom,
keeping the army’s mostly Sunni 2nd Division
commanders in check. Of the 200,000 career
soldiers in the Syrian army, roughly 70 percent
are Alawites. Some 80 percent of officers in the
army are also believed to be Alawites. The
military’s most elite division, the Republican
Guard, led by the president’s younger brother
Maher al Assad, is an all-Alawite force. Syria’s
ground forces are organized in three corps
(consisting of combined artillery, armor and
mechanized infantry units). Two corps are led by
Alawites (Damascus headquarters, which commands
southeastern Syria, and Zabadani headquarters
near the Lebanese border). The third is led by a
Circassian Sunni from Aleppo headquarters. [7]
There are reports of desertions by
Syrian soldiers, but these continue to be
relatively small-scale incidents. (A few such
soldiers were among the refugees that fled into
Wadi Khaled, and Lebanon, to the consternation of
human rights activists, plans to send them right
back. [8]) Overall, the Assad regime does not seem
completely desperate just yet.
Regionally,
the situation also does not seem critical yet, but
worries are on the rise. Saudi Arabia, which is
widely rumored to have helped stoke the unrest, is
conspicuously silent. Lebanon is teetering on the
brink. The Lebanese daily An-Nahar quotes Western
diplomatic sources as saying Syrian violence could
spill into Lebanon:
They considered that Syria was keen
on helping Premier-designate Najib Miqati in the
formation of the government but the uprising
against the Assad regime halted such efforts ...
Thus, Syria is no longer capable of contributing
to the formation of a one-sided government that
would give way to Hezbollah to rule ... The
government formation chaos came because the
Lebanese authorities have underestimated the
difficulties that would encounter the cabinet
formation, they told An Nahar. [9]
Israel has been shaken by the
incident Sunday in which hundreds of Palestinian
refugees broke through the border and initiated
clashes in which several died and dozens -
including Israeli soldiers - were wounded. Both
the United States and Israel accused Syrian
President Bashar Assad of orchestrating the
provocation. "It seems apparent to us that this is
an effort to distract attention from the
legitimate expressions of protest by the Syrian
people, and from the harsh crackdown that the
Syrian government has perpetrated against its own
people," White House spokesman Jay Carney told
Reuters on Tuesday.
Some Israeli
commentators have started to question their
country’s relatively passive policy toward its
belligerent northern neighbor. Even though most
agree with the guiding principle that ''the devil
we know [Assad] is better than the devil we don’t
[what might come after him],'' dissenting voices
have pointed out that Israel’s leaders needed to
be more assertive.
For example, if they
had moved more forces to the Golan Heights and
announced a state of high alert due to the unrest,
the Syrian army may well have been forced to
divert some attention to that border and would
have felt less confident cracking down on its own
protesters. There are dangers involved with this
strategy, and Israel wanted to deny Assad any
opportunity to use it as a scapegoat, but Sunday’s
provocation testifies that sitting idly carries
dangers as well. Some have argued that it erodes
Israel’s deterrent and does more harm than good.
As a whole, the Syrian crisis constantly,
if slowly, heats up, and general confusion
increasingly sets in as the narratives of the
different sides become more and more polarized.
Accurate information is hard to come by, and it is
a very tricky task to make forecasts about the
course of violence, but over time experts in the
fields of conflict and conflict resolution studies
have developed some reliable general indicators.
The polarization of narratives and the shrinking
of the middle ground are two such indicators. Even
though they do not appear to have evolved yet the
full course that would lead to a large-scale
conflict, they are sliding in that direction.
These are forces, moreover, which, once unleashed,
are very difficult to reverse. The metaphoric
genie may well be out of the bottle.
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