Syria in the shadow of Libyan
parallels By Victor Kotsev
TEL AVIV - The clearer and neater the
narratives presented by the international media,
the more suspicious they are. This rule of thumb
has retrospectively proved its value in numerous
conflicts and uprisings in the past decades,
including the color revolutions of Eastern Europe,
the conflicts surrounding the break up of the
former Yugoslavia, various African civil wars, and
the Arab Spring this year in countries such as
Libya, Egypt and Yemen.
The pattern is
repeating itself in Syria. On the surface, the
fault lines appear simple, even though this makes
the conflict no less of a quagmire. Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad is sticking to his guns
even as the pressure on him escalates and his
legitimacy seemingly declines.
The
London-based Arabic newspaper Asharq Alawsat compares
the situation in the country
to that in Egypt during the final days of former
president Hosni Mubarak. [1] Al-Jazeera describes
500,000 protesters (out of an estimated 700,000
residents) marching in the city of Hama with olive
branches. [2]
Yet a growing number of
experts, including Syrian dissidents, question
this narrative. They describe a fragmented and
opaque opposition, a growing sense of fear,
frustration and foreign meddling, and they slam
the notion that a democratic transition can happen
quickly and following a revolutionary model. As I
argued previously, the Syrian social fabric is in
danger, and the basic issues and internal
divisions can shift quickly if they haven't
already started to do so. [3]
Add to this
the ever-growing international intrigue, and we
have a situation where the conflict is
increasingly taking on a life of its own,
independent from its original causes and fault
lines. This is a fertile ground for protracted
violence, hijacked by powerful outside interests
and fueled by endemic poverty and sectarian
divisions.
On the past two Fridays,
extraordinarily large demonstrations (at times
with hundreds of thousands of people) took place
in the city of Hama and in several other hotbeds
of the opposition, including the third-largest
city of Homs. In the past days, the international
standoff also intensified significantly.
On Thursday and Friday of last week, the
American and French ambassadors in Syria, on
orders from their governments, visited Hama - the
scene of a massacre committed by Assad's father,
Hafez al-Assad, in order to put down an uprising
in 1982 - and spent hours encircled by
enthusiastic protesters.
Reportedly, they
criticized harshly the regime's severe crackdown
on the demonstrations and the use of tanks and
snipers. Some of the more speculative reports
making the rounds claim that the visit was a
warning to Assad not to dare repeat his father's
actions for fear of an international (presumably
Turkish) military intervention.
Indeed,
the army crackdown was less severe in the past
days than in the past, although military units
entered the cities, killing a reported 15
demonstrators over the weekend and arresting over
200. In the nearly four months of unrest, an
estimated 1,500 protesters and 350 security
personnel have died.
The Syrian government
responded by labeling the visit an "unauthorized"
provocation and by claiming that it was "clear
evidence" that foreign powers were behind the
unrest. Over the weekend, enraged pro-regime mobs
attacked and briefly broke into the two embassies.
They did not manage to harm any diplomatic
personnel, but they caused material damage and
elicited a strong response from the United States
and France.
For the first time since the
start of the unrest, US Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton threatened Assad personally, saying that
he was "not indispensable". She added: "From our
perspective, he has lost legitimacy, he has failed
to deliver on the promises he's made, he has
sought and accepted aid from the Iranians as to
how to repress his own people." [4]
This
amounts to nothing less than a symbolic exchange
of ultimatums between the Syrian government and
Western powers. Syria slammed Clinton's statement,
even as the United Nations condemned the attacks
against the embassies "in the strongest possible
terms".
In Damascus, a
government-sponsored conference was held on Sunday
and Monday, and Syrian Vice President Farouk
al-Sharaa opened it with a call for "transition to
pluralistic democracy". [5] Not surprisingly, the
conference was attended mostly by government
supporters and only by some moderates among the
opposition, and it was widely labeled
internationally as a fig leaf and a ploy to win
time. As mentioned above, the deputy
editor-in-chief of Asharq Alawsat compared the
move to the last desperate gambles of Mubarak.
In this broad rendition of the story, the
Syrian regime is gradually losing ground against
mounting domestic and international pressure, and
every subsequent crackdown against the protests
places Assad in an ever-more precarious position.
This is not necessarily wrong, but on a closer
examination, different narratives emerge as well.
"If the Americans think [Assad] has lost
legitimacy, this doesn't mean he has lost
legitimacy, it means the Americans think he has
lost legitimacy," a political analyst based in
Lebanon told Reuters. [6] Such impressions,
especially on the part of the global super power,
are far from innocent, and carry a weight of their
own-including that of a possible "responsibility
to protect", as demonstrated in Libya.
Conversely, al-Jazeera and other
protest-friendly media may have labeled the
pro-Assad demonstrators as "mnhebak" ("we
love you," or political Hare Krishnas of sorts),
but this does not erase the fact that said
"mnhebak" represent a legitimate Syrian
political voice. There is every indication that
they are not simply regime-paid thugs, as some
accusations against them have it. Neither is the
opposition as democratic and unified, and nor is
the conflict as simple as many reports have it.
[7]
Some side plots that emerge are not
entirely motivated by the events in Syria, but may
have unintended consequences for those events. The
actions and words of the American ambassador and
the White House, for example, may well have been
motivated by domestic political reasons. Recently,
Obama faced increasing accusations that he is
tacitly supporting the Assad regime by keeping his
controversially-appointed ambassador Robert Ford
in place, despite the brutal crackdowns.
"Certainly, Ford's credibility is restored
in Washington [after his visit to Hama and the
assault on the American embassy]," writes renowned
Syrian expert Joshua Landis. "Even Republicans
will have to laud him as a local hero. Only
yesterday they branded him an Assad propaganda
tool. The State Department will also look good.
But are these antics helping the Syrian opposition
or Assad?" [8]
A similar pattern of
domestic considerations taking precedence, with
confused results, in international politics, often
demonstrates itself in the American responses to
the ongoing Libyan crisis.
Other
scenarios-in-the-making include an increasingly
more heated geostrategic game over Syria between
Turkey, Iran and by extension the United States
and other involved countries. This seems to be the
most worrisome development, since such intrigues
are traditionally quick to descend on important
crisis-stricken countries. As many past
experiences and bloody civil wars have taught,
this bodes nothing good to Syria and the Levant.
Libya is again a contemporary example of the onset
of this pattern.
According to Turkish
analyst Nihat Ali Ozcan, some of that geostrategic
game can be seen as part of a broader
Sunni-Shi'ite confrontation.
The rise to power of a "democratic"
Muslim Brotherhood with the mediatized and
psychological support of the West would mean
that Syria will no longer belong to the Shiite
bloc. Losing an ally like Syria would force Iran
to lose a highly important geopolitical space
and also instigate serious psychological trauma.
Under such circumstances, Turkey will most
likely leave aside the politics of balancing and
begin to embrace its role as a new member of the
Sunni bloc. It would be no surprise at all if
Turkey-Iran relations acquired a new shape in
the near future. [9]
Iran has
consistently supported Assad, even allegedly by
sending special forces and military supplies to
help suppress the uprisings. Turkey, on the other
hand, broke in the past months its former alliance
with Assad and is now unofficially threatening to
invade parts of Syria in order to establish a
"security zone".
But Iran, too, may at
some point consider cutting its losses, especially
if the situation of the Syrian president becomes
untenable. Meir Javedanfar, writing for The
Diplomat, elaborates:
For now, time and events are on
Turkey's side. [Prime Minister Recep Tayyip]
Erdogan has been smart enough not to sacrifice
his relations with the West by placing all of
his eggs in the Iran basket, a move that is now
paying off. Meanwhile, he will likely have
calculated that he can withstand pressure from
Iran without having to pay the costs of angering
it. And with Iran so short of friends, there's
little pressure that Tehran can bring to bear
upon Ankara. This allows Erdogan to continue
pressuring Assad to implement serious reforms,
pressure that could evolve into a request that
he step aside should the situation deteriorate
further…. Sooner or later, Iranian Supreme
Leader Ali Khamenei will be faced with a stark
choice – either stand with Assad until the end
or abandon him. [10]
Some reports
claim that Iran may already be considering
replacing its ally Syria with Iraq. [11] This
would introduce an interesting new dynamic, given
the intense stand-off between the Islamic Republic
and the United States in Iraq and the Persian
Gulf. Escalating the tensions in Iraq, moreover,
could give Iran a tool to divert some
international pressure away from Syria. However,
it could also result in a disastrous military
confrontation with the United States.
Other international actors seem to stand
ready to join the fray. Russia comes to mind, with
its sharp interest in its Mediterranean naval base
in Syria.
The most optimistic scenario
currently being discussed involves some sort of a
gradual transition to democracy in Syria and a
broad and lengthy reform implemented by the Assad
government and accepted by the protesters. Such a
reform would necessarily require the removal, and
perhaps exile, of key regime figures such as the
president's brother Maher, the hardline commander
of the feared 4th Armored Division.
There
are some indications that such negotiations are
underway. Even the visit of the American and
French ambassadors to Hama could be such an
indication. As the Israeli intelligence-analysis
website Debka, known to mix wild speculation with
legitimate information and analysis, sharply
observes, it would have been hard for the visit to
go through army blockades surrounding Hama without
some sort of a nod and a wink from the Syrian
government.
Yet such a scenario would be
difficult, if not impossible, to implement in the
long term. It seems more likely, if such
negotiations indeed exist, that Assad is simply
trying to buy time with them.
In an
article in Foreign Policy, Gary Gambill explains:
A "pacted" transition requires that
a critical mass of the ruling elite come to
prefer "democracy with guarantees" over the
costs of continuing to forcibly monopolize
power. Elite beneficiaries of authoritarian rule
range from soft-liners, who have the fungible
assets and limited criminal liability to make it
in the "real" world of democracy, to
hard-liners, who don't.
Unfortunately,
Assad is a hard-liner. Under the present
circumstances, he can count on solid Alawite
backing, strong support from other religious
minorities, and the acquiescence of many Sunnis
who are prosperous, staunchly secular, or
militantly anti-Zionist. These allegiances,
however, would quickly evaporate in a democratic
Syria. Absent the looming threat of catastrophic
domestic upheaval, a regime-less Assad family
may not even command majority support among
Alawites. [12]
It is extremely
worrisome that increasing parallels emerge with
Libya and with how the Libyan story was originally
told in the beginning.
Simplistic
parallels to simplistic narratives of what
happened in other countries (specifically Egypt)
often guided analysts; insufficient attention was
paid to unique local realities such as a
fragmented political and social structure and the
nature of the power base of the regime.
The result: the current debacle in which
the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance finds itself in
Libya. On a side note, even the success story in
Egypt misses several important points such as the
continued tensions in the country, political
stagnation and the steady economic decline.
Such simplistic narratives have been known
to serve very well complex geostrategic games and
foreign interests. Judging from ample past
examples, this will bring nothing good to Syria
and to the region; it may, however, signal the
onset of a new international stage in the Syrian
conflict.
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