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Mainstream, VOL L, No 24, June 2, 2012

Shadow of the Al-Qaeda on Syria: Damascus Needs to be Understood Better

Friday 8 June 2012

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by Kallol Bhattacherjee

The tomb of Saladin outside the grand Umayyad mosque of Damascus is a constant reminder of the past conflicts that shaped the world, like the Crusade, arrival of the Ottoman Caliphate and the colonial era of the 18th to 20th century. Syrians still remember Henry Gourad, the French military officer who strode to the tomb of Saladin, after defeating a colonial insurrection against French rule following World War I, to declare triumphantly: “Arise Saladin, we have returned,” in a historic reference to the epic (that some say is continuous) battle between Christendom and Islam. History is witness to battles in Syria that have never been what they seemed. The context of the current disturbances in the country is therefore necessary to be understood before judgements are pronounced.

With the end of the Cold War, a large number of countries in Asia and Africa had to reorient their policies towards the world. Syria, a key ally of the erstwhile USSR, had to find a way of reorienting too. But this could not be done in a hurry without jeopardising the internal stability of the Syrian system because the Government of Syria, despite what its critics might say, is the outcome of a social consensus in a country which has different groups vying for political power and social dominance. As a country that has huge emotive sway among followers of different religious groups and sects in the region, Syria’s domestic stability was not undervalued by its ruling elite who for close to six decades has held the country in balance. In brief, change had to take its own course in the Syrian environment and that change was being groomed for some time before the current round of crisis broke out.
More regarding the social stability of Syria later. First, we will look at the issue of transition of Syria from one global network to the other.

The image of Syria in the global arena for long has been viewed through the Israel-Palestine prism. This is primarily because of the fact that post-colonial Syria chose the official name of Syrian Arab Republic, thereby making it amply clear to the world that it opted for the cultural-linguist category of “the Arab” as an ideological force for nation-building among a disparate population. As a result, Syria, one of the most advanced parts of the Arab world, led the charge of the Palestinian cause from the front and suffered whenever the “confrontation states” clashed with Israel.
Over the years, Egypt and Jordan struck peace deals with Israel, but Syria stuck to the position that as long as Israel held on to the Golan Heights (which the Israeli versus had occupied during the war of 1967), there was no chance of a dialogue between Israel and Syria. While lack of dialogue over the Israel versus Syria conflict creates the image of intransigence of Syria, the reality is that their political position does not take anything away from the innate hospitality and openness of the Syrian masses and the sophistication of the highly cosmopolitan Syrian political elite.

It is telling of our era that some of the key progressive and secular figures in the Arab world, in Syria, are perceived as a danger to the world. Perhaps the progressive forces of Syria can be criticised on the ground of lack of democratic sincerity but they remain the best bet for progressive politics in a region which is not known for democratic politics. I will stick my neck out and say that if democracy has to come then it will arrive riding on the back of the current group of political elite and through a dialogue between all groups of the Syrian people.
After having seen Syria from close quarters, it can be said that most of Syria’s decisions flows from its fierce domestic politics and not from any ideological blindness. Syria wanted to be the beacon of modernity in a sea of backward and struggling Arab masses who were often not fit for modernity. But as an ancient community and witness to global trade, wars and faiths, Syria took to the modern, nationalist era without much trouble. 

As a result, Syria emerged as a revolutionary country in the midst of the less-than-perfect political structures of the Arab world that stretch from the shores of the Arabian Sea to the Rock of Gibraltar at the western end of the Mediterranean Sea. As part of its Arab identity, Syria has supported the Palestinian struggle and currently stands in the Levantine region as the sole flag-bearer of the secular progressive Arab identity.

But there is more to Syria than its Arab identity and support to the Palestinian issue. Syria is the home to Biblical Christianity. The cities of Damascus, Maalula, Aleppo and several others are places sanctified by mentions in the Holy Bible. In short, Damascus, which emerged as a key Islamic pilgrimage site, is also the capital of a country considered sacred by millions of Orthodox Chrisitians. One aspect that is never spoken out loud in the underpinning of ties between Russia and Syria is the reality that Syria is the home to the Orthodox Christian Church, which is the state religion of Russia and has millions of followers in Greece, Cyprus, USA, and many countries in Eastern Europe. With such a solid Christian tradition, it is little wonder that 20 per cent of Syria consists of Christians. Apart from the sizable Christians, Syrians also consist of the Druze, the Bedouins and other smaller communities.

The bulk of the country comprises Muslims who are further divided politically among the articulate Shias and assertive Sunnis. Among the Christian community of Syria, particular mention should be made of the large number of Russian and Greek nationals who have settled in Syria, partly out of professional reasons and also out of religious consideration. The state of Syria, under the Baathist rule of Bashar Al Assad and before him his father Hafez Al Assad, did not interfere in their religious freedom in any way. In fact President Bashar Assad and his wife, a Sunni Muslim, are known to be regular visitors to the mountainous Christian shrines of Maalula.

Given the unique educational, political background of the Syrians, rise of one relatively small sect of the Syrian society, the Alwites, was long considered a less contentious move as the Alwites were perceived by many as an inter-community peace-maker. However, such concentration of power also showcased the necessity for political pluralism for the larger Syrian society.

The Baathist socialism of Syria, like its counterpart in Iraq, began as a unique native bureaucratic innovation to preserve domestic harmony while keeping the country focused on essential goals like education, prosperity and general well-being of the citizens. The Government of Syria, thus evolved, is therefore also an ‘arrangement’ to hold diverse competing political claimants from tearing the system apart.

It is unlikely that the politically aware Syrians themselves did not think about the necessity to reform their system in the last twenty years of the post-Cold War era. Indeed, they had been trying. The big change started coming with the assumption to power of Bashar Al Assad, the son of the strongman Hafez Al Assad, and perhaps during his time, one of the strongest supporters of the USSR from the West Asian-North African region. How not to compromise with the core of Arab identity and causes like the Palestine dispute was the first priority for Assad as he tried to modernise the government of Syria. In this, he needed support from regional players like Turkey and Iran. Both the countries turned out to be allies of Syria, but Turkey—due to its evolving partnership with Israel—started rolling out of this partnership. There were also problems on the Kurdish front and hence Turkey often accused Syria of non-cooperation. Due to such reasons of distrust between Turkey and Syria, it was Iran—which was supported by Hafez Al Assad during the long war with Iraq during the 1980s—that finally became the strategic partner of Syria.

However, despite their partnership, the Iranian religious establishment is certain to feel uncomfortable in the highly liberal atmosphere of Syria. Given the ground reality of bars and night clubs and liberal outdoors, the partnership between the vilayat e faqih of Iran and the modernist Arabs of Syria can rightly be described as a political and strategic understanding and shows the realpolitic nature of the two countries involved in this partnership.

Any insider of the Syrian elite system will tell you that they are not against political reform, but they also want their political system, built on tense social fabric, to hold lest the country ends up divided along ethnic and sectarian lines a la Iraq. The division of Syria was, by the way, also the dream of the French power of the Mandate era before World War II. But the other side of the current campaign against the Syrian Government is not coming from any impartial force. The international powers campaigning against the regime of Bashar Al Assad had in the past been against Syria—the Cold War opponents of the Soviet bloc.

The realisation that dances out of self-serving condemnation of the Bashar Government does not mind throwing out a liberal Arab Government at the risk of plunging the entire country into a phase of civil war and anarchy and vivisection and larger regional conflict. Intriguingly, there-fore, when did the biggest opponents of Syria become the biggest supporters of the disgruntled elements of the Syrian society? Disenchantment is an entirely domestic Syrian matter and this is not too difficult to sense on the streets of Syria, where working classes, religious groups, minorities and majorities alike continue to support Bashar Al Assad while acknowledging the need for the sharing of power. Assad, despite being the favourite whipping boy of the Western media, has not banned a single Western TV channel from being telecast into Syria.

Instead, his government continues to practise a free-air policy even for the scathingly critical ones like Al Jazeera and CNN and BBC while criticising and exposing their stories whenever they are telecast without much ground research. The reality is that some of the loudest Western channels and newspapers have often ended up as hostage to subjective history and histrionics.

After one such dubious bomb blast in Damascus, the aftermath of which was witnessed by this writer, Los Angeles Times clearly “indicated” that the source of the attack lay in the Government of Assad. On my trip to the spot of the bomb blast, I found the bomb had gone off right outside the Iranian Cultural Centre in the Marje locality of Damascus. It is nearly impossible to imagine that any government which has got the biggest powers of the world arrayed against it would bomb the neighbour-hood of a cultural mission belonging to its closest supporter in the region. Someone who is completely without any field research alone would have accused the Government of Syria of self-planted bomb blasts. It also does not do any good to the image of the US-UK combine which, according to the BBC, is on the same side as the Al-Qaeda in opposing the Assad Government of Syria. A news report from Syria, aired on BBC in the evening of May 26, showed that the rebels of Syria threatening to join hands with the Al-Qaeda to fight off Assad’s modern government. The Al-Qaeda, which is accused of the 9/11 attacks and whose men are acknowledged as the flag-bearers of the worst form of regressive practices, is ironically on the same side as the champions of Western liberal values. Any sane observer of the Syrian drama will ask: how can the Al-Qaeda be an evil in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, and a good reason to upstage the modern Arab Government of Baathists in Syria? Is a modern Arab Government with a functioning Army and bureaucracy a greater threat than terrorists planning to smuggle in nuclear weapons? Perhaps the media campaign against the Syrian Government has no clear answer to this.

The Western media has also suppressed the fact that the insurgents, who are mostly affiliates of the Al-Qaeda, have targeted the minority Christians from the beginning of the movement. The world also needs to recognise the fact that as a result of its relaxed visa policy for the victims of war on Iraq, a large number of refugees arrived in Syria from Iraq in waves from 1991 till 2003 and thereafter. Victims also poured into Syria from Lebanon during the 1980s. The latest Lebanese refugees came to Syria after the Israel versus Hezbollah fight of 2006.

These victims of war, who live near Damascus and in the vicinity of the holy shrines of the Shia faith, have also provided the channel through which terrorists have infiltrated cities like Daraa which fall in the trade and pilgrim route between Syria and Iraq. While a large part of the dominant media in the world wants to dismiss the Syrian Government, it should be brought to the notice of the reader that Syria has silently borne more than three million Iraqi refugees fleeing from war over the last twentyone years.

The first issue in understanding the Syrian imbroglio is that the war dreams and calls for “preventive action” are coming from the long-time enemies of Syria. A legitimate question therefore is to ask if these outside actors have suddenly turned into sympathisers of the Syrian people after being in a complicated love-hate relationship with them for decades. The other issue is the importance of Syria as a strategic, spiritual and cultural power making it a powerful pillar in the Arab/Islamic world. Any armed action on Syria would tantamount to attacking the country that hosts some of the holiest shrines of Shia Islam. Given the emotive nature of such a situation, no one can predict how the Shias of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Cenral Asia are going to respond if such a war is unleashed on Syria. Unthinkable, however, is the impact that such a volatile sectarian-fuelled regional unrest will have on the energy prices of the world.
The other fact is that political boundaries on the map do not divide communities on the ground. Violence in Lebanon has already showcased that violence will in all probability flare up not just in Lebanon but also in Shia-majority Bahrain and beyond if the Al-Qaeda-like insurgents are supported by some “invisible forces” with weapons and means of countering the state authority of Syria.

Hezbollah’s TV channel, Al Manar, has in the recent past shown large protests by Shias in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain which were airbrushed by the CNN and BBC. The fact is that the region is being selectively reported in the Western media to produce a conducive atmos-phere for reckless military adventurism. The ground reality, however, is entirely different and extreme caution must be exercised lest devastating effects befall countries of the region and beyond. Syria is deeply tied to Iran and Russia and both have based their partnership with Syria on strategic grounds keeping their sentimentalism away.

Russia, which is increasingly encircled by NATO forces stationed in as different places as Afghanistan and Eastern Europe, accesses the Mediterranean Sea through its naval base at the Syrian port of Tartus. Iran, on the other hand, has expanded its reach through Syria to Lebanon and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the disastrous Iraq war of 2003 because of which the Shia pockets of the region coalesced and formed one unit stretching from Iran to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. The contest for power in Syria is a domestic matter that should be left to the Syrian people and their ability to resolve the crisis. Lopsided reporting on Syria has produced a distorted a picture of the Syrian situation. These reports have not highlighted the entire web of crisis that will erupt in both Syria as well as the region, if the Syrian Government is destabilised at this moment. Both kinds of instability will impact the energy scenario of the growing economies and therefore impact the world’s fragile economic health. Syria therefore is not an open-and-shut case of another cowboy warfare of the neo-imperialists of the world. Syria should be allowed to solve its problems on its own without any outside interference and/or intervention.

The author, who is on the staff of The Week, has recently returned after a trip to Damascus to cover the events in Syria.

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