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27 June 2012
Arab Spring model not a Syrian reality
Published in The Drum, ABC On Line, 28 June 2012
Foreign Minister Bob Carr has adopted a pre-emptive and partisan position on the Syrian situation.
This may not reflect the will of the majority of Syrian citizens, nor the good will of the UN Special Envoy Kofi Annan, nor indeed the majority of Australian citizens of Syrian descent.
Rather than being peacemakers in a polarized situation, Carr has cornered Australia into a position of a provocateur.
After the al Houla infanticide on May 29, he jumped the gun and expelled the Syrian diplomats, long before the UN investigated the facts. This week, he has ramped up the anti-Syrian sanctions, which are largely tokenistic given the minimal trade between the two countries.
He challenges Russian president Vladimir Putin to put ‘pressure on Assad to walk off the stage’. Knowing that Russia supplies arms to Syria, why not also put pressure on the US-Saudi-Qatar axis to stop supplying arms to the fractured opposition groups? This way, his efforts to demilitarise the conflict and help bring the parties to the UN negotiating table can be taken more seriously.
On March 21, 2001, the Syrian revolution was heralded with graffiti by unarmed teenagers in Dara’a, ‘the people want the regime to fall’, a copycat mantra inspired by the Arab Spring in North Africa. This ember that drifted into Syria was swiftly snuffed by the local authoritarian guard and the youth were imprisoned. The Syrian president squandered a historic opportunity to listen to the grievances of these sons of Syria. He could have orchestrated a political evolution instead of a bloody revolution. He could have morally disarmed the opposition, both exiled and resident.
President Assad misread all the writing on the wall, and believed that he was immune from this social tsunami sweeping across the Arab region. Two months before this trigger, he declared that ‘Syria is stable’ because he was ‘very closely linked to the beliefs of the people’. In his March 30 speech to parliament, he could have opened serious dialogue to harness the angst rather than peddling conspiracy theories. Instead, he wrote off dissenting voices as terrorists which has ironically become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
By his own admission, ‘Syria is geographically and politically in the middle of the Middle East’, sharing borders with Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq and Israel, so he should have been ultra cautious about Syria’s vulnerability.
The unarmed teenage message has been usurped by the militant Syrian National Council (SNC), who make the teenagers look like kittens.
Today, even the voices of the SNC have been hijacked by the Salafist Sheikhs proclaiming Fatwas and jihads against all the pro-Assad infidels. The jihadists do not take man-made orders from the SNC in Istanbul. They take divine orders direct from Saudi Arabia.
Their rants are viral on YouTube and they make the fractured SNC sound like pussy cats in a lion’s den. The neat Arab Spring template of goodies and baddies fails to fit the reality on the ground in Syria.
On one hand, Assad is sanctioned for failing to exercise restraint against the armed opposition groups.
On the other hand, his citizens criticise him for failing to defend them against the invading jihadists.
It is exactly one year since Sheikh Adnan Arour declared that ‘for those [Alawites] who violated all that is sacred, by Allah the Great, we shall mince them in meat grinders and feed their flesh to the dogs’.
Similarly Sheikh Muhammad al Zughbey proclaimed that ‘your jihad against this infidel criminal and his people is a religious duty’ and that Alawites are ‘more infidel than the Jews and Christians’. It is no surprise that original teenage slogan has been replaced with a sectarian one ‘Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave’.
The Arab adage ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ creates bizarre bed fellows. Last May, we celebrated when the Al Qaeda leader was buried at sea, yet now we collaborate with them as they embark upon ethnic cleansing.
The Salafists taint the reputation of the Sunni ‘guardians’ in Saudi Arabia, with their threats of hell for Assad loyalists and promises of a (promiscuous) paradise for martyrs.
With the Fatwas ‘on tap’ making mockery of his country, Sheikh Ali al-Hikmi of the Saudi Council of
Senior Scholars deployed an anti-ballistic missile with his counter-fatwa forbidding all jihad in Syria.
On February 7, Dr Yusuf al Qaradawi, president of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, issued another ‘damage control’ fatwa, co-signed by 107 other Muslim scholars, declaring the ‘need to protect the ethnic and religious minorities which have lived for more than a thousand years as part of the Syrian people’.
Ironically, the more the Salafists terrorise Syria, the more the Syrians cling to Bashar al Assad as their saviour, which feeds directly into the Salafist claim that these infidels worship Assad above Allah.
However, these jihadist calls continue to echo in Australia through the social media with impunity and their followers have sought to terrorise Australian Alawis with petrol bombs, vilifying graffiti and death threats. The targeted citizens believe that Mr Carr’s anti-Assad stance has validated and unleashed the anti-Alawi sentiments, which he needs to untangle and condemn.
There is nothing civil about the war in Syria – it is a proxy war to protect Israel from a nuclear Iran. This was confirmed when Israel’s defence minister Ehud Barak declared that toppling Assad ‘will be a major blow to the radical axis [Iran] … It’s the only kind of outpost of the Iranian influence in the Arab world … and it will weaken dramatically both Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza’.
President Assad should have treated the writing on the wall as a sectarian inscribed prophecy, not as secular erasable graffiti. Even if another UN monitored election voted Assad back into presidency. Even if a UN supervised political negotiation is brokered, where the exiled opposition can table their demands, many of which have already been met. His enemies have already written the next chapter of history, where he has been written off.
It is the height of arrogance to assume that we know the will of Syrian citizens, who are increasingly demanding stability over democracy. We cannot be hell bent on regime change and peace brokers at the same time.