The figures – over 70,000 dead, up to 60,000 missing, five million
displaced, millions starving, thousands detained, thousands raped, thousands
tortured and thousands massacred – have become meaningless.
They are numbers that cannot express the suffering that
Syrian civilians now endure in their smashed cities and overcrowded refugee
camps. For these people burying their dead, their cries are that the rest of
the world has to wake up. Recently the UN Relief Agency said it was running out
of funds for Syria.
But while President Bashar al-Asad – who is seen to be the
stumbling block – is propped up by Iranian and Hezbollah forces and
Russian-supplied arms, he will hang grimly onto power. He will last as long his
Iranian and Russian masters find him useful, and as long as the Syrian
opposition remains politically fractured.
Called a ‘dead man walking’ by the US State Department last
year, Asad is remarkably healthy for a political corpse. Iran, which regards
Syria as its closest ally and supports Hezbollah in neighbouring Lebanon, has much
to lose in the region.
Iran’s concern is a hostile Sunni-led government (Syrians
are 80% Sunni) as opposed to the Shi’ah-aligned, but thoroughly secular ruling Alawite
minority. There are Iranian officials who believe leaving Syria will break a
‘golden thread’ running through Tehran to Damascus.
They believe it will also bring Israel – itching to make a
pre-emptive strike against Iran’s non-existent WMD programme – to within a
shouting distance of Tehran. It’s hardly likely, either, that Iran will be
happy to contemplate a sectarian homeland, which has been suggested as a last
resort for the 10-15% Alawite minority.
For Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who have financially supported
certain Free Syrian Army groups, an Iranian withdrawal from Syria and Lebanon
would prevent their bogey, a ‘Shi’ah crescent’ from sweeping deeper into the
Middle East and the Gulf through neighbouring Iraq.
Russia’s presence in Syria is because Damascus has been a
faithful ally for over 50 years. Russia’s last cold-war naval base is in
Tartus. With Moscow not willing to forgo a regional presence, Russia’s (and
China’s) Security Council veto checkmates the western axis on NATO intervention.
For once, the US – wary of another Iraq – has been forced to
be something of a bit player, lobbying for sanctions and providing what is
essentially small-scale financial support to the FSA. Turkey has had to play a cautious
diplomatic role, allowing refugees and humanitarian aid to cross its southern
border, as has Jordan – who now wants a US sponsored buffer zone between it and
Syria.
Russia, I believe, is now playing its ‘Iraq-Halliburton endgame’
in Syria, and like China and Iran, will probably want to benefit from deals to
rebuild the country’s infrastructure once the conflict ends.
Since the Arab Spring, power vacuums have been created in
the Middle East. Syria, for instance, has had little experience of political
process. Asad’s few concessions to the uprising (which he blames on
western-sponsored religious extremists) have all been geared to maintaining the
status quo.
The point is that there has been no room for political
discourse. Politics, and not religion, is at the core of the Syrian problem –
and the Syrian mukhabarat, or security police, have clamped down on any opposition
since 1970.
It’s unrealistic, therefore, to expect that the FSA –
reflecting diverse viewpoints – would be able to coalesce overnight into a
united political front. We all know how Egypt, Tunisia and Libya have struggled.
The disparate, if not rag-tag Free Syrian Army is unanimously resolute in
removing Asad, but equally determined to guard its hard won turf. Many FSA
commanders, for example, are said to be extremely unhappy about the extremism of Jabhat
al-Nusra, the foreign-manned Al-Qaeda-linked unit said to be responsible for
many of the bombings.
Bashar al-Asad, however, has had to deal with much more than
revolution and mercenary Salafists. It has hardly been noted that he has also
had to face economic meltdown – partly caused by his own greed, and partly by climate
change.
With the economy moribund by the late 1990’s, the Asad regime
resorted to privatisation. This resulted in wealth accumulating amongst the
ruling elite, and it caused Syria’s already yawning poverty gap to widen even further.
A devastating drought in the north-east of the country saw an
implosion of the agricultural sector, mass urbanisation, burgeoning youth
unemployment and massive cost-of-living increases.
So when teenagers scrawled anti-regime graffiti on a school
blackboard in the city of Deraa, and were viciously beaten and tortured (this
incident sparked the uprising) it was an equal measure of political and
economic frustration that moved the Syrian cataclysm.
Asad’s response to peaceful demonstrations was to turn his
guns upon the crowds and to unleash the shabihah (notorious paramilitary
gangs).
The escalation of the conflict is well-known, and the extent
of its violence, horrifying. Human Rights Watch in its April report, ‘Death
from the Skies’, accuses the Syrian air force of ‘indiscriminate’ and sometimes
‘deliberate’ attacks on civilian targets such as bakeries and hospitals.
A UN panel earlier this year also found that ‘gross human
rights violations’ had occurred at the hands of the Syrian government. It found
that the Free Syrian Army had also committed abuses, but not on the same scale
as Asad’s forces.
But the most disturbing development has been the
assassination of religious leaders. The most notable has been Shaikh Ramadan
al-Buti, an internationally renowned scholar who was politically cautious, but reportedly
on the brink of speaking out against the regime. He met his demise in a suicide
blast whilst delivering a lecture in his Damascus mosque.
In one of the darkest moments of the Middle East conflict,
over 40 died. Who is responsible for such a despicable act is not the question
here. For when sacred space becomes the battlefield, and we have forgotten how
to disagree, we have surely entered the darkest domains of the human spirit, a
detestable place where cruelty and hate rule over compassion and mercy.
