For the hundreds of thousands risking their lives to protest against the regime, the tens of thousands of refugees who have fled over the border to Lebanon and to Turkey, and especially the thousands who have been harrassed, injured, detained, imprisoned, tortured and killed, it probably seems a little late in the day to now be remarking on a loss of ‘legitimacy’. In a faintly absurd juxtaposition, even while the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon was scolding the Syrian president over the phone on Saturday, al-Assad’s army was preparing to roll its tanks into the eastern city of Deir al-Zour in a major pre-dawn assault to quell the uprising from the reported 400,000 citizens who had been taking to the streets since earlier in the week.
It is understandable that Syria was always going to be one of the hardest Arab uprisings for onlookers to understand and to deal with. As a key strategic player at Europe’s back door, the West’s main concern with Syria has been that any upheavals would have unpredictable repercussions for Israel-Palestine and other delicate areas of Middle East politics, particularly given Syria’s close ties with Lebanon and Russia among others. Secondly, there is no Gaddafi-style nutty bogeyman to caricature here. Up until recent events at least, it has been notoriously difficult to know what to make of al-Assad as a leader. Never intended for rule until the death of his older brother, highly educated in the West and married to a sophisticated and cosmopolitan ‘queen of hearts’, al-Assad for a long time looked set to bring about genuine democratic reforms and a thaw in relations between Syria and the West.
However, in the last few months it has become painfully clear as to the lengths that the regime will go to in order to hold onto power, and the international community has run out of excuses as to why it should not intervene. Evidently the finger-wagging tactics relied upon so far have had no real impact. The Security Council’s call for an end to the violence, though welcome after such a period of silence, is a presidential statement and thus not legally binding or indicative of any decisive action that will be taken against Syria. The weakness of the response has been criticised by groups such as Amnesty International, which is demanding an arms embargo, an asset freeze and, most importantly, that the situation be referred to the International Criminal Court as with Libya in February.
The death toll is now widely agreed to number around 2,000, and is rising daily. Perhaps even more chilling is the seemingly endless list of the disappeared – those who have been snatched and detained by the authorities, held incommunicado at unknown locations, many beaten, tortured or murdered. Extrajudicial detention and killing is not new in Syria but the scale and arbitrariness of the current escalation is unprecedented. According to one private online forum which must remain anonymous, teenagers are routinely being plucked off the streets or from their homes for nothing more than gathering together in white t-shirts. The campaign movement Avaaz is promoting a petition, signed by nearly half a million people globally, for a human rights delegation to investigate the cases of the 3,000 Syrian citizens who have disappeared since March and to achieve justice for them and their families.
Without a stronger response, however, thousands more will die. Russia, a long-time ally of Syria, has been one of the main blocks to concerted action, particularly at the UN level, but the US believes that this is now changing, with outrage over current events paving the way to an international mandate for some kind of intervention. This cannot come soon enough: the situation in Syria has gone underreported too long, and peace and security have come at too high a price, even long before the explosive events of this year. When I was there in 2008, what struck me most was the uneasy mismatch between the vibrancy, warmth and intelligent perceptiveness of the people, and the stagnant, somewhat sinister, political lock-down which provided for the much-cherished condition of ‘stability’. It was a state of affairs which one senses Western powers were reasonably happy with, and until very recently, probably hoped would be reinstated. If someone had told me then that this pervasive political quietism and social adherence would within a few years be replaced with a mass grassroots uprising, I simply would not have believed them.
The slower and more fitful nature of the Syrian revolution compared to others in the region in part belies and in part reflects the deep and passionate patriotism which abounds there. Even when you see past the school-learned soundbites and mandatory presidential posters on every street corner and in every taxi, there is a relatively large contingent which is genuinely, emotionally, loyal to al-Assad and his family. This has been one of the defining features of events in Syria, not least the army’s continuing faithfulness, at least until now, to the will of the regime. But the army cannot be everywhere at once, and the growing number of reported defections suggests that the tide may be about to turn. As a Swiss journalist who recently managed to get in to Hama comments, the merry-go-round of cities playing host to the latest protests – first Deraa… the people of Hama on behalf of the besieged in Homs, now Homs on behalf of Hama… now Deir al-Zour, and so on – are testimony to both the astonishing resilience and shared sense of destiny of the Syrian people. The same is true when you look online and find the plethora of social media campaigns and solidarity movements coordinated by ordinary youth from around the country, in spite of the ever-present threat of internet shabiha (regime spies).
International actors may have so far taken care not to rock the Middle East boat with hasty action in Syria, but while stability can be a means for progress, it should never be an end goal. As the regime brutally attacks, imprisons and kills thousands of innocent citizens, momentum is finally building in support of a credible response, and the international community must now take its responsibility seriously and act.
Posted on August 9, 2011
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