EDITORIALS

Syrias Tragedy
A popular uprising for democracy has ended up militarised and kidnapped by reaction.
ore than a year and half back, on 15 March 2011, when the world was being turned upside down with what was called the Arab Spring, many citizens and organisations of Syria called for a Day of Dignity to protest the lack of fundamental freedoms and political rights. The call saw hundreds of thousands of people coming out to demand their rights from the government of Bashar al-Assad. Even before this protest had taken place, the Syrian police had started arresting the leaders and putting curbs on people to prevent them from participating in the demonstrations. The protest itself was met with harsh police measures but did not die down. As with most other protests of the Arab Spring, it spread from city to city and each day saw ever-increasing participation of people who would normally stay away from politics in these countries. True to its character, the only response of the Syrian regime was to use its police, security and intelligence services to break up the protests by arresting its leaders and creating conditions that were meant to scare people away from participation. By April the military was out in the streets shooting the protestors and arresting hundreds all over the country. Syria has been under emergency laws since 1963 and since 1971 has been under the dictatorship of the Assads of the father Hafez till 2000 and since then of his son, Bashar and their Baath party. There have been no legitimate elections and political parties which oppose the regime are not allowed. The ruling Baath party is in a formal alliance with a number of smaller parties, including the two communist parties of Syria, but there is no space for independent political opinion. In a context where political opposition is criminalised and even political platforms identied with popular protests are co-opted within the ruling power structures, people had no legitimate space to express their dissatisfaction and differences. Added to this was the Assad regimes political brinkmanship in the region and its economic policies which engendered a strange formation of crony state capitalism. Like with so many other tyrannical and anti-democratic regimes of the region, Syria has been sitting on a volcano of public anger that has been held down by increasing oppression by the state.

Even when faced with the widespread anger of the Syrian people, Bashar-al Assad refused to nd a democratic solution. Instead of accommodating popular demands for political representation and freedoms, he tried to browbeat the people into submission. The increasing use of military force including the shelling of citizens by artillery units of the Syrian army against unarmed and non-violent protests not only helped the rise of armed opposition, it also made the distance between the rulers and the ruled unbridgeable. The military response of the Syrian regime has closed the possibility of any democratic solution to the crisis and opened up space for the entry of forces like the United States (US) and Saudi Arabia who have used this opportunity to fund and supply the armed opposition. Over this year and a half of a terrible civil war which has claimed thousands of lives and reduced large parts of Syrias cities to rubble, the opposition now seems to be entirely subverted by the imperialist do-gooders. The people of Syria, who have faced one form of dictatorship after the other since their independence, are today caught between two warring camps, one backed by Iran and Russia and the other funded and armed by the US and Islamic fundamentalists. It is a sad testament of our times that popular movements for freedom often become geopolitical fodder, as we have seen in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria. The Government of India has thankfully adopted a sensible position on this conict. It has taken a stand against foreign military intervention while asking for a non-violent and democratic resolution to the conict based on negotiations between the domestic players. While correct in its stance, this has little chance of success given the level of violence in the conict and the entry of the major global and regional players. After more than a year of a stalemate in the military standoff between the Assad military and the Free Syria Army, it appears that the latter is slowly gaining ground, helped no doubt by the external funding and massive military and intelligence support they have received as also the entrenched resentment of the Syrian people against the Assad regime. Unfortunately, it appears that freedom from Assad and his tyranny will only mean the coming to power of a regime that will be dependent on the US and Saudi Arabia and will also be inuenced by Islamic fundamentalists who have already gained ground.

Economic & Political Weekly

EPW

october 6, 2012

vol xlviI no 40