Syria in crisis
Alexander Macpherson-Glasgow discusses the situation in Syria
The legal philosopher Neil McCormick said that jurisprudence is peddling in the shallows of philosophy. I am inclined to agree. If a cause is right or wrong, it should be possible to make an argument without appeals to law.
For the past twelve months, Syria has been travelling along a dreadful path as the Ba’athist forces, led by Bashar al-Assad, deployed heavy weaponry and helicopter gunships to quell protest. On 16 February a binding UN Resolution, which would have empowered the Arab League and other states with nonmilitary means, was blocked by China and the Russian Federation. Their reasons strike me as a cynical desire to maintain their influence and restrict that of America.
Although ‘legal’, this was to my mind undoubtedly ‘wrong’ and, from listening to advocacy groups such as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, I suspect Russian and Chinese policy now is more tainted in the region than American policy.
The next day, the bombardment of Homs and other cities increased, leading to the scenes that war journalist Marie Colvin described in her last dispatch on 22 February, hours before she was killed by mortar fire.
In some ways, Bashar al-Assad strikes me as a tragic figure. He was trained as an ophthalmologist at London hospitals. He could have continued his career, literally giving sight to the blind, had his playboy brother and his father’s preferred successor, Bassel, not died in a car crash in 1994.
Yet, the good intentions and promises of reform expressed at his inauguration, following his father’s death in 2000, had been abandoned long before the current uprising. Al-Assad family members kept their hands on economic and financial levers – and the Ba’ath Party continued its totalitarian and brutal rule, as it had done since being installed by a coup d’état in 1963, with control passing in 1970 to Hafaz al-Assad, Bashar’s father.
What is extraordinary about the Assad family is that they are Alawite: a heterogenous iteration of Islam that engenders considerable animus from Sunni Islam, which is followed by the majority of Syrians. An Alawite becoming president of an Arab Muslim majority country has been compared to a Jew becoming tsar of Russia or a Dalit the maharaja of an Indian princedom.
Like all Arab majority countries, Syria is far from a single homogeneous mass (belied by the descriptor ‘Arab world’). To maintain control, Hafez and then Bashir al-Assad presented themselves as defending a multitude of ethnic and religious minorities from Sunni Arab extremism. Furthermore, they prided themselves on avoiding the US axis, unlike Saudi Arabi or Kuwait, and normalising relations with Israel, unlike Jordan or Egypt.
When protests began in the Sunni Arab city of Deraa, accusations of such outside meddling were made, even as protests were appearing in the Kurdish city of Qamishli.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has reported that government forces are targeting entire Sunni Arab families, and that a mood of revenge against the various minority groups associated with the Assad family is developing. Alawites are in a particularly perilous position because, if they have been historically distrusted for religious reasons, then four decades of oppression and economic corruption by a clique of Alawite officers will only accentuate this distrust.
Whatever lies further along the dreadful path that Syria is following, I am genuinely afraid that it will include a human catastrophe similar to that seen following the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Notes: Syrian Observatory for Human Rights www.syriahr.com (mainly in Arabic)
