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| Abdelbaset Sida, George Sabra and Burhan Ghalioun |
By
week’s end, an activist from Syria’s Kurdish or Christian minorities will most
likely succeed Burhan
Ghalioun as leader of Syria’s main opposition umbrella, the Syrian National
Council (SNC).
Either
a Syrian Kurdish native, Abdelbaset Sida, or a Syrian Christian, George Sabra,
will probably be named to replace Muslim Sunnite Ghalioun at the June 9-10 meeting of
the SNC executive bureau in Istanbul. Both are members of the SNC executive
bureau.
Many in the opposition view Sida or Sabra's appointment as a way to convince
minorities they are partners in the revolution and in shaping Syria's future. The
move would also allay concerns over the Muslim Brotherhood’s hegemony in the
SNC.
Ghalioun
has led the SNC by consensus since its formation last October and was
elected chairman in a vote held in Rome in mid-May, when Sabra
came second in the ballot.
Based
in Paris since the 1970s, the 67-year-old Ghalioun is the
author of numerous books dealing with sociological and political issues of the
Islamic world. He is director of the Centre d'Etudes sur l'Orient Contemporain
(CEOC) in Paris and a professor of recycling sociology at the Université de Paris III
(Sorbonne Nouvelle).
Sida,
56, is a native of al-Hasakah in Syria’s northeastern corner sandwiched between
the borders with Turkey and Iraq. He holds a PhD in Philosophy and has been
living in self-exile in Sweden since 1994. His book – “The Kurdish Question in
Syria” – was published in 2003.
He
told KurdWatch organization, which reports on human rights violations against
Kurds in Syria, in an interview last November, “I try (at the SNC) to
bring the Kurdish question to the fore, because it is in Syria's interest to
find a just and democratic solution to this question.
“To
the Syrian opposition, I say again and again: If you solve the Kurdish
question, you will win as new friends more than 20 million Kurds in Northern
Kurdistan, seven million Kurds in Southern Kurdistan, and up to 10 million
Kurds in Eastern Kurdistan… But our main objective (for the moment) must be to
overthrow the regime.”
Sabra, 65, is a working-class liberal Christian
and longtime dissident now based in Paris. He spent two years in solitary
confinement and only left Syria, crossing to Jordan on foot, last October following a
brief spell in detention.
He is a founder member of the Damascus
Declaration for National Democratic Change and an ally of Syria’s top
dissident Riad al-Turk.
Turk, an 81-year-old
former leftist who spent 25 years as a political prisoner, operates underground
inside Syria. The opposition looks to him for moral guidance.
In a televised interview
aired by Alarabiya news channel earlier this year, Sabra blamed the diffidence
of Church leaders for the lack of Syrian Christian presence on the streets. He
said Christians should not draw parallels with their coreligionists in
post-Saddam’s Iraq and refuted remarks by Aleppo’s Roman Catholic Archbishop Jean-Clément Jeanbart that Christians don’t trust Sunnite
governance.
“The history of
independent Syria tells another story,” he said. He was referring to Syria of
the 1950s, when the Godfather of modern Syrian politics was a Presbyterian Christian
statesman, Faris
el-Khoury, who served as minister, prime minister,
speaker of Parliament, and represented his country at the inauguration of the United
Nations.
A vote to choose between
Sida and Sabra might be abandoned if there is a “consensus” agreement on one of
them or on a third “dark horse.”
