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| Postage stamp issued by the short-lived Alawite state under the French mandate |
Fawaz Tello, a veteran Syrian
opposition campaigner now based in Berlin, penned this think
piece in Arabic for the aljzeera.net portal.
A leader of the 2001 “Damascus
Spring” movement, Tello spent five years (2001-2006) as a political prisoner.
He moved to Cairo end February 2012.
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| The author, Fawaz Tello |
His degrees in Civil Engineering
and Business Administration are from Damascus University.
To put his think piece into
perspective, of the Syrian population of 22.5 million, 74 percent are Muslin
Sunnis, 11 percent are Alawites, and 15 percent are from other religious
denominations.
****
Last June 18, a Lebanese daily close to the Syrian
regime quoted a Syrian official as saying in the presence of a UN organization
representative, “We shall prevail with or without Bashar al-Assad. For us, what
matters most is to see the state – i.e. the regime – survive without losing its
regional status.”
Obviously the Syrian official is “Alawite.”
By saying, “what matters for us,” and by equating
“state” and “regime,” he simply meant “Alawite rule.”
Over a year ago, after meeting diplomats and
attending Syrian opposition conferences, I wrote two articles.
In them, I warned that the United States has -- since
the first (February 2012) “Friends of Syria” conference in Tunis -- already
contrived a roadmap for Syria.
With opposition groups’ blessings, the U.S. then
underpinned the blueprint at the (June 2012) Action Group conference in Geneva
and at subsequent “Friends of Syria” meetings.
Essentially, the roadmap is the political solution
proposed for Geneva-2, whereby the “Alawite regime” retains the state’s
military and security branches, which are sectarian Alawite par excellence.
These would supposedly be reformed gradually “in
order to conserve state structures.”
In other words, proponents of Geneva-2 concur with
the Syrian official who encapsulated “the state” in the word “regime” and “the
regime” in “Alawite rule.”
The Americans, Europeans, Russians and Iranians share
this rationale, their only dispute being over the role of “the regime
president” in the negotiations and in the transitional stage.
The Americans have lately made common cause with the
Russian position, meaning that at Geneva-2 the regime president would negotiate
his “future role.”
That’s a new political rib-tickler worth adding to
America’s stock of international wisecracks, particularly the joke of
“non-lethal weapons.”
So Geneva-2 recognizes the current regime as a full
and powerful partner without reference to justice or bona fide power transfer.
Rebels had to be coerced militarily to accept such
solution. This was done by giving the Syrian regime a free hand to stifle the
revolution by all means possible, including ceaseless carpet bombing and
shelling; the use of ballistic missiles, chemical weapons and airpower;
inexhaustible supplies of arms and ammunitions; blithe disregard for the
regime’s recourse to sectarian mobilization by inviting mercenaries from
Lebanon, Iraq and Iran.
By contrast, the Geneva-2 partners exerted immense
pressure to starve rebels of arms and ammunitions, which some Arab states
promised them 18 months ago.
The Geneva-2 Western patrons used the pretext of
“opposition unity” at a timewhen Jabhat al-Nusra was nowhere in sight. The
group’s catchword “wrong” hands later became the chief excuse although the “wrong
hands” hardly represent five percent of the Free Syrian Army and moderate
Islamic groups’ forces on the ground.
After Iran’s overt intervention in the battle for
Qusayr through her proxies in Lebanon and Iraq, Arab countries resentful of
Iran’s expansionism turned a deaf ear to Washington and started channeling
weapons to the rebels.
That’s when the West -- read Americans and Europeans
-- resorted to the political ploy of publicly declaring they would be arming
the rebels while trying behind doors to prevent this from happening.
The West never stopped hoping the regime would
succeed in crushing the revolution or in forcing it to the surrender
negotiations table.
Never before did a dictatorship willingly transform
into a democracy – neither at once nor piecemeal.
The Syrian Alawite official realizes this. But he is
telling the West that Alawites would stay behind the sectarian dictator until
they sense defeat, which is when they would make a deal with the West to dump
the dictator and safeguard “Alawite rule.”
That’s what the “Western Friends of Syria” give the
thumbs up to.
In truth, it’s the case of the West giving something
it does not have to an undeserving side, the side being partisans of the sectarian
Alawite regime, most of whom are actively supporting the dictator militarily
and politically.
The West is saying a sectarian Alawite minority
regime in league with other minorities is more suitable than a secular and
moderate Sunni regime, even if modeled after Turkey’s.
The fitting secular Muslim, the West is saying,
should preferably be “hostile” to all the cultural, authentic and manifest
trappings of Sunni Islam. Problem is such Muslims are marginal among Sunnis and
stand no chance of winning elections.
This explains the West’s penchant for
quasi-democratic minority rule that leaves the military and security striking
force in minority hands.
The clearest example yet of such political and
intellectual bigotry by Western decision-makers and think tanks is Iraq, which
was delivered to Iran on a silver platter at the expense of the West’s Gulf
Arab allies.
What is happening in Syria today is the continuation
of that policy. Iran is left to carry on shoring up Syria’s sectarian regime at
all levels even if she swallowed Syria altogether and her expansionism
detonated the entire region.
All this is to keep alive the Alawites’
half-a-century-old rule of Syria by means of the most repulsive sort of
overlapping international support from America, Europe, the Soviet Union then
Russia, Iran and Israel.
This minority regime gave the State of Israel
unparalleled leeway to appropriate the Golan. It also gifted Israel a unique
prize by crushing the Palestinian Revolution. Above all, by seizing power in
the 1963 military coup in the name of the Baath Party, the minority regime
interrupted the significant economic, political and social strides Syria was
making to become a free and liberal Muslim democracy.
The latest evidence of the West’s complicity and its
partiality towards Alawite governance is its refusal to pass on a simple message
to the ruling Alawite sect.
The message is this: “You have to accept the new
Syria as ordinary citizens. Instead of being stripped of your total control of
state institutions posthaste, the erosion of your privileges would be phased.
You have the choice of endorsing or resisting the change. It’s an opportunity
that is slipping through your hands day by day.”
The West has yet to tell the pro-Assad Alawites their
war crimes and human rights violations will not go unpunished. Although
sectarian killings and massacres in Syria are still one-sided, their insistence
on setting up an Alawite statelet would trigger a full-scale civil war against
them and the regime.
Any shape or form of dismemberment or partition of
Syria would lead to protracted internecine strife that could last for years and
envelop the region.
Geneva-2 is stillborn. It could have drawn breath 18
months ago, but not anymore. Syria is neither Bosnia nor Yemen. Her revolution
is total, not halfway.
No matter how long the war would last to shatter the
dream of Balkanizing Syria and bring regime criminals to justice, the Syrians
will fight on for a better life with their backs to the wall.
To be ruled by a sectarian minority is the Syrian
majority’s worst option, even if such choice were to open the gates of hell on
the West, the region and the Alawites.
The West, the region and the Alawites are the least
of the Syrian majority’s worries.
