Thursday, May 22, 2014
The ‘revolutionary’ face of the Syrian conflict
By Nicola Nasser*
Reports are abound by international organizations
about the responsibility of the Syrian government for the human rights
violations in the ongoing conflict in Syria, now in its fourth year, but the responsibility
of the insurgents has been kept away from media spotlight for political
reasons.
However, the horrible image of the “revolutionary”
performance imposed itself on the media and public opinion to an extent that it
has become impossible to black it out anymore.
Internationally last Thursday, for example, the
U.S. envoy to the United Nations, Samantha Power, said that Russia’s and
China’s vetoes against a United Nations
Security Council resolution to refer allegations of war crimes in Syria to the
International Criminal Court (ICC) “protect monstrous terrorist organizations
operating in Syria … who are pursuing a fundamentalist assault on the Syrian
people that knows no decency or humanity.”
Regionally on the same day, The Yemeni Coordination
Committee for the Support of Syrian Revolution dissolved itself in protest
against what it called in a statement “the diversion and transformation of the
leaders of the revolution and opposition into terrorist gangs and groups.”
Since U.S. President Barak Obama imposed sanctions on
April 29, 2011 on some Syrian officials reportedly accused of using violence
against civilians, the U.S.
Their blackout of the
insurgents’ responsibility could not be avoided otherwise those sponsors would
be held accountable as well and consequently could not continue their support
to the insurgents with impunity, because without their support the insurgents
would not have survived.
Their reluctance to arm the Syrian rebels with advanced
weapons lest they fall into the hands of the terrorist organizations could not
cover up their initial and ongoing arming and recruitment efforts, which
empowered the militarization of the peaceful civilian protests with its most
extreme Syrian and non-Syrian insurgents.
On last April 8,
the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay was quoted as
saying in a briefing to the UN Security Council
that the actions of the forces of the Syrian government "far
outweigh" the crimes by the “opposition” fighters.
Statistics
Tell a Different Story
However,
scrutiny of the statistics of the death toll and the facts of the humanitarian
fallout of the conflict tell a different story. On this May 19, the UK-based
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said it had documented more than
162,000 deaths in the conflict until this May 17, more than 61 thousand of them
were government troops, 42,701 rebels and more than 1600 foreign fighters; SOHR
believes that both sides of the combat strongly tend to be very conservative
about their human casualties. The rest were civilians many of whom were victims
of suicide bombing and mortar shells fired by the rebels.
The breakdown of
these figures show the government a victim rather than a culprit and indicate
that the actions of the rebels “far outweigh” those of the government, contrary
to Navi Pillay’s conclusion.
“Questioning
the Syrian ‘Casualty List’” in the Lebanese Alakhbar on February 28, 2012,
Sharmine Narwani documented that, “The very first incident of casualties from
the Syrian regular army that I could verify dates to 10 April 2011, when gunmen
shot up a bus of soldiers travelling through Banyas, in Tartous, killing nine,”
i.e. few weeks after the first peaceful protests broke out in Syria, a fact
which questions the now wrongfully accepted public knowledge that the
government was the party who initiated the “violence.”
The communiqué issued by the eleven western and
Arab foreign ministers of the core group of the so-called “Friends of Syria”
after their meeting in London
They
called the upcoming presidential elections on next June 3 “illegitimate” and a
“parody of democracy,” ignoring the fact that any power vacuum in Syria
The
inevitable result would be an exacerbation of the humanitarian crisis in the
country, rendering their humanitarian rhetoric a parody of humanity.
Worse still, the eleven “Friends of Syria” had
“agreed unanimously” to boost their support to what they described as “the moderate opposition National Coalition (SNC), its Supreme
Military Council and associated moderate armed groups.”
What “moderates” did they refer to? On last September
25 the BBC quoted a recent study published by IHS Jane's analyst Charles
Lister, which concluded that, “the core of the Syrian insurgency is composed of
Islamist groups of one kind or another.” “The
armed opposition is all too much a part of the conflict,” Red Maistre wrote in
The Northern Star four days later.
Three years and three months on, the “Friends of Syria” failed to bring
the “regime” down. On the contrary, it has got the military upper hand, while
the organizations which the U.S.
and Saudi Arabia
Whatever
military supplies the “moderate” rebels could get will only prolong the war,
postpone any political settlement and perpetuate and exacerbate the worsening
humanitarian crisis.
Civilian protesters, political opposition and “secular” armed
rebels were hijacked, sidelined and finally dumped by the mainstream
terrorists, whose backbone consists of “foreign fighters,” thus dooming any
political solution for a long time to come and vindicating Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad’s determination on last August 4 that, “No solution can be reached with terror except
by striking it with an iron fist.”
As early as March 2012 Sara Leah Whitson, Middle East
director at Human Rights Watch, had warned that, ““The Syrian government’s
brutal tactics cannot justify abuses by armed opposition groups.”
Schools, universities, hospitals, health clinics, churches,
mosques, religious monuments, power grids, railways, bridges, oil fields,
historical sites, museum assets, police symbols of public safety and order and
other infrastructure were targeted by the rebels with unprecedented level of
destruction and civilian plight.
A
survey, conducted by the Relief and Works Agency of UN's Microfinance Programs
and released early last April, said it would take 30 years for the Syrian
economy to recover to its 2010 level.
According to the SOHR, the
infighting among rebels has claimed more than five thousand casualties in 2014.
The infighting over border crossings and oil fields displaced more than one
hundred thousand civilians in north eastern Syria
As a strategy, the rebels since the very beginning have been
using Syrian civilians en masse as a bargaining chip and as human shields, a
fact which the “Friends of Syria” have
been keen to blackout.
On this May 12, rebels have agreed to free 1,500
families whom they had kidnapped and
held hostages in Adra, a suburb of the capital Damascus
On May 4, they cut off water supply to some three million
civilians in Syria ’s second
largest city of Aleppo , a collective punishment
reminiscent of a similar horrible practice by Israel
in Beirut
Rule, Not Exception
These inhuman tactics are not the exception, but the norm and
rule. Since the very
beginning of their rebellion in March 2011, rebels stormed into Syrian city
centers, where there was no official military presence, and used the civilian
population as human shields against any retaliation by the government forces,
thus unleashing what the United Nations described as the world’s largest
refugee problem.
Civilians have paid the higher price. Syrians now hold the
rebels responsible for their plight. Their sectarian public incubator has
already turned against them in favour of restoring the missing safety, security
and order by the government.
All factions of the rebels claim
they are the representatives of the Muslim Sunni majority, but the overwhelming
majority of some six million Syrians who are displaced internally are Sunnis,
now hosted by non-Sunni compatriots in safe havens under government protection,
let alone more than three million refugees who are also overwhelmingly Sunni
Syrians and fled to neighbouring countries from the areas held by the rebels.
It’s a well-known fact now that creating a
humanitarian crisis in Syria, whether real or fabricated, and holding
the Syrian government responsible for it as a casus belli for foreign military
intervention under the UN 2005 so-called "responsibility to protect"
initiative was from the very beginning of the Syrian conflict the goal of the U.S.-led
so-called "Friends of Syria' coalition.
A second fact was the rush to militarize the Syrian civilian
peaceful protests. When President al-Assad issued in 2011 the first of his six general
amnesties, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went on record with a
public appeal to armed rebels not to lay down their arms in response.
In March
2014 a commission of inquiry mandated by the United
Nations Human Rights Council, chaired by Paulo
Pinheiro, for the first time accused the insurgents in Syria
On
this May 14, Syrian Rev. Michael Rabaheih, from the Greek Orthodox Church, was
quoted by The Washington Post as saying: “If this is freedom, we don’t need
it.”
Rabaheih
was one of some 80,000 Christians who returned to the Old City of Homs, which the opposition once proudly called “the capital of the
revolution,” but which the rebels were forced to evacuate this month. He was
seated next to the grave of the Dutch
priest, Frans van der Lugt, who was assassinated by the rebels a few weeks
earlier, not far from the gravely damaged historic Khalid ibn al-Walid mosque
in the devastated neighbourhoods of Syria’s third largest city, where “little
was left.”
Obviously,
the “Friends of Syria” have failed to artificially create any credible alternative
to the incumbent regime, which, however, did change indeed.
* Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based
in Birzeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. An
edited version of this article was first published by Middle East Eye. nassernicola@ymail.com
