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Syria is used to the slings and arrows of friends and enemies

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  • Syria is used to the slings and arrows of friends and enemies

    http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-syria-is-used-to-the-slings-and-arrows-of-friends-and-enemies-6297648.html

    Robert Fisk: Syria is used to the slings and arrows of friends and
    enemies

    Bashar al-Assad is clinging to power despite the slow growth of a
    civil war. But if the regime should survive, what sort of country will
    it rule?

    Robert Fisk

    Wednesday 01 February 2012


    The violence grows worse. The Arab League throws up its hands in
    despair. Madame Clinton may huff and puff at the United Nations. But
    the Syrian regime and the stalwarts of the old Baath party don't
    budge. Only the Arabs are unsurprised. For Syria - the "Um al-Arabia
    wahida", the Mother of One Arab People, as the Baathists would have it
    - is a tough creature, its rulers among the most tenacious in the
    Middle East, used to the slings and arrows of their friends as well as
    their enemies. Syria's "No" to anything but total Israeli withdrawal
    from the Golan Heights in return for peace is almost as famous as De
    Gaulle's "No" to British entry to the European Union.

    True, the Syrian regime has never confronted opposition on such a
    scale. If the fatalities do not yet come close to the 10 or 20
    thousand dead of the 1982 Hama uprising, which old Hafez al-Assad
    crushed with his customary ruthlessness, the widespread nature of
    today's rebellion, the defections from the Syrian army, the loss of
    all but one Arab ally - little Lebanon, of course - and the slow
    growth of a civil war make this the most dangerous moment in Syria's
    post-independence history. How can Bashar al-Assad hang on?

    Well, there's Russia, of course, and the Putin-Medvedev determination
    not to be caught out by the West at the United Nations as they were
    when they failed to oppose the no-fly zones over Libya that led
    directly to Gaddafi's collapse. And there's Iran, for which Syria
    remains the Arab bridgehead. And Iranian suspicion that Syria is under
    international attack principally because of this alliance may well be
    correct. Strike down Baathist Syria and its Alawi-Shia President, and
    you cut deep into the soul of Iran itself. And there's Israel, which
    utters scarcely a word about Syria because it fears that a far more
    intransigent regime might take its place.

    But Syria is also a symbol. In Arab eyes, it alone defied the West in
    refusing an unjust peace in the Middle East. Alone, it refused Anwar
    Sadat's peace with Israel. Alone, it turned its back on Yasser Arafat
    after his doomed agreement for "peace" with Israel. And historically,
    Syria alone defied its French occupiers in 1920 and then again in 1946
    until its Damascus parliament was burned down over the heads of its
    defenders. And while many Lebanese choose to forget their own history,
    it remains a fact that after the First World War, most Lebanese wished
    their land to remain part of Syria - see the results of the King-Crane
    commission - rather than live in a separate nation under French
    patronage.

    And far from being a state based on expansion, as America likes to
    claim, Syria has steadily lost territory. It lost Lebanon to French
    machinations. It lost Alexandretta in 1939 when the French handed it
    over to Turkey after a fraudulent referendum in the vain hope that the
    Turks would join the Allied alliance against Hitler. And it lost Golan
    to Israel in 1967. For Syria as a nation - rather than a regime -
    there is much sympathy as well as respect in the Arab world. Bashar
    al-Assad - neither a toady like Egypt's Hosni Mubarak nor mad like
    Libya's Gaddafi - knows all this.

    But Baathism is not "Arabism", however much its supporters may claim
    the opposite. Decades of stability did not rid Syria of corruption. It
    fostered dictatorship along the same, dull rules which the Arabs
    tolerated for so many years: better autocracy than anarchy, better
    peace than freedom, albeit controlled by a Shia minority, better
    secular than sectarian. Why, if any Syrian wanted to see the results
    of a confessional state, they had only to look at the civil war in
    Lebanon.

    With embarrassment, I look back now to that terrible conflict and the
    cruel words I wrote so many years ago; that one day, after years of
    Syrian military "peacekeepers" in Lebanon, the Lebanese army may be
    asked to fulfil the role of "peacekeepers" in Syria. At the time, it
    was a wicked joke. Not now, perhaps. Indeed, a Lebanese peace force in
    Syria - where all of Lebanon's communities (Sunni, Shia, Christian
    Maronite, Orthodox, Druze, Armenian) are represented - might just be
    one way of damping down the civil conflict there. A supreme irony,
    perhaps, after the 1976-2005 Syrian army's presence in Lebanon. An
    impossibility, of course. But it shows the nature of political change
    in the Middle East.

    In reality, the Syrian government is likely to fight on alone. It
    always has. The Assad father-and-son doctrine has always been one of
    patience. Hold on tight - however great the condemnation by the rest
    of the world, however terrible the threats from Israel or America -
    and eventually the wheel of fortune will turn once more in your
    favour.

    The awful carnage in Homs and the rest of Syria, the beheadings and
    the torture, however, suggest that Assad rule really is running out of
    time. Syria's people are dying just as the people of Egypt and Libya
    and Yemen have died, because they want the dignity of governing
    themselves. Their own battle is already infecting the sectarian
    divisions in northern Lebanon and they exist inside the Lebanese
    parliament, although this will not be the Syrian government's primary
    concern.

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