OPINION Syria – a choice of evils
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SOUTH Africans need to consider four basic facts, when trying to work out what can (or can’t) be done about the slaughter in Syria.
This follows on the criminal use of nerve gas against civilians in Damascus and the probable use of a military strike – in some fashion – by the US against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, as the Daily Dispatch editorial “World watches Syrians burning” (September 2) movingly brought to readers’ attention.
The first fact is that governments and the electorates in mainly nonIslamic countries, including the vast majority of South Africans, generally know nothing about the religious sectarian divisions which lie at the heart of the civil war in Syria. This ignorance is no basis for an informed decision on military action in a charged and complex theatre of war.
The second fact is that the religious division which lies at the heart of the civil war in Syria – just as it was in the internal divisions in Iraq before, during and after the second Iraq war of 2003-2011 – is more than 1 300 years old.
This civil war derives basically from the historic division between two very large and opposing schools of Islam, the Sunni and the Shia, going back to shortly after the death of the prophet and founder of Islam, Muhammad.
By comparison, the great problem of white minority rule in South Africa was less than 350 years old by the time of the release of Nelson Mandela and the first democratic elections.
If anyone thinks there is an easy solution to a civil war resting on religious differences going back 1 300 years, well. . . the ongoing problems in South Africa should make us humble, and very cautious about a rush to action. This leads to the third great fact. Before the defeat in 1918 of Germany, Turkey and Austria-Hungary at the end of the First World War, most of the Middle East had been ruled for hundreds of years by Turkey, through the Ottoman empire, with its capital, Istanbul.
Arabic-speaking peoples of this huge region, who had led the first great wave of Islamic expansion, were ruled by Turkish-speaking authorities, but with a great deal of local self-government, region by region, religious community by religious community. There were no modern states.
A great revolt by Arab armies in World War One demanding selfgovernment helped to cripple the Ottoman empire, and assisted the victory of the allied powers of Britain, France and the US.
Britain and France then became colonial rulers over the greater part of the Arabic-speaking regions of the former Ottoman empire.
Just as in the colonial occupation of most of Africa, they divided up this huge area between them by drawing lines in the sand, roughly according to a secret agreement, drawn up in 1916 by Sir Mark Sykes (for Britain) and Francois Georges-Picot (for France).
Iraq went to Britain, Syria to France.
In the same way that Britain set a minority white dictatorship in place in South Africa with the Constitution of the Union of South Africa in 1910, it set up a minority religious dictatorship in Iraq.
With roughly 20% of the population, the Sunni minority was placed in supreme power over a 60% Shia majority, as well 20% ethnic minority Kurds.
In Syria, the reverse took place. The Alawites, a religious grouping in a precarious and fragile multi-religious society.
Over the same period, the reverse happened in Afghanistan. Military occupation by the Soviet Union between 1979 and 1989, intended to prop up a weak Marxist government, helped instead to mobilise a powerful Sunni army of ideological, political and military fighters dedicated to global Jihad – al-Qaeda, with its local associate, the Taliban.
When the Taliban took over after its defeat of the Soviet occupation, the large Shia minority in western Afghanistan – the Hazara – were forced to flee to neighbouring Iran.
In this way, the 1 300-year conflict between Shia and Sunni has now come to murderous civil war in Syria.
For decades, opposition to the minority Assad dictatorship in Syria was most forcefully expressed through the illegal Muslim Brotherhood, one of several fundamentalist Sunni religious sectarian groupings with a deep hatred of secularist civil society, parliamentary government and the rule of law, and also deeply hostile to Shia claims to represent the heritage of Islam.
The most powerful grouping among the Sunni forces in Syria (misleadingly referred to as “the rebels”) is now Jabhat al-Nusra, a close affiliate of al-Qaeda, which has a deadly hatred of Alawites, Christians, Druze, Kurds and others, who believe they will be killed and extirpated in the event of a Sunni victory.
As a leading Labour Party MP, Tom Watson, told the British House of Commons last week, the Syrian conflict is not “goodies versus baddies, but baddies versus baddies”.
These are the facts to keep in mind when trying to work out what can (or can’t) be done about the slaughter in Syria.
I think military action on this basis will be worse than no action for the time being.
It will create a temporary feelgood factor for US President Barack Obama, and militarily assist one murderer against the other. No good will come to Syria, or the region, or the world, or the refugees from this, and chemical weapons will continue to be used by these monsters whenever they consider it appropriate.
Especially in view of the political and diplomatic support for the Assad regime by Russia – which has its sole Mediterranean supply base at the Syrian post of Tartus – neither warring side in this fratricidal horror can be defeated by Obama’s proposed military actions. Nor can the use of weapons of one kind or another be put out of use.
The proposed US/French – and maybe British? – measures are just a stunt to create appearances, and to hold off the tough thinking, tough political education, tough military preparation and tough warfare that is going to be needed before a real peace of some kind can be established in. . . how long. . . 20 or 30 years?
The ballgame has changed. In my view the world is in a far, far worse situation than we realise, and the long post-war “peace” since 1945 – allowing for many “smaller” wars in between – is now basically over.