Syria’s quest for Democracy and the cost of Superpower Hypocrisy

“This is where the revolution happens first,” say Leila Al-Shami and Robin Yassin-Kassab in their book, Burning Country (Pluto Press 2016), “before the guns and the political calculations, before even the demonstrations—in individual hearts, in the form of new thoughts and newly unfettered words.”

The tragedy of the so-called “civil war” in Syria has become so unspeakably monumental and monstrous that, for the public at large worldwide, it has distilled into merely a set of grim statistics, a current titleholder for World’s Worst Conflict, the source of the bulk of Europe’s migration crisis, but unimaginable and, sadder still, unthinkable for the majority in terms of the horror taking place there on a daily basis. It is a country where the superpower-imposed family of dictators who have ruled for over four decades had, until 2011, stilled all opposition and autocratically governed generations brought up resigned to living mute.

According to Al-Shami and Yassin-Kassab, “Syria was once known as a ‘kingdom of silence’. In 2011 it burst into speech—not in one voice but in millions. On an immense surge of long-suppressed energy, a non-violent protest movement crossed sectarian and ethnic boundaries and spread to every part of the country. Nobody could control it—no party, leader or ideological programme, and least of all the repressive apparatus of state, which applied gunfire, mass detention, sexual assault and torture, even of children…”

After four years of grinding, non-stop war—in which regional conflicts have muddied the playing field, Islamist terrorism has taken advantage of the chaos to expand and dig in, superpowers have helped stall peace and poured gasoline on the flames, and the Syrian regime has employed horrific devices of war banned by every humanitarian convention in the world to murder, maim and starve its own people, including innocent civilians from infants to the elderly—the story of how it all began has been rendered largely anecdotal. But no matter how Eastern and Western powers might eventually strong-arm a wedge between the belligerents and seek to cobble together a “solution” to their own advantage and in their own image, the authentic story of the Syrian war isn’t the conflict itself but the peaceful revolution that unintentionally lit the fuse. The true story is the quest (the demand) for democracy that—perhaps unwittingly—exposed the Syrian regime for what it had always been and under which the country’s citizens had for so long suffered in silence: a ruthless, inexpressibly evil autocracy, a vile dictatorship in the guise of a “constitutional presidency”, a puppet of the Russian Bear, tolerated and lavished with wealth as long as it continued to form part of Moscow’s strategic plans for the Middle East, a golden pawn in the latent but still unresolved Cold War between the top superpowers and their regional warlord proxies.

Nor was that genuine democratic revolution a mere idealistic expression of desire. It was, indeed, a practical movement with a mutual thought process and path forward beneath its surface protests. “Revolutionary Syrians,” say the authors of Burning Country “often describe their first protest as an ecstatic event, as a kind of rebirth. The regime’s savage response was a baptism of horror after which there was no going back.”

They tell about how “where the state collapsed or was beaten back, people set up local councils, aid distribution networks, radio stations and newspapers, expressing communal solidarity in the most creative and practical ways.” And they add, “For a few brief moments the people changed everything.”

So what happened? Quoth Burning Country: “Nobody supported the revolutionaries.” That trend toward democracy and legitimate self-determination was, the authors remind us, “abandoned by the ill-named ‘international community’, (and) usually ignored or misrepresented in the media…”

The authors provide, among many other things, one of the most succinct and highly comprehensible descriptions that I’ve ever read regarding how Western meddling has submersed the Middle East in sectarian, religious and tribal strife for most of the past century. They provide an explanation of a series of Anglo-French agreements that, following World War I, divvied up the former Ottoman Empire’s erstwhile possessions with total disregard for the wishes, political geography or traditions of the peoples living in the territories involved. A summary of that description is contained in a clearly thought-out sentence to which I entirely subscribe: “To some extent the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Lebanese civil wars and the current chronic instability in Iraq and Syria can be traced to this early twentieth century bout of imperialist map-making and sectarian engineering.”

It should be unbearably sad for civilized people everywhere to witness what is happening in Syria today. A country that has emerged from some of the most ancient civilizations on earth is being reduced to rubble stained with innocent human blood and carrion, where both Western and Russian vultures are cherry-picking their involvement in the processes of both on-going war and eventual peace according to their own strategic interests and, once again, with total disregard for the plight and wishes of the Syrian people. It is a nation on the brink of collapse and the healthy democratic process that sparked the first clashes has been ignored and abandoned by the leery West and reviled as “terrorism” by Putin’s Moscow.

But Burning Country isn’t the story of Syria’s descent into oblivion. Rather, it is the unheard and unheeded story of those who haven’t abandoned the dream and cause of a free, pluralistic and democratic Syria of the future: free from the cruel repression of externally empowered dictators and free from the conditioning influences and political engineering of major world powers.

Syria today constitutes, whether recognized or not, the symbol of those who struggle everywhere, and against all odds, for the right to their own forms of democratic governance and true self-determination—i.e., not the determination to be with or against Russia or the West, but to be free to establish their own relationships with the world and to decide their own course to a brighter future. Until the Western powers are willing to heartily and disinterestedly support this as a sacred right and to defend it against tyranny and imperialist designs, the principles of democracy and self-determination that they purport to advocate will be little more than sweet stories they tell their children at night to ward off the kind of nightmares Syrian children are living in the flesh every day.