Betrayal in Syria

War-torn Syria risks its future being constructed around sectarian divisions rather than democratic principles.

GOOD ANALYSIS

By Marwan Bishara

Al-Jazeera

"You've listened. You've watched. You've witnessed the worst crime of the 21st century thus far.

A people bombed, murdered, purged, tortured, imprisoned and humiliated. The world watches from the sidelines, as a whole society is destroyed and tens of thousands of its finest people killed for daring to demand a life of dignity.

Clearly, "never again" is never really NEVER again. The atrocities in Syria continue - again and again. It's the ultimate complicity of silence.
The so-called international community's commitment to the doctrine of R2P, or "responsbility to protect", is more of a "right to peddle" unfulfilled promises. Alas, when it comes to Syria, Iraq and Palestine, the international community has proven to be neither international nor a community.

Syria's four-decade-long dictatorship run amok has been permitted to slaughter its own citizens, wreak havoc in its country and forever stain the nation's history in blood.
What began as largely peaceful protests against regime repression was soon turned by the regime into an open battlefield throughout the country as the opposition became armed and extremists joined the fight.
But the state's belligerence has been to no avail: no force could deter the people or crush an idea whose time has come. Despite the excessive use of air-power against cities and the shelling of civilians, the Bashar al-Assad regime failed to quell the revolution or break its fighting spirit........

The bottom line

Assad might continue to make tactical advances, but he will never again be able to legitimise his dictatorship. Winning the battles is nothing like winning the war, let alone defeating the people's quest for freedom from repression. Nobody in their right mind could imagine that Assad would ever rule Syria again, regardless of the military victories.

Paradoxically, the more battles the regime wins using excessive violence, the more detested and less legitimate it becomes in the eyes of the Syrians and the world. Meanwhile, further deterioration leading to deeper sectarianism and extremism - and eventually full-fledged civil war - will lead to regional chaos as violence spills over to neighbouring and other countries.

As the human cost mounts and the images of ugly killings spread to every home, my guess is that something's gotta give... But what?

With the Iranians (and perhaps the Russians) committed to arming Assad, and the Europeans authorising the arming of the opposition, more arms will most probably flow into the country - leading to ever worse atrocities, increasingly along sectarian lines.

This means the violence continues to take the shape of civil war by proxy, and will eventually lead to the breakup of the Syrian society and perhaps even the state, and scar the country for generations.

In other words, delaying serious attempts to bring the opposition and elements of the regime to jointly transition to a new democratic political order without Assad will mean that, in the best-case scenario, Syria's future will be constructed around sectarian divisions rather than democratic principles.
In other words, many thousands more dead and an open conflict for decades to come."