14.1.2013

one year and 10 months, going strong

On the 15th of March, 2011, wide scale demonstrations started all over Syria. Now, 1 year and 10 months later, The civil war of Syria keeps waging, with a painfully slow progress. News of rebels forces capturing an airport in the northern parts can be interpreted as another decisive move, but the Syrian regime has withstood past successes of the rebels and as senior defectors tell, the current regime is operating at an extremely high level of violence and self-surveillance, which will probably enable it to survive further.

Until when ?

No one can really tell.

The U.N estimates are about 60,000 casualties in the civil war, nearly half civilans (the other described as military or armed rebels).  In addition "more than 612,000 people have been registered as Syrian refugees or are 'being assisted as such'.... 194,769 in Lebanon, 176,569 in Jordan, 153,163 in Turkey, 69,282 in Iraq, 13,292 in Egypt and 5,059 elsewhere in North Africa."

Unlike Lakhdar Brahimi , The U.N. and Arab League special envoy to Syria, who is persuaded that there is no military solution to this conflict, I think otherwise. Slowly, painfully slowly, the current regime is losing. It may take years. It may end in a surprising internaly crumble, unforeseen by outsiders, old USSR style. It may end by a unilateral act of secession of the Alawite minority and the formation of a new state, where the current regime shall concentrate its forces and relinquish its control or claims for other parts of Syria. Or it might be that another assasination shall do the trick. It is everyone's guess.

Had the international community took a stand and stopped the Syrian regime from targeting civilians, setting no-fly zones and giving humanitarian aid, this conflict would have been much shorter, similarly to the one in Libya.

But the international community -

  •  still unclear about the forming reality in Libya and Egypt
  • suffering from the limitations of the global economy 
  • and torn because of the stance of nations like Russia and China, both having their own arguments against wide-scale involvement in the Syrian civil war
is involved in semi or fully clandestine operations, assiting in some aspects, but leaving the conflict to boil on its own, letting them play, and letting the people of Syria suffer.   


This stance, as practical and machiavellian as it may be, is immoral. Shamefully so.


But maybe a small ray of light can be found in the words of the U.N. and Arab League special envoy to Syria, Brahimi: "I think what people are saying is, a family ruling for 40 years is a little bit too long" in an interview to CNN. When one hears these words in regards to Syria they sound almost self-evident. Was Brahimi aware of the fact that those same words apply for many other Arab nations ?

The Arab Spring is still here. And if we judge by the way it impacts the consciousness of some persons who should have known better, it is here to stay. 

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