Mchugo Syria

A Recent History
Neuauflage 2015
ISBN: 978-0-86356-763-6
Verlag: Saqi Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

Syria's descent into civil war has already claimed an estimated 200,000 lives while nearly nine million people have fled their homes. This is now the greatest humanitarian and political crisis of the twenty-first century. In this timely account, John McHugo charts the history of Syria from the First World War to the present and considers why Syria's foundations as a nation have proved so fragile. He examines the country's thwarted attempts at independence under French rule before turning to more recent events: sectarian tensions, the pressures of international conflicts, two generations of rule by the Assads and the rise of ISIS. As the conflict in Syria rages on, McHugo provides a rare and authoritative guide to a complex nation that demandsour attention.

After studying Arabic and Islamic studies at Oxford University and the American University in Cairo in the early 1970s, John McHugo's career as an international lawyer took him to a number of Arab countries including Egypt, Oman and Bahrain over a period of more than a quarter of a century. He is an honorary Senior Fellow at the Centre for Syrian Studies at St Andrews, and a board member of the Council for Arab-British Understanding and the British Egyptian Society. He has also written on legal aspects of the Arab-Israeli dispute and advised Tim Farron, when he was leader of the Liberal Democrats, on Palestinian issues. His publications include A Concise History of Sunnis and Shi'is, A Concise History of the Arabs and Syria: A Recent History.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mchugo, John

Leseproben

Preface

I

The sufferings of the Syrian people since their country descended into civil war in 2011–12 need no recapitulation. The statistics, even if provisional, are terrible. Nobody knows for certain the numbers of dead or injured. Accurate statistics are hard to come by in a war zone, and the numbers are bound to rise. As of December 2014, estimates of those killed have reached 200,000.1 Out of a population of almost 22.5 million people, over 3.2 million have fled the country,2 while 6.45 million are internally displaced and 4.6 million ‘in need of humanitarian assistance in besieged/hard to access areas’.3

To the English-speaking world, Syria is a far-off country which relatively few people have made a serious effort to understand. The “Arab Spring” aroused great interest and excitement, but as the crackdown on protesters in Syria evolved into civil war and a man-made humanitarian crisis began, disaster fatigue seemed all too often to be the general reaction to what was happening. Despite energetic advertising campaigns by relief charities, at first only occasional incidents such as the death of the reporter Marie Colvin in Homs in February 2012 brought the unfolding catastrophe home.

For a couple of weeks, the use of chemical weapons in the Damascus suburbs of Ain Tarma and Zamalka which killed hundreds of people on 21 August 2013 shook the world, but it was not enough to persuade British Members of Parliament to give their government the discretion to use force for humanitarian intervention. It was the same with other major world players. As soon as agreement was reached with the Syrian government about the decommissioning and destruction of its chemical weapons, the issue largely faded from the headlines. The killing of Syrians by conventional weaponry and their deaths by starvation, disease and hypothermia did not capture our attention in the same way. Soon enough, public compassion had moved on to fresh humanitarian disasters in other parts of the world.

Following the failure of the talks in Geneva between the Syrian government and opposition politicians on 15 February 2014, the international mediator, Lakhdar Brahimi, stated that he had no alternative but to apologise to the Syrian people.4 The fighting does not yet seem to have run its course. When the conflict ends – and no one can say when that will be – the world will be presented with yet another traumatised Arab nation. In 1947–9, the majority of the indigenous Arabs of Palestine were forced to flee their homes. Many of them and their descendants are refugees to this day. Among many people in the West, their story remains a taboo topic. But the Palestine problem is just one cause of instability in the region. In the mid-1970s, Lebanon exploded into a civil war which lasted until 1990 and whose embers smoulder still. Then, following the US-led invasion in 2003, Iraq disintegrated along sectarian and ethnic lines. Each of these countries borders Syria, and their tragedies caused severe problems for the Syrian government of the day and Syrian society as a whole. Now it is the turn of Syria itself to look destruction in the face after decades of draconian rule by a government that overreacted to the smallest signs of dissent.

Is the sequential implosion of these closely connected Arab countries just a coincidence? Or is there a deeper, underlying cause that brought conflict to them? In either case, what lessons can be learned? This book provides pointers towards an answer to these questions by reviewing the history of Syria since the Great War of 1914–8, whose one hundredth anniversary the world commemorated in 2014. While the descent into civil war in 2011–2 was certainly the result of failings by the Syrian leadership, there is also an element of culpability and negligence which must be spread much more widely.

The effect of the actions of outside powers on Syria over the last century cannot be overlooked. The country’s borders were decided by France and Britain in the immediate aftermath of the Great War. Those two nations thus took upon themselves the momentous responsibility of deciding who was – and who was not – a Syrian. France had a vision of a permanent French presence in Syria, something that conflicted with its “sacred trust of civilisation”5 to prepare the Syrian people for full, sovereign independence. Furthermore, although this book is not about the Arab-Israeli conflict, its enormous and deleterious effect on Syria cannot be avoided. That conflict was not created by Syrians but they, like their Arab neighbours, had no choice but to assimilate and digest its consequences – something that put both leaders and people under immense strain which has lasted to the present. The Cold War did not help, either. All too easily forgotten today, the global tussle for supremacy between the USA and the USSR turned Syria into a pawn. It was to be moved and, when expedient, sacrificed on the chess board of global politics. In fact, today’s Syrian civil war could be said to be the last proxy conflict of the Cold War. The alternative view, which is even more disturbing, is that it is the harbinger of the revival of the Cold War which has now begun in Ukraine. It is not an exaggeration to say that the actions of the great powers in the aftermath of the Great War and over the following decades deprived the people of Syria of any chance of a normal development to nationhood.

But the major international players were not the only ones who have played games in Syria. As will be seen, certain Arab states, particularly Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and latterly even Qatar, have treated Syria as a ball to be prised from their opponents. It has been the same with non-Arab Iran and Turkey. In each period covered by this book, the impact of wars and foreign affairs will be considered before turning to the developments which actually took place inside Syria. This may seem unusual for the history of a country, but in this case it is only logical. Events happening outside Syria circumscribed the freedom of action open to its rulers and foreclosed the options available to them. This does not excuse or justify some of the actions those rulers took, but their actions cannot be examined in isolation from what was going on between Syria and its neighbours.

One of the greatest tragedies in the history of Syrian politics is what happened to Ba’thism. Initially a nationalist movement which seemingly cared deeply about social justice and healing the rifts in society throughout the Arab world, it had the added advantage for Syrians of having been conceived and born in Damascus. The way in which Ba’thism morphed into the dictatorship of the Assads is an object lesson for other Arab countries at the present time. Another salutary example is the chaos of parliamentary life in Syria under the Mandate and the years after independence. The glimpses of that chaos which this book contains are a dire warning. It led to impatience with elected politicians and is part of the story of descent into dictatorship.

Religious politics in Arab countries didn’t use to be as important as many people now assume, but they gained in significance as a reaction to the failures of the Ba’thists and other Arab nationalists, and were also linked to the profound sense of alienation from the West which occurred for reasons which this book will make painfully clear. Islamism is not well understood in the West. It is ultimately a quest for authenticity and identity. Values such as honesty, justice and mercy are at the heart of Islam, with the result that the kind of indiscriminate violence practised by some Islamist groups is incompatible with the Muslim ideal of Jihad. Many Syrians may well want a form of democracy that acknowledges in some way the Islamic roots of the majority of the population. Such a democracy could not be more different from the kind of rule offered by militant organisations like al-Qa‘ida or ISIS, which are infamous for their brutality and intolerance.

Hafez al-Assad never envisaged the establishment of a democracy in Syria which might threaten his position. If his son ever did so, he left it as a can to be kicked down the road until it was too late. For both father and son, democracy and Islamist militancy were twin threats. To tar the advocates of the former with the brush of the latter was highly expedient. The increasing prominence of militant groups among those fighting the Assad regime today is just part of the price Syrian society has paid for this cynicism.

II

I first went to Syria in November 1974 when I was twenty-three years old and studying Islamic history at postgraduate level at the American University in Cairo. I had planned a week walking in the mountains which run parallel to the coast. Armed with a sleeping bag and ground sheet, I got off the bus at the crossroads below the famous Crusader castle of Krak des Chevaliers. The dark, green hills rising before me had more in common with the Brecon Beacons in Wales than what I had been expecting: the stark rocks of the Arabian desert which I had seen in the film . Rain threatened, and I was only too happy to accept a lift from a taxi driver taking the local vet to visit a sick cow. Ibrahim, the farmer who had summoned the vet, insisted I stay the night as soon as he had greeted us. He was a stocky man in his sixties who wore a white cloth wrapped round his head and the , the traditional black pants of a farmer, tight round the ankles but baggy from the knees upwards.

Western visitors were rare in the mountains then, although that was not so in the years before 2011 – and plenty of hotels have...