[Midden-Oosten] How Arabs are complicit in massacring Eastern Ghouta's people

[Jeff]

https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/comment/2018/2/24/how-arabs-are-complicit-in-massacring-eastern-ghoutas-people

How Arabs are complicit in massacring Eastern Ghouta's people
Robin Yassin-Kassab

Date of publication: 24 February, 2018

Comment: Syria's massacres are not an
accident. Local, regional and global
powers created the tragedy. And Arab
and international public opinion has
contributed, through apathy and
silence, writes Robin Yassin-Kassab


In 2011, people in the Eastern Ghouta (and throughout Syria) protested 
for freedom, dignity and social justice. The Assad regime replied with 
gunfire, mass arrests, torture and rape.

The people formed self-defence militias in response. Then the regime 
escalated harder, deploying artillery and warplanes against 
densely-packed neighbourhoods. In August 2013 it choked over a thousand 
people to death with sarin gas. Since then the area has been besieged so 
tightly that infants and the elderly die of malnutrition.

Seven years into this process – first counter-revolutionary and now 
exterminatory – the Ghouta has tumbled to the lowest pit of hell. This 
didn’t have to happen. Nor was it an accident. Local, regional and 
global powers created the tragedy, by their acts and their failures to 
act. And Arab and international public opinion has contributed, by its 
apathy and relative silence.

Blame must be apportioned first to the regime, and next to its 
imperialist sponsors. Russia shares the skies with Assad’s bombers, and 
is an equal partner in war crime after war crime, targeting schools, 
hospitals, first responders and residential blocks.

Then Iran, which kept Assad afloat by providing both a financial 
lifeline and a killing machine. Iran’s transnational militias provided 
80 percent of Assad’s troops around Aleppo, and some surround the Ghouta 
today. Their participation in the strategic cleansing of rebellious (and 
overwhelmingly Sunni) populations helped boost a Sunni jihadist backlash 
and will continue to provoke sectarian conflict in the future.


Beyond the pro-regime camp

But the blame stretches further. American condemnations of the current 
slaughter, for instance, ring very hollow in Syrian ears. The Obama 
administration, focused on achieving a nuclear deal with Iran, ignored 
Iran’s build-up in Syria. It also ensured the Free Syrian Army was 
starved of the weapons needed to defend liberated zones. And by 
signalling his disengagement after the 2013 sarin atrocity, Obama 
indirectly but clearly invited greater Russian intervention.

Since the rise of the Islamic State, the United States has focused 
myopically on its ‘war on terror’, bombing terrorists – demolishing 
cities and killing civilians in the process – but never deploying its 
vast military might in a concerted manner to protect civilians. 
Objectively, despite the rhetoric, the US has collaborated with Russia 
and Iran.

French President Emmanuel Macron, meanwhile, called for a humanitarian 
truce to allow civilians to evacuate. This sounds humane, and if the 
fall of Aleppo is any guide, it’s probably the best scenario Ghouta 
residents can expect.

Moreover, the proposal’s lack of ambition illustrates the current 
dysfunction of the global system. Instead of acting to stop the 
slaughter and siege, European statesmen support mass population 
expulsion, requesting only that it be done as gently as possible.

Despite Syria’s contribution to the West’s refugee and terrorism scares, 
Western leaders are under no significant public pressure to act. The 
crowds who protested the Iraq war and Israeli assaults on Gaza do not 
protest Syria’s subjugation. Such people, if they notice the Ghouta at 
all, often adopt the security rhetoric pioneered by the likes of Sharon, 
Blair and Bush, then polished by Putin and Assad. According to this 
reading, Syrian civilians are terrorists, the White Helmets are an 
al-Qaeda front, and Assad is restoring order.

The muted western response has many causes, including a general decline 
in political discourse, a proliferation of pro-Kremlin propaganda, 
orientalist and Islamophobic prejudices and simple apathy.


The Arab regimes' 'complicity'

One would surely expect more of the Arabs – the supposed larger nation 
to which most Syrians belong.

But one would be disappointed.

Commenting on the Ghouta, the Saudi foreign ministry stressed “the need 
for the Syrian regime to stop the violence.” More robust, the Qatari 
foreign ministry offered “strong... condemnation of the massacres ... 
carried out by ... the Syrian regime.” Qatar’s Foreign Minister used 
fiercer language still, including the words “genocide” and “forced 
displacement”.

These words are welcome but not nearly enough. Russia isn’t mentioned, 
let alone sanctioned. Quite the opposite, Gulf states are rushing to 
establish cordial relations with the resurgent imperial power, and to 
invest in the Russian economy.

In earlier years Gulf states sent weapons and funds to Free Syrian Army 
and Islamist militias – though this never amounted to a sufficient or 
sustained supply. Today Saudi Arabia in particular has given up on 
Syria, focusing instead on its petty dispute with Qatar, and its 
seemingly endless bombing of Yemen.

Saudi and Egyptian investors, meanwhile, are already lining up for 
contracts ‘reconstructing’ Assad’s Syria. Foreign business interests, 
regime elites and profiteers may benefit from the proposed rebuilding 
schemes. Not so rebellious working-class Syrians. Indeed, the razing of 
the eastern Ghouta, and its consequent depopulation, aims in part at 
clearing space for these projects.

Egypt’s General Sisi, himself engaged in crushing the hopes of democrats 
as well as Islamists, naturally sides with the Assad dictatorship.

Jordan stopped weapons supplies to the rebels in Daraa once Russia 
asserted its dominance, and even deported refugees to punish the rebels 
for launching an offensive in Daraa’s Manshiyeh quarter.

Lebanon and Iraq, both under partial Iranian control, send Shia 
militiamen to Syria, and so contribute to its dismantling.


Disappointing popular solidarity

The feeble responses of Arabs and Muslims at ‘street level’ are perhaps 
even more depressing. Ghouta residents may wonder why furious Muslim 
crowds can be roused all over the ummah by symbolic insults (blasphemous 
cartoons, or YouTube videos), but not by the actual murder, rape and 
torture of Muslims in Syria. Why does the regular incineration of Syrian 
mosques not provoke the rage reserved for occasional Quran-burning Texan 
provocateurs?

Why were angry Arab protests (rightly) unleashed by Israeli crimes in 
Palestine, and by American crimes in Iraq, but not by Iranian and 
Russian crimes in Syria?

To this last question at least there is a hint of an answer.

Arab states used to sometimes permit rallies against Israel or America. 
So long as popular rage was channelled towards external enemies, and not 
directed inwards at Arab regimes or Arab failures, it could fulfill 
functions beyond just letting off steam. Israel’s apparently 
overwhelming power – exaggerated further in the paranoid and 
conspiratorial atmosphere cultivated by dictatorship – even helped 
excuse Arab weakness.

The exclusive focus on the foreign enemy also suited certain 
intellectuals and social groups. These people would have been 
well-advised to consider the Quranic verse, “Indeed Allah will not 
change the condition of a people until they change what is in 
themselves.”

The 2011 uprisings promised a new path. During that abrupt 
transformative passage, Arabs vocally made the link between dictatorship 
and foreign occupation, between political underdevelopment and national 
defeat. Revolutionaries dared dream of building democracies which 
wouldn’t, for instance, lock up teenage girls like Tal al-Mallohi for 
blogging solidarity with Palestine.

But seven years have passed since then. Stunned by the repression that 
followed the uprisings, terrified by the monsters (like IS) that chaos 
unleashed, bombarded by misinformation, or simply struggling through the 
humiliations of daily life, the Arabs seem to barely notice Syria’s 
tragedy.

Our descendants may find this hard to understand. When the Arabs lost 
Palestine in 1948, most Arab states were newly born. In 2018, youth can 
no longer serve as an excuse. And Syria is being dismembered before our 
eyes, carved into Russian, Iranian, American and Turkish zones. Its 
people are scattered through the world in their millions. The death toll 
is half a million, rapidly rising.



Robin Yassin-Kassab is co-author, with Leila al-Shami, of Burning 
Country: Syrians in Revolution and War, and author of The Road From 
Damascus, a novel.

Books he has contributed to include Syria Speaks, Shifting Sands, and 
Beta-Life: Stories from an A-Life Future. His book reviews and 
commentary have appeared in the Guardian, the National, Foreign Policy, 
the Daily Beast and others, and he often comments on Syria on TV and 
radio.

He blogs at qunfuz.com and pulsemedia.org

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not 
necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or 
staff.