The Imminent Partition and the Ultimate Extinction of Syria.
By Paul Merkley
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Wikipedia (the best of friends) describes Syria as “home to diverse ethnic and religious groups.” Conveniently for me, it names the ethnic groups: Syrian Arabs, Kurds, Turkemens Assyrians, Armenians Circasssions and Greeks. Likewise, the religious groups are identified as Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims, Alawites, Druzes, Isma’ilis, Mandeans, Shiites, Salafis, and Yazidis. Arabs are the largest ethnic group, and Sunnis the largest religious group.
It is almost impossible to imagine the amount of chaos that awaits this unhappy land (an immediate neighbour of Israel) when the heavy hand of its tyrant-President is finally removed and the leaders of these many ethnic groups declare themselves free at last to settle ancient scores. This day cannot be far off.
It is customary for our elected politicians, wining and dining (on my dime) with the local, mainly-un-elected, politicians to ingratiate themselves with their hosts by insisting that Canada is a mere toddler among the nations, standing now in the company of ancient peoples. They consider it inconvenient to note that the present state of Syria, like all of the current Arab nations in the Middle East and for that matter beyond, is less “ancient” than Canada is (or, for that matter, than I am.)
I was born in 1934. Syria came into being as a nation-state in 1946.
Syria’s post-colonial period, was incredibly bloody from the outset. The independence honeymoon lasted only a few months (as elsewhere throughout the post colonial world generally). Only a handful of specialist historians can tell you the number of military coups and coup attempts that made life intolerable for everyone but the soldiers from 1949 to 1970. But then, in 1970, General Hafez al-Assad (born 1930) became President.
Governing with an iron fist, Assad père remained in power long enough to hand over governance of the land to his elder son, who shortly thereafter handed off to his younger brother Bashar al-Assad in the year 2000. As for Assad fils: throughout his rule, Syria has been involved in virtually non-step violent aggression against everyone on the block.
Bashar al-Assad’s regime holds all the relevant titles in the categories of abuse of the rights of human rights. The regime’s ability to censor free speech in all its forms is the envy of all tyrants everywhere. Also notable among the regime’s records is that for frequency of executions of its citizens and also of alleged spies.
Since March 2011, Syria has been embroiled in an armed conflict with a number of its neighbours. For this bad behaviour it was suspended from the Arab League in November 2011 and thereafter from the Organization for Islamic Cooperation. Along the way, wanting to be alone, it walked out of the Union for the Mediterranean (in 2012).
While the present nation-state is young, local history is very, very long – at least so it seems to us – a nation with only a century and a half of history. The modern state sits atop the sites of several ancient kingdoms and empires, going back to the third millennium BC. Aleppo and Damascus are among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world.
Syria was a province of the Ottoman Empire, until its overthrow at the end of World War One. Then Syria became a Mandate (virtually a colony) of France. It gained independence just in time to become a founding member of the United Nations.
Only the most senior scholars in this field can tell you how many coups and attempts at coups took place after independence and before the last of them was extinguished by Hafez al-Assad.
Through at least the last half-millennium of Syria’s independence from France, the lives of Syria’s citizens have been becoming more and more miserable and its political institutions more and more brutal. The best estimates are that Syria’s wars with its neighbours killed more than half a million people, caused 7.6 million to be internally displaced and over 5 million to become refugees. According to the Global Peace Initiative Syria ranks as “the most violent country in the world.”
This regime – among the ugliest in the world from every perspective — cannot last much longer. Syria itself is likely to begin flying apart in all directions like the remarkable-one-horse-shay the moment the current regime collapses.
So far, Syria’s citizens have been victims of the proxy wars conducted on her soil by a shifting cast of outside powers. Her recent history is reminiscent of the history of Poland, repeatedly partitioned by the Great Powers beginning in the Eighteenth century and ending in the years of the Second War. A major difference is that what is now called Syria has no previous history of national sovereignty; indeed, it has never had greater dignity than that of a province within the Ottoman Empire.
Following the destruction of the Ottoman Empire by the Allied Powers, Syria had been a Mandate – that is, virtually a colony of Great Britain — until independence was granted in the 1940s. By contrast, Poland has had a long national history, and had in fact for a long while been a regional power of major significance — before being set upon and cannibalized by Russia and others as opportunities occurred during wars conducted by the major powers in in the Eighteenth Century.
No one doubts that the Poles are distinct nation, while the notion of a Syrian Nation has never taken hold – neither in popular imagination nor in the thinking of the major powers. The bottom line here is that the notion of nationhood has never taken firm hold where Islam holds the primary allegiance.
For all these reasons, it is improbable that Syria will defy the realities of Muslim history and flourish as a nation-state for more than a decade or two past this present moment.
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