Syria – the dangers posed by foreign intervention
The future of Syria is being fought out town by town as the resistance grows against Assad’s regime. Marcus Halaby looks at how imperialist governments are doing all they can to conservatise and control the Syrian revolution.
The Syrian opposition, both domestic and abroad, remains deeply divided on the three issues that will decide the fate of Syria’s revolution: on negotiations with the regime, the role of armed force, and the risk of foreign intervention.
Eight months of unremitting violence from President Bashar al-Assad’s regime has killed around 4,000 people. November has proven the deadliest month with 950 killed as the Ba’ath regime viciously fights the growing revolt. As writer Amal Hanano puts it, only in Syria does someone go “to a funeral of a man who was killed at a funeral of a man who was killed at a funeral of a man who was a protester.” Yet this violence has failed to subdue the revolution, and resulted in up to 20,000 soldiers deserting or defecting to the side of the people, protecting civilian protests with whatever arms they have, and taking shelter in the revolutionary districts of Homs, Rastan and other towns.
We should welcome this development. This is the stuff that revolutions are made of: the repressive apparatus of the state fracturing under the pressure of the masses, as its personnel turn their guns on their officers and, if need be, their own former comrades-in-arms.
The most visible wing of this movement, at least in the West, has been the emergence of the rebel “Free Syrian Army” (FSA), nominally led from exile in Turkey by the defected former air force colonel Riyad al-As’ad. Its members can be seen in numerous videos on the internet, publicly listing their names and civilian occupations, displaying their now-defunct military identity cards, declaring their dissidence from what they disparagingly call “[president Bashar] al-Assad’s army”, and threatening to put on trial after Assad’s overthrow those who do not join them in rejecting his regime’s crimes.
They claimed responsibility for an attack on the air force intelligence base in the Damascus suburb of Harasta on 16 November, although Riyad al-As’ad denied the FSA’s involvement in an attack on the headquarters of the ruling Ba’th party four days later.
It is not unusual for revolutionary movements to include lower and middle-ranking officers. The pressure of the masses on the men under their command will affect them also, and they can provide much needed military expertise to the struggle.
However, we must recognise that the defected officers’ political leadership of this soldiers’ movement also creates dangers for the revolution. The first is that their current strategy, of isolated hit-and-run attacks on regime targets, is largely at odds with that of the mass movement, which has preferred to maintain peaceful protests precisely in order to win over the mass of the army. One story that has passed into legend has it that demonstrators in Darayya, a small town in the Damascus countryside, threw empty plastic water bottles containing flowers and written messages at the army, prompting the shamefaced soldiers to retreat – although not the regime’s unofficial thugs.
Indeed, it is the regime that has consciously militarised its conflict with the people, with the intention of frightening the Christian and Alawi minorities, and the Sunni Muslim middle class, with the prospect of Iraq-style sectarian chaos and civil war. The very scale of the military defections shows that this bloody self-sacrifice on the part of the revolutionary youth and urban poor has not been entirely in vain, although we have yet to see defections of whole units with their materiel and chain of command intact.
However, acting separately from the mass movement, the FSA and similar guerillaist groups can only adopt tactics that provide the regime with an irritant, as well as with fuelling the its long-standing propaganda that the revolution is really a conspiracy of foreign-backed “armed gangs”. Worse still, barring a real split in the army, this leaves their military effectiveness hostage to Turkey, the conservative Arab Gulf states, and the Western imperialist powers. As in Libya, these vultures will want to exact a heavy price for any self-interested “support” that they provide to Syria’s revolution, and they will be selective about who and what they support.
Almost as if to prove this point, Riyad al-As’ad has called on “the international community” to provide “protection” in the form of “a no-fly zone, a buffer zone and strikes on certain strategic targets considered as crucial by the regime”.
At the time of writing, direct external military intervention remains unlikely, not least because Israel, US imperialism’s most important regional ally, regards the downfall of its erstwhile Syrian Ba’thist enemy as an existential threat. Amos Gilad, an Israeli defence ministry official, has stated that Assad’s downfall would be a “devastating crisis” for Israel, bringing with it the threat of an “Islamic Empire” taking in Egypt and Jordan. China and Russia also support the Assad regime and are uncooperative after their imperialist rivals’ used the UN no fly zone in Libya to advance their own interests.
The Syrian opposition to Assad
Even so, French foreign minister Alain Juppe has described the Istanbul-based Syrian National Council (SNC), led by Paris-based academic Burhan Ghalioun, as a “legitimate interlocutor with which we will continue to work”, and has echoed Riyad al-As’ad’s call for a “secured zone to protect civilians”. UK foreign minister William Hague has also met SNC representatives in London, and has sent Frances Guy, the former UK Ambassador to Lebanon, to meet Syrian exiles in Paris.
The “radical” SNC, mainly comprising exiled Islamists and bourgeois liberals, is formally opposed to foreign intervention. But Ghalioun appears happy to play the role of an interlocutor with Western and Arab diplomats and politicians, promising to cut Syria’s ties to Iran and Hezbollah in the event of “regime change”. Individual SNC figures like US-based academic Radwan Ziadeh, and SNC affiliates like the Muslim Brotherhood and the liberal “Damascus Declaration” grouping, have edged ever closer to open calls for intervention, and now support calls for sanctions like those imposed by the Arab League on 27 November.
The SNC’s principal rival, the “reformist” Damascus-based National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change (NCC), mainly comprises leftist and Kurdish parties. It has a much stronger stance against foreign intervention than the SNC, with its spokesman Hassan Abdel Azim rejecting both the suspension of Syria’s membership of the Arab League on 17 November and the imposition of a no fly zone, on the grounds that “the people and not the deposed regime will pay the price” for it. The NCC has ruled out direct negotiations with the regime until its cessation of violence and the release of political prisoners. Azim has stated he “trusted” the Arab League’s central role in negotiations and advocates an “Arab solution” – yet as sanctions show, the Arab League’s pro-Western, undemocratic governments can play a front role for imperialism to achieve its goals.
The NCC is alarmed by the prospect of the “militarisation” of the struggle, instead looking to the example of Yemen, where the revolution continued for ten months “without the people using weapons”, even though weapons are available in Yemen “in all houses and streets”. But in Yemen the struggle has dragged on since January without conclusion.
In any case, both the SNC and the NCC lag behind the real forces on the ground, which are hostile both to intervention and to negotiations. The Local Coordination Committees in Syria (LCCS) – probably the body most representative of activists in Syria – have welcomed the sanctions but declared “the Syrian people do not want to substitute authoritarian rule by submission to foreign influence”. This certainly reflects the voice of the Syrian street. The newly organised Syrian Leftist Revolutionary Current goes further, rejecting any military role for “NATO or other reactionary forces from the Arab States”.
The very fact that Turkey, the conservative Arab regimes, the United States and the European imperialisms are now trying to influence events in Syria, after months of letting its people bleed, is a reflection of the courageous, sustained insurgency of the Syrian people. But the risk is that without a change in revolutionary strategy, exile groups like the JSA and SNC could broker a deal with imperialism above their heads and without their consent.
A peaceful revolution?
Advocates of an entirely “peaceful” revolution are looking to what they see as the model of the protests that brought down Egypt’s dictator Mubarak. But it was mass strikes, not just mass protests, which forced the dictator from office, and they did do to preserve what remained of the system that he represented. The people in Tahrir square had to use force repeatedly to defend themselves from pro-government thugs and the police. Moreover the conditions in Egypt are not the same as Syria, which is more like Gaddafi’s Libya in the regimes willingness to use the army to open fire on the people.
To achieve victory, the Syrian revolution must therefore bring the working class into action. Class divisions have been visible in Syria’s struggle from the outset. As Syrian writer Ammar Dayoub put it, the uprising “is about marginalized and impoverished sectors of society” who have come together with various political forces against a tyrannical regime “which over decades has impoverished seven million Syrians and destroyed local agriculture and industry”.
If the Local Coordinating Committees called a general strike, it would bring into play the social and economic power of a working class that has already been drawn into a mass struggle on the streets for democratic rights. This would paralyse the state, precipitate a real split in the army, decisively tie the defected soldiers to the mass movement, and isolate the bourgeois forces advocating negotiations or intervention. The Syrian workers need their own revolutionary party and to control the local councils if they are to ensure that Assad’s downfall is not merely the prelude to a new dictatorship in the making but see it through to a Socialist end.
