Экономические науки/2. Внешнеэкономическая политика

Фадва Бен Брахим

Уфимский государственный авиационный технический университет, Россия

Syria revolution in the Arabic world

Сирийская революция в Арабском мире

No country has suffered more than Syria as a result of the repression of the Arab revolutions. In a civil war that still seems far from over, some 220,000 people have perished, most of them civilians. Despite the spectacular barbarism of ISIS, magnified by the global media, the vast majority of these deaths have occurred at the hands of the Assad regime without much media exposure, whether in its dark prisons or the communities that its military has firebombed over and over again.

According to UN estimates, by this summer some 10 million Syrians have been forced to flee their homes, with 4 million of them now languishing abroad. This means that nearly half the population of 23 million people is now refugees, most of them from the Sunni Arab majority that forms the core of the base of the opposition. For its part, the regime has fallen back more and more onto its sectarian base among the Alawite minority, an offshoot of Shia Islam. Some observers have suggested that the Assad regime’s strategy involves the permanent expulsion of Sunni Muslims, in order to forcibly alter the country’s demography in its favor. (At present the population is about 60% Sunni Arab, 16% Alawite and other Shia-oriented, and 11% Christian.) If true, this would amount to ethno-religious “cleansing” as seen in Bosnia, which would constitute a form of genocide.

A year ago, it seemed that revulsion at the rise of fundamentalists within the opposition had strengthened the Assad regime’s base of support and that it was likely to prevail in the end. This also produced a decline in international support for the rebels.

However, the regime seems to have weakened in recent months, as its military has become overstretched due to the scale of the fighting and the drying up of its base for recruits among the ethnic minorities, especially the Alawites, many of whom are fleeing the country.

While Russia’s involvement has been steady, Iran has increased its activity in Syria in response to these regime setbacks. Large numbers of Iranian Revolutionary Guards, their Lebanese Hezbollah allies, as well as Shia volunteers from Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere have joined the fray. This has also had major sectarian economic and cultural implications. Wealthy Iranians have reportedly been buying up real estate in Damascus. Last November, Assad allowed for the first time a large public celebration on the streets of Damascus of Ashura, the most important Shia religious holiday. This broke with decades of regime policy restricting outdoor religious celebrations of Syria’s various religious communities to specific neighborhoods where they predominate rather than the city center. While Damascus is by no means about to become a majority Shia city, these developments have stoked Sunni fears (and prejudice) regarding the danger of a Shia “takeover,” which could increase even further the sectarian element in the civil war

Some cities, most significantly Idlib in the north, have fallen to rebels, who are primarily Islamist, although not ISIS. And though the Assad regime was able to retake some of the southern cities like Homs, the key northern city of Aleppo remains in play in a three-pronged battle among the Assad forces, the mainstream rebels, and ISIS. Last year, mainstream Syrian rebels took on ISIS as an enemy of their uprising, driving it from the center of Aleppo. As I argued in a previous article, it was this defeat that drove ISIS back into Iraq, where it captured the second largest city, Mosul, and re-emerged as an even greater force (Kevin Anderson, “Popular Movements and Their Contradictions: From the Arab Revolutions to Today,” By spring 2015, however, those mainstream rebels had become even more Islamist, and they used armed force to make groups like the more secular Hazzm Movement join the Islamist coalition that is fighting Assad and ISIS in Aleppo. For its part, ISIS has gained additional territory in some parts of Syria, this spring taking the historic city of Palmyra, where it threatens to blow up its sizable Roman ruins, which form a key part of Syria’s and the world’s cultural heritage.

While the magnificent Syrian civil opposition that arose in 2011 has been to a great extent driven underground by the militaristic maneuvers of increasingly Islamist armed factions, it has by no means disappeared. To take one dramatic example, inside the ISIS capital city of Raqqa itself, a network of clandestine revolutionaries has spraypainted “Down with ISIS” on walls and has sent damning videos out of the city: “We are revolutionary activists, anti-regime and anti-ISIS. Since ISIS took control of the city in January [2013] our role is to expose its crimes” (Benjamin Barthe, “A Rakka, des citoyens journalistes résistent,” When a grassroots democratic movement is forced off the stage by authoritarian armed groups, its aims can sometimes also be reflected in exile politics, as seen in a March 2015 demonstration in Paris on the fourth anniversary of the 2011 uprising in Syria. There, rally organizer Hassan Lababibi declared: “Assad and Daesh [ISIS] are two sides of the same coin, and getting rid of Assad carries with it the disappearance of ISIS” (“Manifestation à Paris contre Assad et l’État islamique, un ‘monstre à deux têtes’,”

Wealthy Saudis and other Gulf Arabs have continued to supply ISIS and other jihadist groups with funds and arms, most of which pass through Turkey, where the moderate Islamist and increasingly authoritarian government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan has turned a blind eye, if not engaged in actual assistance to the fundamentalists. Thousands of foreign fighters have arrived in Syria, most of them also passing through Turkey. The most extreme among the Sunni fundamentalists, like ISIS or the local Al Qaeda branch Al Nusra, are of the same ilk that attacked the World Trade Center on September 11. Here, it should be remembered that most of these groups trace their origins to the Afghan war of the 1980s, when the US played with fire in order to counter Russia in the Cold War by arming, funding and organizing jihadist groups. Moreover, ISIS actually formed out of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the most extreme form of Sunni resistance to the US Occupation of Iraq, a group that was condemned even by Al Qaeda for its brutality toward Shias.

ISIS and the Assad regime have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship, and the regime certainly seemed to encourage ISIS’s rise for two reasons: (1) sapping the forces of the other opposition groups, which ISIS was bent upon dominating or destroying; (2) allowing its most unattractive enemy to become more prominent, thus gaining reluctant support at home and abroad. As French journalist Alain Frachon reminds us, the Assad regime is no bulwark against Islamism, as some elements of the international Left maintain:

As is well known, in 2014 ISIS took over large swathes of Iraq, including its second city Mosul, gaining huge caches of arms and money. At this point, the US started to alter its policy toward both Syria and Iran. It began to work almost openly with Iran in Iraq to forestall further gains by ISIS, given the disintegration of the Iraq Army in the Sunni belt. This meant US airstrikes to support Shia fighters, some of them Iranian Revolutionary Guards. In Syria, the US also began to bomb ISIS and Al Nusra targets, something that outraged the Syrian resistance, which noted that the US had not intervened — and was still not intervening — against the Assad regime itself, which had carried out so much more carnage than had these fundamentalists (Michael Karadjis, “Syrian rebels overwhelmingly condemn US bombing as an attack on revolution,

In April, another cruel setback occurred when ISIS forces, apparently abetted by Al Nusra, overran the Yarmouk district of Damascus, whose 160,000 residents once formed the largest Palestinian refugee community outside the West Bank and Gaza. Beheadings of perceived opponents of ISIS began immediately, in what some are calling the second Palestinian Nakba, a reference to the catastrophe for Palestinians of 1948 defeat of the Arabs by Israel. By 2015, only 18,000 increasingly desperate souls remained in Yarmouk, with some 200 having died of outright starvation during a 700-day siege at the hands of the Assad regime. At the beginning of the 2011 uprising, Yarmouk tried to stay neutral, but was pressed by Assad’s forces to side with the regime. Once they refused, they were put under siege. Many observers say that it is inconceivable that ISIS could have entered Yarmouk without the complicity of the Assad regime (Gerry Emmett, “Death in Yarmouk,” Assad is now calling on Palestinians to rally to his side against ISIS, something neither the Palestine Liberation Organization nor Hamas has agreed to do (Clément Melki, “Ce qui se joue à Yarmouk,”

Syria Again: Enter the Kurdish Left

But the newest development in Syria in the past year has been the rise of the Kurds as an independent factor. This began in 2014, when the US-backed Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga in Iraq almost buckled in the face of the ISIS conquest of Mosul. After thousands of members of the Yazidi minority fled onto the blisteringly hot and arid Sinjar Mountain in order to escape ISIS beheadings and sexual enslavement, the US only sent airdrops of food and water and the Peshmerga did little. Instead, the Marxist People’s Protection Units (YPG), the armed wing of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) took to the field across the border in Northern Iraq, establishing a human corridor to Turkey to rescue the Yazidis when no one else would do so.

Six months later, in fall and winter 2014-15, YPG forces inflicted the first major defeat on ISIS at Kobane, Syria, a Kurdish town bordering Turkey that ISIS had surrounded, threatening to kill or enslave the population. Kobane’s successful resistance, abetted by 700 US airstrikes, galvanized the progressive left all over the world. Images of youthful YPG women fighters enjoying equality with their male counterparts, as well as their explicit revolutionary politics, suggested a leftwing turn in Syria after years of horrific civil war. Their enactment of social justice measures in Kobane seemed to recall — and perhaps even deepen — the original social justice content of the Arab revolutions of 2011 in Egypt and Tunisia.

As a group of Iranian writers stated at the time: “An autonomous society with its radical democracy, Kobani is experiencing three special years [sic]. Community councils, in which every walk of life has its own representatives, are the decision makers. Kobani people don’t have their own masters, they make their own destinies. Kobani has surpassed all identity borders of race and gender and is a perfect model of human equality, an example unrivaled in the modern history of the region; a life in which people can live differently, an equal life free from all identity limitations; a style of life in which every member of society, whatever their religion, gender and race is, live with equal rights and shoulder to shoulder they manage their society; a life in which man is valued because he is a human. From this viewpoint, Kobani is crucial as a resistance center. Reactionary governments of the area and colonial governments are scared of the spread of such an idea of lifestyle in the region, an idea roaring to the people of the world that ideals of equality and freedom are not mere dreams”

Since 2012, the PYD has established Rojava, a de facto autonomous Kurdish zone in northeastern Syria, an area not far from where ISIS has its core strength. The PYD is the Syrian affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) of Turkey, historically a Stalinist Kurdish nationalist group with an iron hierarchical discipline. For a time during the 1990s, PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan orchestrated their guerrilla forces in eastern Turkey from Syria, where the Assad regime granted the PKK legal status. Since his expulsion from Syria and capture by the US and Turkey in 1999, Ocalan has altered his politics, now espousing Kurdish autonomy — dubbed “Democratic Confederalism” — inside Turkey rather than independence. He has also written of a libertarian form of socialism influenced by an eclectic mix of disparate sources, including Friedrich Nietzsche and US anarchist and social ecologist Murray Bookchin.

It was this type of politics that was on display in Kobane last winter and that won the admiration of so much of the global left. For example, the anarchist David Graeber compared Kobane to the anarchist and socialist revolutionaries of Spain in the 1930s. Acknowledging the authoritarian history of these Kurdish tendencies, Graeber focused on grassroots democracy and changes in property relations: “Clearly, authoritarian elements remain. But what has happened in Rojava, where the Syrian revolution gave Kurdish radicals the chance to carry out such experiments in a large, contiguous territory, suggests this is anything but window dressing. Councils, assemblies and popular militias have been formed, regime property has been turned over to worker-managed co-operatives – and all despite continual attacks by the extreme rightwing forces of Isis” (“Why is the world ignoring the revolutionary Kurds in Syria,” ). Graeber also compared the PKK-PYD to the Zapatistas.

An international delegation of leftist academics reached similar conclusions after visiting Rojava in December, giving particular stress to women’s liberation:

“In Rojava, we believe, genuinely democratic structures have indeed been established. Not only is the system of government accountable to the people, but it springs out of new structures that make direct democracy possible: popular assemblies and democratic councils. Women participate on an equal footing with men at every level and also organize in autonomous councils, assemblies, and committees to address their specific concerns. The women we met embodied the empowerment, self-confidence, and pride recently gained by the women of Rojava. We saw banners and slogans that read: ‘The Rojavan revolution is a women’s revolution.’ It really is.”

“What is happening in the Kurdish autonomous region is far from perfect. There is repression of Kurdish activists and forced conscription — people who refuse are imprisoned. Institutions that criticized the PKK were closed. The PYD — the Democratic Union Party, a Syrian Kurdish political party established in 2003 — like its mother organization the PKK, is not democratic in its internal functioning. We must remember for example the protest movements in late June 2013 in some cities of Rojava, such as Amouda and Derabissyat, against the repression by the PYD of Kurdish revolutionary activists.”

“But at the same time you have some very positive aspects when it comes to the protection of religious minorities, strengthening women’s rights, and secularism. In comparison with the popular councils that were established from below in the liberated areas of Syria by the revolutionaries, which are real examples of self-administration, in the case of Rojava it is more a dynamic from above, led and controlled by the PYD. So again, these are the different aspects that you can say about this intervention in Kobanê and how I see it.

Two issues are paramount here. First, there is a strong element of grassroots democracy, women’s rights, and a leftist political program on property relations being implemented in Rojava. This is very important indeed. One would have to be very naive to think that this is the only element and that the PKK-PYD have not retained some of their old practices and theories.

But what seems to be happening, as Onur Kapdan, a Turkish leftist intellectual suggests, is that the PKK and PYD have been evolving over the past decade or so, moving away from their earlier Stalinist politics and organizational forms and toward something more open. This is even more the case when it comes to legal Turkish groups linked to them, like the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). This young intellectual writes that in Turkey “young Kurdish activists,” sometimes influenced by the Zapatista movement in Mexico and by anarchism, “have been pushing different interpretations of revolution and independence as well as different organizational forms to achieve that. I believe that this new generation managed to push the PKK towards their interpretation as well.” At the same time, this correspondent concludes, some PKK leaders “are still as Stalinist as it gets.” This has led to a three-sided debate in Turkey among the HDP youth, Ocalan, and older Stalinist elements of the PKK (Onur Kapdan, private communication, 7-28-15).

Second, one cannot underline too much that the PYK and Rojava are the most important force confronting ISIS barbarism in eastern Syria and northern Iraq, a barbarism that enslaves women and executes Shia Muslims, religious minorities, and anyone else who does not swear immediate fealty to their dogmatic form of Islam. (ISIS is so repulsive that even the knee-jerk response to all forms of US intervention, even those against genocide, that is usual in many parts of the global left, has been strikingly absent this time). The PYK and Rojava are confronting something like fascism and they are espousing principles of gender equality, religious tolerance, and progressive changes in the socio-economic system.

Overall, despite their compromises with Assad and their legacy of Stalinism, one can say that the PYK and Rojava are putting forth not just resistance to ISIS — and to an extent, Assad — but also a vision of different human relations, toward the overcoming of the oppressions of gender and class. Such a vision is sorely missing at this juncture, not only in the Middle East, but also globally .Also, it goes without saying that examples like Kobane should not be seen as connected to the spurious Stalinist notion of “socialism in one country,” since no truly revolutionary transformation can be ultimately successful without the uprooting of the global capitalist system.)

In June, the PYK, in alliance with Syrian opposition forces and with support from US airstrikes, took from ISIS an even more important border town, Tal Abyad. Control of this town cuts off the supply line from Turkey to the ISIS capital city, Raqqa,

It also linked two large parts of Rojava together, which had been separated by this ISIS stronghold up to now. The fact that the PYK and the Syrian opposition were allied in this attack could be a turning point for the entire Syrian civil war, although that of course remains to be seen.

The ISIS response was swift, and murderous. A week after Tal Abyad, ISIS forces raided Kobane again. Before they were driven back, they had managed to kill some 150 people, most of them civilians. A few weeks later, an ISIS suicide bomber blew himself up in the Turkish town of Suruc, killing 31 young supporters of Kobane who had gathered there. Far from intimidating the supporters of Kobane, it only increased their determination. (This incident is discussed more below, in the section on Turkey, but first I want to take up briefly another relatively positive development in the Arab world, in Tunisia, where events have taken a turn different from both Egypt and Syria.)

The tragic situation in Syria is worsening. The peaceful civilian protest is developing into a military confrontation, and the differences between the political opposition forces mainly in exile are weakening peaceful protests inside the country. Violent armed confrontations between defecting army troops and units and those loyal to the regime are escalating. There are no signals that the regime will give up; on the contrary, it is showing total isolation from reality internally and regionally. After more than 10 months of bloody attacks against civilians and building up counter-attacks by armed protestors, a civil war is inevitable. Converting the peaceful civil protest into a military confrontation will play into the hands of the Assad regime and give him an excuse to use excessive power against the protest movement. This will be a disaster for Syria and the region, because any disturbance in Syria will spill over to Jordan and Lebanon and the stability of the whole region will be at stake.

Литература

1. Lynch, Marc. Voices of the New Arab Public: Iraq, Al-Jazeera, and Middle East Politics Today. New York: Columbia UP, 2006.

2. Miles, Hugh. Al Jazeera: How Arab TV News Challenged the World. London: Abacus, 2005. 

3. Mourtada, Rasha, and Fadi Salem. “Arab Social Media Report, Facebook Usage: Factors and Analysis.” Dubai School of Government 1.1 (Jan. 2011).

4. Oreskovic, Alexei. “Google Inc Launched a Special Service...” Reuters 1 Feb. 2011. 28 Jan. 2011 ‹http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/01/us-egypt-protest-google-idUSTRE71005F20110201›.

5. Saleh, Heba. “Egypt Bloggers Fear State Curbs.” BBC News 22 Feb. 2007. 28 Jan. 2011 ‹http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/middle_east/6386613.stm›.

6. Shapiro, Samantha. “The War inside the Arab Newsroom.” The New York Times 2 Jan. 2005. 

7. Shouier, Mohammed. “Al Tahrir Qanat al Naser … Nawara Najemm” (Liberation, Victory Channel… and Nawara Najem). Al Akhbar 17 Feb. 2011.

8. Zayani, Mohammed. The Al-Jazeera Phenomenon: Critical Perspectives on Arab Media. London: Pluto, 2005.