The Syrian Revolution, at Street Level
This is Hell! Radio (Chicago)
by Robin Yassin-Kassab
Qunfuz, May 13, 2016
Leila and I were interviewed by phone (we were in Los Angeles) by Chuck
Mertz of This is Hell radio, a Chicago-based station. We talked about the
Syrian revolution. Because the radio station was in Chicago, here's a
picture of the Trump Tower, or one of them, also in Chicago.
AntidoteZine has published a transcript alongside the audio, here.
The Syrian Revolution, at Street Level
by Ed Sutton
AntidoteZine, April 4, 2016
http://antidotezine.com/2016/04/04/syria-at-street-level/
Transcribed from the 2 April 2016 episode of This is Hell! Radio (Chicago)
and printed with permission. Edited for space and readability. Listen to the
full interview:
"The movement has shown very clearly that they will not accept fascism, and
their struggle is against all authoritarianism. They’re not going to replace
one authoritarian state with another."
Chuck Mertz: A little over five years ago, small groups of Syrians broke out
into peaceful protests asking for democratic reforms. The protesters were
greeted by the state with violence. The protests continued, and as they
grew, so did the brutality of the security forces supporting Bashar
al-Assad. Here to tell us how Syrians wanted democracy but instead face
annihilation, Leila Al Shami and Robin Yassin-Kassab are co-authors of
Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War.
Leila was a founding member of Tahrir-ICN, a network that connects
anti-authoritarian struggles across the Middle East, North Africa, and
Europe, and has worked with the human rights movement in Syria and
throughout the Middle East. She blogs at leilashami.wordpress.com.
Robin is the author of the novel The Road From Damascus and a contributor to
the anthology Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Front Line. Robin
writes frequently for the Guardian, Foreign Policy, and Al Jazeera English.
He is co-editor of the blog Pulse and former editor of the journal Critical
Muslim.
Leila and Robin will be discussing their book Burning Country: Syrians in
Revolution and War on Tuesday April 12 at six p.m. in Assembly Hall at the
International House at the University of Chicago.
[to Antidote readers in the US: the University of Chicago event is only one
on an extensive tour already underway; please check out this list for an
event near you. --ed.]
Leila, let’s start with you. You write, "This is where the revolution
happens first--before the guns and the political calculations, before even
the demonstrations: in individual hearts, in the form of new thoughts and
newly unfettered words. Syria was once known as the ‘Kingdom of Silence.’ In
2011 it burst into speech. Not in one voice, but in millions. An immense
surge of long-suppressed energy, a nonviolent protest movement crossed
sectarian and ethnic boundaries and spread to every part of the country.
Nobody could control it, no party or leader or ideological program, and
least of all the repressive apparatus of the state, which applied gunfire,
mass detentions, sexual assault, and torture--even of children--to death."
So Leila, what were the words that needed to be said that could cause such
an uprising?
Leila Al Shami: Well, the uprising was a response, I think, to two aspects.
One was the authoritarianism of the state, and the complete denial of
political freedom, the complete lack of space for Syrians to participate in
their communities, in their society, under the Assad regime.
It was also a response to the neoliberal economic reforms which were brought
in under Hafez al-Assad, the former president, and really sped up under
Bashar. These reforms led to the impoverishment of wide sections of the
population during Bashar’s decade in power.
As you mentioned in your introduction, a leading Syrian dissident called it
the "Kingdom of Silence." People didn’t have the opportunity to express
themselves, and this is what made what happened in 2011 so remarkable. It
came in the wave of a transnational revolutionary uprising across the
region, in North Africa and the Middle East--people going into the streets
and saying, "Enough!"--but we should also remember that at the beginning of
the protest movement, people in Syria were not calling for the fall of the
regime, unlike in Egypt and Tunisia. They were asking for very modest
reforms. But because of the response of the state and the massive amounts of
violence that were directed towards peaceful protesters, people radicalized
and started calling for the fall of the regime.
Chuck Mertz: Robin, let me follow up on what Leila was just saying. She
mentioned the neoliberal economic reforms under Hafez al-Assad prior to
Bashar al-Assad’s succession to power after his father’s death. What do we
miss in our understanding of the Syrian civil war when we don’t mention the
neoliberal economic reforms and the impact that they had on the citizenry of
Syria?
Robin Yassin-Kassab: Unfortunately, I think we in the West--left as much as
right--have missed most of what’s happening, because we’re stuck with our
pre-existent "big stories," our grand narratives of Sunni-Shi’a conflict or
geopolitical conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, or the supposed
conflict--which actually doesn’t exist at the moment--between America and
Iran, or between America and Russia.
We don’t attend to the voices on the ground. We don’t ask Syrians why they
are doing it, what their motivations are. And then we come up with silly
conspiracy theories: some people seem to think that the Syrians are
rebelling because the CIA told them to, which of course is absurd--the vast
majority of Syrians are not interested at all in what Obama or the Sauds or
the Israelis have to say. They’re responding to their immediate
circumstances.
As Leila said, the economic situation in Syria by 2011 was fairly
disastrous, because of these neoliberal reforms. And whether or not you
agree with neoliberal economic reforms, these ones were done particularly
badly. It was crony capitalism, really, to the extent that the president’s
cousin, a man called Rami Makhlouf, was estimated by 2011 to have a finger
in sixty percent of the national economy. At the same time, the subsidies on
food and fuel--which had provided a safety net, traditionally, for the
poorest people in society--were drastically cut.
A lot of people would put up with the humiliation and the repression of the
regime, because they felt that economically they were getting something out
of it--they were at least able to feed their kids. By 2011 a lot of people
were working three jobs, were suffering daily humiliation and repression,
and also were finding it really difficult to feed their kids. So they began
to feel like they’d gotten to a breaking point: "There’s no safety net; we
have to go out and complain."
But as Leila said, it was just a complaint. And then the regime provoked a
war--and I would say deliberately, which sounds a bit strange, but I could
tell you why.
Why on Earth would a regime, a government, a state, provoke a war against
itself? The reason is that the regime knew that to satisfy the people it
would have to start a real, genuine reform process--political as well as
economic--and that they couldn’t survive it. One thing would have led to
another, and at the end of that process the regime elite would have ended
up--at best--in prison, stripped of its wealth. And they really didn’t want
that.
And of course, they’d done it before and it had worked. In the late
seventies in Syria, there was a political movement--nothing like the mass
mobilization of 2011, but nevertheless a political movement against the
regime--which included leftists, nationalists, and liberals as well as
Islamists. By 1982, as a result of ruthless repression, all that was left of
it was the armed wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, which staged an armed
uprising in the city of Hama, at which point the regime said, "Okay, you’ve
brought guns into it, so we will go in." And they smashed the historical
heart of that ancient city, killed somewhere between ten thousand and forty
thousand people (we don’t know), and the terror of 1982 kept the Syrians
quiet until 2011, when there was a new generation who couldn’t remember the
scale of the terror.
So by torturing children to death--and then, interestingly, returning the
mangled corpses to the parents, because they wanted a response--and by
organizing a mass rape campaign; by forcing soldiers to shoot on their
unarmed countrymen every day, so some of them defected; by doing all of
this, they provoked a war.
And sadly, although it’s destroyed Syria and made half the population
homeless and killed up to half a million people, it does seem to be working.
Because now there are international jihadists jumping in; we’ve got lots of
different states jumping in; and everybody is ignoring the original
democratic demands of the people in favor of these grand narratives.
And lots of people--including in the West, including Western
governments--are coming around to the idea, which they may have had all
along, that it’s best for the sake of so-called stability to work with this
tyrant who wears a tie and shaves, because he’s supposedly the "lesser evil"
as opposed to the jihadists with beards who want to kill us even in the
West.
And of course there are other people we are ignoring. There are democrats,
there are self-organized communities, local councils. There is another
alternative which should be supported, that isn’t being supported or even
being heard of.
Chuck Mertz: Leila, when we in the West think about this uprising, we think
about it as something that started in 2011. But does this uprising date back
to the 1980s? Instead of looking at this as something that has only happened
within the last few years, should we be looking at this uprising as
something that has been taking place for decades against a brutal
dictatorship that was handed on from father to son?
Leila Al Shami: There were instances of protest against Hafez
al-Assad--there were demonstrations and strikes that occurred throughout the
eighties, and Robin has just talked about the uprising that occurred in
Hama. Also in Bashar’s period there were a few movements happening. There
was a very interesting nonviolent youth movement which was carrying out
things like boycotts of businesses; they were doing a lot of work
campaigning against the Israeli occupation of Palestine, these kinds of
things. But in general there was no independent or active civil society
existing in Syria prior to the revolution.
What civil society existed was very much controlled by the Ba’ath party. For
example, there were a number of development organizations which were
established under the patronage of Asma al-Assad, the first lady of Syria.
And there were a few charities, which were mainly involved in service
provision. But political activity was ruthlessly suppressed throughout that
period.
So 2011 was very unique, and people often talk about the fear barrier being
broken, that people found a voice that they had suppressed, themselves, for
decades, out of fear of repercussions. To me, what happened in 2011 was
unexpected, and a very, very interesting historical moment, when people
suddenly found their voice and really said enough is enough.
"Men and women of Maarat al-Nouman have continued their civil resistance
against Jabhat al-Nusra for 21 days"
Chuck Mertz: Let me follow up on that, Leila. You write, "The two-fold
character that the battle imposed on Syrians is against the Assadist necktie
fascists and the Islamist long-bearded fascists." So more than anything, is
this ongoing war that we’re seeing right now--is this a war against fascism?
Leila Al Shami: I would argue yes, and I think it’s very interesting not
only how the Syrian uprising began against the fascist regime, against the
authoritarianism of the Syrian state, but how that movement has also
radicalized over time. Because over the course of the conflict--and
certainly when the conflict became militarized--there was the arrival of all
kinds of different groups, many of them Islamist extremist groups such as
Jabhat al-Nusra and Jaysh al-Islam. And in areas where those groups have
tried to impose their dominant vision or tried to control the freedoms of
the people, we’ve again seen popular protests against such groups, and that’s
happened continually over the past five years.
What’s been very interesting now, with the reduction of hostilities by
Russia, is the massive resumption of protests. The civil movement has not
been so visible, because of the violence and the dominance of the military
struggle. But we’ve seen people in places like in Idlib--at protests on the
streets that have erupted in the past few weeks once again, really showing
that civil activism is still alive--calling not only for the fall of the
regime and stating that their original concerns have not been addressed and
they’re still very committed to that revolutionary struggle against the
regime, but also showing that they reject Jabhat al-Nusra. People in Idlib
have been protesting against Jabhat al-Nusra, and Jabhat al-Nusra has been
trying to suppress the protests in Idlib.
So yes, I think the movement has radicalized some people, and shown very
clearly that they will not accept fascism, and their struggle is against all
authoritarianism. They’re not going to replace one authoritarian state with
another.
"It’s a state-centric discourse, and there’s very little knowledge about the
popular struggles or grassroots civil movements in Syria. When this kind of
discourse comes from sections of the left, it is very strange, because the
politics of liberation should be grounded in people’s struggles for freedom,
dignity, and social justice."
Chuck Mertz: Robin, are these democratic reformers--the people who started
the nonviolent protests back in 2011, the people who wanted to have real
democracy, the people who put in these local coordinating committees--are
these reformers the real threat to not only Assad, but to Russia and even
the United States?
How much of a threat--and I don’t mean that as a negative thing--do they
pose to all of the powers that are trying to control what is taking place
within Syria?
Robin Yassin-Kassab: I think it is a threat, because for outside powers,
for states--whether domestically that state has some degree of democracy or
not--externally, it’s always easier for foreign states to deal with one man.
If you’ve got one guy in charge of a country who you can bribe or threaten
or pat on the head when he’s good, you can get what you want out of him, it’s
quite simple.
It’s much more complicated when the people themselves are jumping up and
saying they want a say too. Then power becomes diffuse, and you have to deal
with different sectors in the society; it’s much more difficult.
So yes, I don’t think that America or Britain or France, any more than Iran
or Russia, particularly want to see democracy in the Arab world. It’s always
dangerous, because those people may not want the things that we think they
should want. They may not want to make peace with Israel until occupied land
has been returned. They may not want American bases in their countries. They
may not agree with the economic policies of the dominant states in the
world. So there’s that danger.
And there’s also this very outmoded idea--which, again, is shared sometimes
on the left as well as the right--that for the sake of stability we have to
stick with these security states, these so-called secular dictatorships. I
think that fails to understand what’s happening now. When Hafez al-Assad,
the father of Bashar, came to power in 1970, there were six million Syrians,
six million people in the country. By 2011 there were 23 million people in
the country. And it was overwhelmingly a young population. And despite the
best efforts of the regime to censor the internet and so on, they’d become
experts at getting onto proxy servers. It was a more connected-up population
than ever before. They were connected to other Arabs, and internationally.
So I don’t think you can rule the Arabs through the security state in the
way that you could in the past, and you certainly can’t get back to
stability by backing dictators. It’s actually making the problem worse.
It’s notable that in the last three or four decades of totalitarian
dictatorships in the Arab world, jihadism and Salafist extremism have become
so prominent; I think the two things are intimately related. It’s a result
of the failures of the educational system, of cultural repression, of
economic oppression, that there are some people jumping to extremes to try
to find a solution.
Chuck Mertz: Leila, speaking of security, stability, and safety for the
region: when that is said within the US or in the Western media, it’s seen
as a very altruistic thing, that we’re thinking about what’s "best for
them." We’re thinking about making certain that they can live from day to
day, that they can have security, stability, safety.
What is the problem with focusing on security, safety, and stability as our
goals--and we’re trying, of course, as a foreign power, to impose them on
somebody else...but what is the problem with focusing on those as our
foreign policy goals rather than democracy?
Leila Al Shami: Well, I think one of the main problems is that people
believe that it’s Assad who can bring stability and security to Syria, and
failing to recognize that the main cause of the instability currently is the
Assad regime. I mean, 97% of civilian deaths in Syria have been carried out
by the regime. But the focus has very much been on ISIS and intervention
against ISIS, and believing that Assad can be worked with as a partner in
the struggle against ISIS, when in fact Assad created the chaos which
allowed groups such as ISIS to thrive in Syria.
So it’s been a huge problem to see Syria through the security lens,
especially when the partner for security is part of the problem, not part of
the solution.
Whenever there’s a popular struggle like there is in Syria, a popular
revolution, all states are going to try and intervene to control that
process, and try to exert their dominance and power and influence over that
process. That’s how power politics works. But a lot of the focus has been on
these geopolitical struggles between states, which has really stripped
political agency from the Syrian people. Syrians are unable to define what
their struggle is, or say what’s happening in their own country. Everything
is being seen as this chess game between foreign powers.
It’s a state-centric discourse, and there’s very little knowledge about the
popular struggles or grassroots civil movements in Syria. And when this kind
of discourse comes from sections of the left, it is very strange to me,
because the politics of liberation should be grounded in people’s struggles
for freedom, dignity, and social justice.
I don’t see support from the West for the popular struggle. The West is
intervening because of its own interests. I also think that it’s a fallacy
to see Western intervention as having played a significant role in Syria.
They have intervened: they’ve been trying, the influence the external
negotiations, they’ve attacked the Islamic State, but they’ve not intervened
in a meaningful way that would support the popular struggle on the ground.
Of course, we don’t want Western intervention. At least I don’t want Western
intervention. I think the best role that the West could play would be to
stay out of Syria, and to use its influence to call on other powers to stay
out of Syria--primarily Russia and Iran, who have been the main outside
powers that are interfering and that have contributed to a massive worsening
of the situation on the ground.
"Even so-called progressive voices on the left, generally out of ignorance
of the Arab and Muslim world, and an orientalist laziness, haven’t felt the
need to study specific political decisions that were made to manipulate
sectarian fears, and instead they rely on old orientalist tropes like, ‘Oh,
those people, it’s in their blood, that’s the way they’ve always been.’"
Chuck Mertz: Robin, you write about the making of modern day Syria’s
borders by the post-WWI European powers. The reason I want to bring this up
is a lot of people point to the Sykes-Picot agreement as the reason that
there are so many problems within the Middle East.
You write, "To some extent, the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the
Lebanese civil wars, and the current chronic instability in Iraq and Syria
can be traced to this early twentieth century bout of imperialist map-making
and sectarian engineering.
"The Kurds, split between Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, inherited no state
whatsoever from the ruins of Ottomanism. The Arabs were embittered by the
imposition of many states. For Syrians in particular, the dismemberment of
Bilad al-Sham was a primal trauma. Because the truncated post-colonial state
had no historical legitimacy, Syrians tended to affirm either more local
identities or super-state allegiances to Bilad al-Sham or the Arab nation or
the global Islamic community."
So was Syria never sustainable given those limitations from the post-WWI
roots?
Robin Yassin-Kassab: I think it was, because all states, everywhere in the
world, are artificial--people refer to them as "imagined communities." Every
country has had borders drawn around it in strange circumstances, and there
are very different groups of people thrown together who, if it works, over
time, they grow to feel a sense of common belonging. And I think that was
happening in Syria. It did happen. There was a Syrian identity. And there
still is, although it’s under great strain at the moment with the sectarian
and ethnic polarizations which war has brought about.
"I’m Syrian. I called for freedom. I was killed twice. Once in the name of
the nation, once in the name of religion."
There’s nothing sacred about Sykes-Picot borders at all. I mean, they’re not
great borders; they weren’t drawn by the locals, they were drawn by British
and French imperialists. And so some people are saying we should carve up
Syria again, into different zones of influence. But one thing that almost
every Syrian agrees on--whether they are pro- or anti-regime, and with the
exception of some Kurds--is that they don’t want another partition. They don’t
want the country to be carved up.
Some people are talking about it rather ignorantly, as if there’s one area
of the country which is Alawi, and one area which is Sunni, and you can draw
a line between them. But Syria doesn’t look like that. On the coast, which
is often presented as the Alawi heartland, there are lots and lots of Sunnis
living in the cities there. There are lots of Alawis living in Damascus and
Homs. There are lots and lots of Christians living in the Jazira, in the
east of the country, which at the moment, unfortunately, is controlled by
ISIS. And people intermarry, and people work together, and people eat
together. Nobody wants a carve-up.
If the borders are going to be altered, we would hope they would be altered
in a more positive way, and certainly not in some sectarian way under the
aegis of Russia or Iran or groups like the Islamic State with their narrow
sectarian or power-based ideologies. This kind of partition would result in
an ethnic cleansing on a scale greater than we’ve seen in the last five
years.
Chuck Mertz: Leila, as you know, Bashar Al Assad tried to exploit
sectarianism in his control of the Syrian people. You write, "Between ISIS
and the Assadist-Iranian partition scenario, Syria is now witnessing
sectarian engineering far worse than any under the French."
How did the revolution resist sectarianism? How did they bring all of these
sects together under one revolution? What is hammered into our heads over
and over again, Leila, is that these different sects have been at each other’s
throats for millenia, that it’s innate sectarianism that is tearing apart
the Middle East.
How did the Syrian revolution overcome that sectarianism?
Leila Al Shami: You’re absolutely right. People often say that the
sectarian tensions that we’re seeing now in Syria are the result of millenia
of struggle. But that obviously doesn’t tell the story, because over many
periods of history people have coexisted and lived together without any
problem. But sectarianism has risen at certain key points as a result of
power politics and how sectarian tensions have been manipulated to create
conflict between communities, often for divide-and-rule purposes.
And as you said, when people rose up in 2011, it was a non-sectarian
movement. People from all of Syria’s ethnic and religious communities
participated in that movement. But now we’re in a situation where
communities are often against each other and there’s great tension between
communities. That’s not because over the past five years the main
theological texts in Syria have suddenly changed. It’s because sectarian
tensions have been manipulated by the regime.
For example, in the early months and years of the revolution and subsequent
war, the Assad regime sent primarily Alawi militias into Sunni communities
to carry out massacres. Men, women, and children had their throats slit.
This contributed to resentments between the communities, and minority
communities often became loyal to the regime for protection, because they
feared reprisals.
Another aspect of the increase in sectarianism has of course been Iran’s
intervention. When a Shi’a, non-Arab power intervenes on a massive scale in
Syria to support the regime against a predominantly Arab and predominantly
Sunni population, of course people who give the conflict a sectarian reading
see this as a Shi’a power against Sunnis.
So I think it’s very important not to fall into the trap of thinking that
sectarian tensions have always existed in Syria, but rather to look at why
sectarian tensions have risen in key moments of history, as a result of
power politics and manipulation.
"Whenever a civilian community is subjected to full-scale military assault,
whoever the community is, they have a right to seek weapons to defend
themselves from wherever they can get them from."
Robin Yassin-Kassab: I would just add to that, if I could, that we should
remember that in the early months of the revolution, the regime, in a
so-called "prison amnesty," released 1,500 prisoners from its prisons (this
is at the same time that it was rounding up tens of thousands of nonviolent,
non-sectarian, peaceful protesters for indefinite detention and for torture,
and sometimes just to kill them). It released 1,500 people--the vast
majority of those prisoners were Salafist jihadists who the Syrian
government had helped to go to Iraq during the American occupation; they
fought the Americans, but more to the point, they helped to precipitate a
sectarian civil war in Iraq. When the survivors among those jihadists came
back to Syria, they were arrested, put in prison, and they were kept there
until 2011, when they were all released.
And these included leaders of Islamist militias like Ahrar ash-Sham and
Jaysh al-Islam, and many high-up people in the Islamic State and Jabhat
al-Nusra. High-level [Syrian military] defectors say that it went beyond
that, that in some cases there was even logistical help for these groups
from the regime. And this was done to promote the Islamist-jihadist
bogeyman, to terrify religious minorities in Syria, and more to the point,
to terrify Western powers: "The choice is between me, wearing a tie, and
these mad people who want to kill you in America and Europe."
Of course, that isn’t the choice. But this is what’s being presented, and it’s
working very well. And sadly, even so-called progressive voices on the
left--generally out of ignorance of the Arab and Muslim world, and a kind of
orientalist laziness--haven’t felt the need to study these specific
political decisions that were made to manipulate sectarian fears, and
instead they just rely on old orientalist tropes like, "Oh, those people, it’s
in their blood, that’s the way they’ve always been."
And it’s not true. In Iraq, for example: before 2003, a third of marriages
were cross-sect Sunni-Shi’a, which is quite a high number. It wasn’t a big
issue. And then suddenly, as Leila said, it became a big issue. Not because
the religious texts changed; not because the people’s DNA changed, but
because of politics.
Chuck Mertz: Leila, you write about the peaceful revolution that began in
2011, and still exists today, with its local coordinating committees and
this type of democracy. Is the nonviolent nature of that revolution a direct
response to the level of violence Syrians have experienced under Assad? Is
this a war for nonviolence, in a sense?
Leila Al Shami: Well, certainly. I think all Syrians want to be in a
situation where the violence ends. The civil resistance in Syria has been a
nonviolent resistance movement, both in the way people are coming out into
the streets, carrying out peaceful protests, as well as the way people are
organizing their communities. Now in Syria there are hundreds of local
councils which have been established in liberated areas where people are
self-organizing and practicing democracy. Most of these councils have been
democratically elected or chosen through popular consensus. People are
coming together, practicing mutual aid and solidarity, trying to find
solutions to the problems that they face, trying to keep basic services
operating in very difficult circumstances: to try and keep electricity,
water supply, and garbage disposal operating.
So yes, people want to live their lives in peace. That’s a natural human
desire, I think. And yes, it is a response to the fact that people have seen
the way the state has monopolized violence for decades, and they now want a
different system. They want a system where they can participate; they want a
system where they can live in peace with their neighbors.
But of course violence and militarization has also been a response to the
violence of the state. Because when the regime applied gunfire against
peaceful protesters, when it started bombing civilian communities, when it
carried out mass rape campaigns--going into oppositional communities and
raping men, women, and children--people took up arms because they felt that
they needed to defend themselves from the violence of the state.
But what we have seen, as I mentioned previously, is that with the reduction
in hostilities there has been a visible revival of civil activism in Syria,
and of people’s commitment once again to nonviolent struggle.
But we must remember that although this visibility of the protest movement
is something we haven’t seen for a while, nonviolent civil activism has been
continuing in Syria throughout the militarization. It hasn’t disappeared, it
just hasn’t been so visible.
Chuck Mertz: Robin, you write, "Abstract criticisms of the revolution’s
militarization miss the point. Syria’s revolutionaries didn’t make a formal
collective decision to pick up arms. Quite the opposite. Rather, a million
individual decisions were made under fire. In this sense, the militarization
was inevitable, and once it had become an undeniable reality, most civil
revolutionaries sought to adapt. Some, in the face of the regime’s
persistence, rethought their nonviolent principles."
You also add, "Militarization was not solely a natural human response to
regime brutality, it also grew from the logical realization that civil
resistance was not enough, that the regime would only go if forced."
So was nonviolence abandoned for violence? And does nonviolence, in that
sense, fall short in the face of extreme violence?
Robin Yassin-Kassab: Yeah, it’s a very sad situation. If we look at what
local coordination committees and other revolutionary bodies were saying in
late 2011 and early 2012, they were releasing statements saying they could
understand why people are picking up weapons, but they were basically
begging people not to. Because of course it is, in the abstract, a mistake.
And a lot of the people who picked up weapons knew it was a mistake as they
were picking up weapons. Violence alienates certain key constituencies who
the revolution needs to win over. It scares foreign powers; it scares the
West, and makes them more likely to stick with Assad--which is why he
provoked it.
And of course the Assad regime has a lot more weapons than the people. And
the Assad regime has received a massive and constant supply of weaponry and
funds from Iran and Russia and others, unlike the people. So when it comes
to a military fight, what the people have got on their side is that they’re
in the majority, and that they’re defending themselves in their own
neighborhoods. But militarily they’re completely and totally outgunned.
What they needed, when they came under sustained military attack by the
state, was anti-aircraft weapons. Because the thing which has been most
important in creating the scorched Earth and the vacuum into which
international jihadists could jump, was aerial bombardment: the barrel
bombs, and also the Scud missiles and all that. These civilian communities
needed anti-aircraft weapons to defend themselves.
And the idea that the Americans have been arming the revolution is absurd,
because the most significant thing the Americans have done, militarily, is
to veto other people from sending in anti-aircraft weapons, when that’s the
one thing that would have made a difference. We wouldn’t have half the
population homeless, or have a huge refugee crisis in the neighboring states
and in Europe, if the people had been able to defend themselves from aerial
bombardment.
The Americans vetoed that. The CIA was down at the Turkish border to make
sure that the Saudis and the Qataris and the Turks didn’t send these weapons
in. Of course the Saudis, the Qataris, and the Turks are not interested in
democracy in Syria, either. They’re doing it for their own geopolitical
reasons, for their own chess game with other states. But nevertheless, I
think that whenever a civilian community is subjected to full-scale military
assault, whoever the community is, they have a right to seek weapons to
defend themselves from wherever they can get them from.
Chuck Mertz: So are there "good guys" to arm? It seems like the only
solution that the United States is ever willing to offer, in any foreign
policy issue, is a military option. Who should we be arming?
Robin Yassin-Kassab: If America doesn’t want to arm people in Syria, then
that’s fine, it doesn’t have to. It should really keep out of it--and stop
vetoing other people from arming the Free Army. One of the excuses for not
allowing sufficient and suitable weapons for the people to defend themselves
was that maybe some of these weapons will get into the hands of jihadists,
and that will be a problem for everybody. Well, I could see that argument in
2011 through 2012, but here we are in 2016 and groups like ISIS have become
dominant precisely because the democratic nationalists, the decent defectors
from the national army, were not armed.
Because those people weren’t able to arm themselves sufficiently, other
actors came in, and people started turning to them. There are foot soldiers
even in Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda franchise, who are not committed to
al-Qaeda’s ideology; they’ve joined up simply because they can get a weapons
supply, and they can get food, and they can get a small salary to send to
their family in a refugee camp.
There are tens of thousands of Syrians fighting who are non-ideological.
They have no aim other than to defend their communities from this attack,
and, once the regime is gone, to allow the Syrian people through some kind
of process to decide what comes next. Those people exist, and it’s really
hideous racism and orientalism to imagine that every Syrian fighting is a
mad jihadist. They are not, by no means. As Leila said, there are over 400
democratic, self-organized local councils and provincial councils in Syria
practicing democracy.
Supposedly, Arab democracy was so important to Britain and America in the
last decade that they occupied Iraq and made a war supposedly to bring the
Arabs democracy. And here in Syria today, there are Arabs doing democracy
themselves, and we don’t even know about it, let alone support it.
Leila Al Shami: The US doesn’t need to support democracy in Syria, because
the fact is that the Syrian people themselves are organizing and practicing
democracy already--and in these circumstances. And as Robin said, the US has
played a largely negative role, stopping arms getting to people who are
trying to defend their communities from assault.
Chuck Mertz: Leila and Robin, I really appreciate you being on the show
with us this week. This is a fascinating book. If our listeners want to know
what is happening within Syria at this moment and what has happened not only
over the last five years but the last fifteen years, they should read your
book. Thank you so much for your insight today.
Leila Al Shami: Thanks for having us.