'Unfolding The Syrian Paradox'

Although the link to this article by Alastair Crooke is featured in one of my latest posts, I wanted to highlight the article again for it offers one of the most complete analysis on what is happening in Syria now as well as revealing the nature of the Syrian revolution 2011.

Can Syria properly be understood as an example of a "pure" Arab popular revolution, an uprising of non-violent, liberal protest against tyranny that has been met only by repression? I believe this narrative to be a complete misreading, deliberately contrived to serve quite separate ambitions. The consequences of turning a blind eye to the reality of what is happening in Syria entails huge risk: the potential of sectarian conflict that would not be confined to Syria alone. 

One of the problems with unfolding the Syria paradox is that there is indeed a genuine, domestic demand for change. A huge majority of Syrians want reform. They feel the claustrophobia of the state's inert heavy-handedness and of the bureaucracy's haughty indifference toward their daily trials and tribulations. Syrians resent the pervasive corruption, and the arbitrary tentacles of the security authorities intruding into most areas of daily life. But is the widespread demand for reform itself the explanation for the violence in Syria, as many claim? 

There is this mass demand for reform. But paradoxically - and contrary to the "awakening" narrative - most Syrians also believe that President Bashar al-Assad shares their conviction for reform. The populations of Damascus, Aleppo, the middle class, the merchant class, and non-Sunni minorities (who amount to one quarter of the population), among others, including the leadership of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, fall into this category. They also believe there is no credible "other" that could bring reform. 

What then is going on? Why has the conflict become so polarized and bitter, if there is indeed such broad consensus? More here

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Neocons wishing for a Ramadan sectarian bloodbath in Syria! (via FLC)

Crooke is right about western funded Syrian exiles using salafis in the Syrian revolution 2011 but ultimately salafis also will use exiles. Here is a facebook page for the Homs revolution: on the upper right band they have a sourate in Arabic, it says: 'Paradise exists in the shadow of the sword' (attention, islamist facebook pages of the Syrian revolution in english or other non arabic languages do not show material that can offend western readers).
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Making peace with the Talibans

Britain and the United States are pressing for United Nations sanctions against 18 former senior Taliban figures to be lifted later this month in the strongest indication yet that the western powers are looking for a negotiated peace with the Taliban.

Candidates include the controversial former head of the regime's religious police, Mohammed Qalamuddin, whose officers were responsible for some of the worst atrocities under the Taliban regime.

The US and UK have strained economies and they cannot wage wars in different parts of the world. This was an expected measure after the killing of Osama Bin Laden because they could not just walk out from Afghanistan without killing Bin laden.

But what will happen with the sunni militants if the US and NATO will leave Afghanistan? They will probably be unleashed in the coming sectarian civil wars between Sunnis and Shias that the US and its two regional allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, have been cooking for a while now in the ME.

Lebanon: Elusive Peace and Despair

Next year, I will be 50. I was born the year Fouad Chehab ended the pro-western pro-US Chamoun presidency to rally all sects in Lebanon around a certain idea of neutrality between pro-western (mostly Christian tribal leaders at the time) and Pan Arabist (mostly sunni tribal leaders at the time) elements in the Lebanese society. I have a clear memory from my childhood, that of soldiers appearing around our village house while my younger brother and I were playing outside. I was terrified. My brother started crying loud and my mother came out. The soldiers explained they were looking for fugitives. And then from their pockets, they pulled some sweets and gave them to my brother. That was enough to calm him down.
Long after, I will learn from my parents that the incident happened in 1962, few months after a failed coup was attempted in early 1962 by members of the Syrian Nationalist Party on the presidency of Fouad Chehab.

With this childhood memory, another one is still vivid. It is about a dream I would make repetitively. I always wonder if I had started making this dream before this encounter with the soldiers or after. In my dream, I would wake up during the night while my parents and the whole village were sleeping. I would go to my grand'parents' and walk past their house in the empty street as if expecting something. And suddenly the road before me would open, a riffle would rise ripping off the asphalt. At this sight, I would run to our house, voiceless and breathless, and wake up in my bed sweating and crying.

Nearly more than a decade after this dream started to haunt my nights, I witnessed the ugliness of the civil war as a teenager within my own community and the savagery applied on other rival communities and sects during seven whole years between 1975 and 1982. I left Lebanon, not before loosing my mother to illness and depression and seeing the rest of my family shattered on three continents. I had my own family and children, forgot about Lebanon, only on the surface. I couldn't for example listen to Arabic music, Fayrouz, or any other music I used to listen to when I was a young person growing up in Lebanon, without breaking into tears. I was always postponing a visit to Lebanon after the country was pacified, inventing excuses to my husband and grown up children who are from another country and had never visited. Until 2005. The events that unfolded in 2005 led me to think that the fragile equilibrium that was prevailing in the country was going to be shattered again. I opened up to my husband and told him about my fears and at the same time about what I thought was maybe our last chance to visit the country with the children in 'normal' times. He was kind enough to suggest approaching Lebanon from a distance, slowly, and with a perspective. We visited that summer Cyprus for one week, Syria for another week, before arriving to Baalbeck in the Bekaa and witnessing the 5kms stretch of trucks delayed at the border between Syria and Lebanon. We stayed the first night awake on the roof of the Palmyra hotel in Baalbeck admiring the Roman ruins by night. The hotel concierge told me that Fayrouz used to stay on the roof admiring the ruins the night before performing at the Baalbeck festival.

I was welcome in Syria. While the Syrian workers were persecuted in Lebanon, the Syrian people, wherever I went, gave me a warm welcome. While visiting the Omeyyade Mosque in Damascus, the man at the door who lends 'abayas to women to cover themselves in the mosque asked from where I come. I answered worried: 'I am from Lebanon but I live in Canada'. And he kindly said: 'welcome our sister' and refused that I pay the price paid by foreign tourists for the 'abayas. In comparison, at Beyrouth airport, when leaving, the woman at the flight registration desk remarked with an air of disgust that we had been to Syria before Lebanon.

In 12 days, we drove Lebanon from north to south, from Bcharré to Qana and the southern border, taking all the small roads and totalling some 6000 kms in a country of 200kms long and 80 kms, at most, large. I arrived to my village unannounced. I walked to my grand'parents'. The door was open, as in most village houses. My aunt came to the door and asked who we were. I said: I am your niece. We embraced while my husband and children were behind, crying. I visited our empty house in the village, gathered some old pictures, talked with neighbours and old friends, took a walk to the olive orchards, trecked deep in the Qadisha valley, drove among crazy Lebanese drivers, bathed in the sea near Tyre, sampled baklavas at major Lebanese pastry stores in Tripoli and Saida, ate Falafel in Saida's souk, slept on the sound of the nearby prayer of the muezzin, walked one day in the ugly Beyrouth downtown, ultrarenovated as to erase the memory of any past or future wars.

The visit was like a therapy for me. But when I returned I started to be obsessed with the security situation in Lebanon, not being able to pass a day without looking at the news from there. And as the news from there were becoming more and more alarming, culminating in the 2006 Israeli agression on the country, I started to despair, and I am still in this mood. And while the lebanese army is pounding now in the north a Palestinian camp emptied of half of its inhabitants and 'equipped' by the Hariri family with some few hundred islamist militants, on orders of the Sanyura government trying to distract from crucial issues in Lebanon, exactly as Al-Qaida serves as a useful distractor for the internal political goals of western governments in power, not in a war of attrition, but in a divisive war of rallying and regrouping different communities around resentment, like what is happening in Iraq, Lebanon is commemorating the 'Second Israeli War' and the second major Israeli agression which rallied its citizens for the duration of the agression across the sectarian divide.

For the time being, and this time seems to last forever, I have adopted a substitute to Lebanon. I went vacationing in Turkey (and partly in Greece) this summer, and will do so often, until of course Turkey also will be reached by the neo-con destabilising and debilitating enterprise for a new middle east and a new century.

There is only one word to describe my hopes for Lebanon and what I think of its political tribal elite and their followers: Despair. And I apologise before my Lebanese friends and parents for my pessimism.

Fear and fragile peace

A son waits to join Hizbullah to avenge shattered family

Bint Jbeil in pictures one year later.

Some background on the Israeli invasions of south Lebanon. The article dates from 1999 but gives a perspective much needed since everything today has been formatted within the new 9/11 explanation framework while dismissing the rest, the rest is history for the US and Israel and much of the western world, but history matters when we need to analyse conflicts.

Olmert, Peretz, and their generals, would have benefited from reading this article published in 2004 in the Daily Star, before launching the 2006 agression against Lebanon.

Lebanon: Sectarian Tensions are being exacerbated to hide an Ailing Economy and a Failed Governance

I read an interesting analysis posted at Loubnan Ya Loubnan on the state of the lebanese debt and economy and it gave me some ammunitions because I have been arguing, since the beginning of the recent escalation, that although Lebanese society is sectarian and sectarian tensions seem to be behind most of the invectives between supporters and opponents to the Sanyura government, the real tension stems from the new economic deal that was designed for lebanon by Hariri. The New Lebanese economy built after the Taif accords sponsored by Saudi Arabia, which ended the civil war in lebanon and litterally officialised the Syrian grip on the country, was not meant to profit all Lebanese but only a clique, those who were in power ever since Taif, Hariri, The Lebanese Forces, and Co. Thus, the present political confrontation will not die because there is wealth and there are privileges at stake if the present political clique were to be replaced, or at least immobilised by the opposition.

The article referenced above highlights, on the basis of figures, academic work and expert opinions (among them, Charbel Nahhas, Georges Corm and Alain Gresh), the source of the economic debt, and traces it back to Hariri days in office as well as his finance minister and present PM Sanyura. Although the civil war left lebanon in a dire economic situation, the article argues that the debt increased rapidly with the reconstruction projects that were to profit the new political elite, or former fighting militia, pacified from civil war by the promises of fresh money and a large scale theft of Lebanon's financial resources. It is this theft that is responsible for Lebanon's debt, a debt that is the burden of the Lebanese people now. In other terms, the present political elite, headed by Hariri, heavily borrowed, heavily stole money that was destined for reconstruction, and is now, not only asking Lebanese to make sacrifices to reduce the debt, but also asking them to shut up because if they protest there will be no more money and no more borrowing. This is a vicious cycle which makes me think that Lebanon is the new Banana republic on the world stage heading to a total collapse of an economy, otherwise traditionally healthy, thanks to the dishonesty and the greed of its western backed rulers.

I am not surprised to realise that the theft of government resources was in fact brought to us by the Saudi mentored government of Hariri. This practice is routine in Saudi Arabia, a country with so much wealth, concentrated within the few who are related to the ruling family, and so little development for its own people, a country where the ruling family taxes the country's revenues at the level of 40%, money that goes in the pockets of the royal family members and not in the coffers of the state. The practice of stealing the revenues of the country was not installed on a tabula rasa in matters of corruption. Lebanon was known, even before the war, for the corruption of its state apparatus but the new economic and political landscape created by Hariri, in the middle of the Syrian occupation years, were to bring theft and corruption to new highs, never reached before. I will not be surprised to see, if there will be a conclusion to the UN report on the death of Hariri, a 'business' motive for his murder which prompted a chain reaction of other assassinations, every one of them destined to cloud further the investigation into the motives of the former and to discard any possible suspicion for motives other than the one who were invented as a storyline and distributed to the press by the March 14th movement, the movement of Sanyura, Hariri, Jumblatt, and the Lebanese Forces.

In the present regional situation, armed confrontation in Lebanon is not suitable. Lebanese should then seize this opportunity to start looking at themselves and at what divides them critically and not fall into the sectarian trap. They have fallen in it in the past and it brought them 15 years of civil war, misery and hell. But resisting a civil war does not mean that we should accept the present state of things as imposed on us by the Sanyura government, we should not accept to be ruled by a dishonest minority, we should not accpet to look at war criminals mutated into statesmen dictate what we should do and think, we should not accept foreign interference, not only Syria and Iran, which are minor when compared to the interference of Sanyura's buddies, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the US in order to change things in Lebanon to their liking.

I am a Christian maronite and I grew up in a multireligious community made of Sunnis and Greek Orthodox. As during the height of the civil war, I still believe that sectarianism is never the cause of what is happening in Lebanon, in Iraq, and even in Gaza. It is only a mean to achieve something else, it is a mean to terrorise people in their own communities by silencing the voices of moderation and reason so the incompetence, corruption and the theft of our rulers go unnoticed. Every time an extremist slogan is shouted, there are ten moderate voices unheard. Extremism eventually creates a state of fear inside a community because not adhering to the rules of the community is to become unprotected, not recognised by the other community, and rejected by his own. What is happening in Lebanon, as in other corrupted governments in the ME, is that the political elite refuses to serve the country, no matter its religion or political affiliation, uses sectarianism to create a state of fear helping to rally people around them and to divert their attention from the real problems of the country and from their bad governance. The political elite in many countries in the ME, and Lebanon is no exception, sees power as a way to enrich itself at the expense of the country and its people. Lebanese illness is not sectarianism, it is feodalism, or the contempt of the ruling elite for its people. I have seen young, smart and educated people in Lebanon desperate because the country is unable to offer them jobs, let alone qualified jobs. Lebanese 'economy' after the civil war was built to suit the rich and powerful, to make of Lebanon, the whole country, a source of income for its political elite, and Lebanon became, under the Hariri rule, a whore country that offered itself to anybody (Israel, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and is now sleeping with the neocons doctrine) who is willing to help maintain the political elite in place and keep the cash flowing into its pockets while the country 's economy was left rotting and dying...This is the kind of governance the US has been praising and encouraging for years and now implementing under the Bush doctrine and at the expense of US national security and the well being of US's inhabitants drafted to wage colonial wars disguised under th banner of 'democracy and freedom'...

Can anybody show me an ounce of patriotism and good governance among the members of the Sanyura government ? These people are only good at political and sectarian agitation and rethoric destined to feed the neocon hubris. But this will not last and the neocons will be history in 2008 and Lebanon will be forgotten again...having to offer itself to a less glamorous master...

Some facts about Lebanon published the day Rafiq Hariri died:
Population: 3.7 million
Life expectancy: 72 years
GDP: $17.8bn (£9.4bn) in 2003
GDP per head: $4,800 a year
28% of Lebanese below the poverty line
Source for the above: CIA World Factbook
There are now 65 Billion dollars in Lebanese banks in private accounts and the central bank has 10 billions. 72% of private accounts reflect only 4,3% of the total volume of money deposits while 9,2% of private accounts possess 82,7% of total money deposits. In other words, there is money in Lebanon but it is not for everyone and certainly not for the state, it is only for the privileged few.