Filipinos and Czechs, among others, toppled dictatorships through non-violent revolts. People Power in 1986 and Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Uprising of 1989 installed democratic governments without bloodshed.
In India’s Salt Tax protest of 1930, the venerated Mohandas Ghandi and demonstrators marched to the sea coast, protesting against colonial rule. Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution drove out Syrian occupiers.
Sandwiched between Lebanon and Turkey, the Syrian Arab Republic is a strategic country. “You can’t make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria,” former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger wrote. Now, Syria is twisting within the vortex of an international crisis
There are 22.5 million Syrians. Most are youngsters. Median age is 22 years. Sunnis make up 74 percent of the population. Other Muslim branches account for 16 percent, Christians are a 10-percent sliver. The nation houses 1.5 million Iraqi and Palestenian refugees.
Since March, Syrians have marched seeking freedoms that Filipinos, since Edsa I, take for granted. They’ve waged People Power rallies, often at the end of mosque Friday prayers. “Students are the most vocal demographic in these protests.”
Damascus’ response has been exceptionally brutal, even by Middle Eastern feudal standards. President Bashar al-Assad and his embedded autocracy have wielded total power for over four decades. The regime unleashed tanks, troops and snipers on the people.
Ten of thousands have been detained. The death toll on civilians now exceeds 1,650—and is still rising. The massive slaughter is blanketed by North Korean- style censorship. Only state TV broadcasts propaganda. Phones are dead. Facebook and YouTube are verboten and foreign journalists banned.
End immediately “the use of troops against civilian protesters,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon urged Assad. “Stop mass arrests of protesters” and let in humanitarian agencies. Bonn, Paris and Washington ratcheted the pressure by lashing again Assad’s use of force and drafting “new sanctions.”
But the most stinging slaps for Assad’s regime were delivered by Moscow, a traditional ally, and the Middle East’s heavyweight, Saudi Arabia.
If Assad does not stop the killing and “urgently launch reforms, a sad fate awaits him,” Dimitry Medvedev, the Russian president predicted. We will also be forced to ultimately take some decisions on Syria.
“End the death machine and bloodshed,” Saudi Arabia’s King Abudallah demanded in a blunt statement broadcast by al-Arabiya television across the Middle East. The monarch called “for acts of wisdom before it is too late… Either it (Syria) chooses wisdom on its own or it will be pulled down into the depths of turmoil and loss.”
The Saudi king’s statement capped a week that saw the muzzled 22-member Arab League and six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council rediscover their tongues. Enough of the blood-letting, both groups demanded. They lashed Damascus’ “excessive use of force.”
As we go to press, the news from Syria is that troops continue to quell protestors in the town of Deir al-Zour. Is Bashar al-Assad listening? Or has he already blundered beyond a “point of no return?” Is Syria now in free fall?
Assad presides over institutions created during 30 years of his father’s dictatorial rule He has little wiggle room. Even if he wanted reforms—which is debatable—the old guard has invariably opted for violence
There is, too, the once-unimaginable spectacle of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak in a hospital bed to face trial. That unnerves Assad, as it does autocrats from North Africa and Arab states.
Syria could well plunge into civil war. That’d unlock old ethnic and sectarian tensions, cautions Ali Khan of Cambridge University. “The result may follow the Libyan scenario rather than the Egyptian or Tunisian model.”
“So what happened to the Arab spring?” asked Sydney Morning Herald journalist Paul McGeough. Middle East elections and revolts led commentators to welcome the Arab spring—about 160 of them, according to one news database. “(With today’s ) results, it seems we don’t like the term anymore—only 23 mentions in the past six months. Funny that.”
“Given Syria’s geographical peg, a civil war could spiral into a proxy battle fought by regional powers like Saudi Arabia versus Iran,” Washington Post fears. The collapse of Syria’s Shiite rulers would give rise to a new Sunni state along Iraq’s long western border.
Iran would lose its only Arab ally. Instability in Syria is virtually guaranteed to exacerbate sectarian divides in Lebanon. The big question, as always, is how will a tough Israel react?
People Power has been aptly called the “post-modern coup d’etat.” “But not all popular golpes have happy endings” Viewpoint noted earlier.
The Uzbekistan revolt over rigged polls was brutally crushed. Before that, China’s commissars crushed the Tiannamen Square demonstrations. The outcomes of Tunisia’s “Jasmine Revolt” and Burma’s “Saffron Uprising” were different.
“The Tunisian Army did not fire on the people,” Nobel Laureate Daw Aung Saan Suu Kyi told the BBC’s 2011 Reith Lectures. “The Burmese Army did.” So did the Syrian military. Moammar Ghadaffi’s soldiers did likewise in their shrunken Libyan enclaves.
In contrast, People Power here saw teenagers place flowers into the gun barrels lofted by befuddled Marines. No wonder our hearts go out to Syrians in the streets.