Syria TMS article by Dr Chandra Muzaffar March 2021

TMS = Transcend Media Network, a weekly collection and analysis of “peace journalism” articles that offer a different view of the world to that found in Western media which mostly promote “conventional wisdom” – meaning too often that the media repeat without critical analysis the version of international events that NATO governments want us the hear and believe.

Transcend is a collective of peace academics, founded by Professor Johann Galtung, the Father of Peace Studies. I am proud to be a member. We seek the truth: not simply repeating things, but analyzing what we hear and confronting facts with what we have discovered through our cumulative centuries of experiences. Here I offer an article about Syria’s destruction, written by an Indian academic, Dr Chandra Muzaffar: Syria: The Price of Resistance.

REP’s personal comment:

Dr Muzaffar is completely correct in his critical analysis of Western policy, which has proved disastrous for Iraq and Syria. Syria’s civil war can only be understood through the prism of Iraq and the destructive and nonsensical “Shock and Awe” delivered by George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in 2001. Subsequent political meddling by Hillary Clinton, William Hague, Laurent Fabius and other NATO leaders has been counter-productive, and frankly naïve.

Much more intelligent has been the advice of Sergeï Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister. If we had followed Lavrov’s approach we might have avoided all the tragic chaos – and the millions of Syrian refugees - we have created. None of the Western media tells the full story of the Daraa uprising. They are filled with hatred for the ophthalmologist Dr Bashar al-Assad, who is the reluctant leader of the Alawite tribe. Journalists use the label “Butcher of Damascus” – itself a slogan of naïveté. Once war begins, both sides kill.

That is why we start from a position that we try to make and keep peace. Western commentators misread the politics of the Middle East when they base their reporting on State structures that were created only in the 1920s (by France and Britain), instead of talking about the people who live in these artificial political creations. Is democracy useful for a tribal society? Experience suggests not.

Back to Daraa. On March 6th 2011 "Children who painted graffiti were arrested and tortured" is what we hear; and the Bashar regime certainly mishandled the moment. But that is not the most important moment. The following Friday, men poured out of the Sunni mosques chanting "Christians to Beirut and Alawites to the cemetery." Soon afterwards, Sunni rebels in Syria were firing weapons and ammunition and claiming to be a "Free Syrian Army."

Where did the weapons come from? This was not a revolt by children, but a deliberate Sunni plot orchestrated from outside Syria and threatening an Alawite genocide. Al-Qaida look-alikes consider the Alawite Shia minority as apostates: therefore they should be killed. Of course Bashar resisted genocide! History will recount that Russia avoided the Alawite genocide that America was supporting. When George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2001, the Sunnis lost power. After dominating a minority dictatorship led by Saddam Hussein, naturally the Sunni tribes sought power elsewhere. In places where demography = democracy and tribal loyalties dominate over ideas, democratic elections do not promote peace and stability.

Is a tyranny of the majority preferable to minority rule? In Syria, the Sunni majority was ruled by the Alawite minority. In Iraq where the opposite had been true, the Sunni minority found it hard to accept a Shia regime in Iraq after the American invasion. With Iraqi ‘democratic’ elections, the Shias will always hold power because they are more numerous. Syria was the fruit the Sunnis wanted to pluck. Sunnis ran this part of the world for 500 years under the Ottoman Empire. By overthrowing the Sunni regime in Iraq, America and Britain (remember Tony Blair, Mr Bush's poodle?) and their NATO allies have opened tribal rivalries, fomenting war and refugees. NATO’s allies in the region are rivals trying to take control of Sunni Islam. Saudi Arabia, UAE, Turkey, Qatar - and Israel which tries to control all of them - have succeeded in destroying peaceful, pleasant, tolerant Syria. All these States are police states. Bashar’s was a strictly-controlled but multi-cultural dictatorship, that has been transformed into a wasteland.

Read Dr Muzaffar’s article below, or go to the original: https://www.transcend.org/tms/2021/03/syria-the-price-of-resistance/comment-page-1/#comment-93650

A funeral in Daraa in May 2011, the southern town where the Syrian uprising began. Predictably, the Alawite regime was fighting back. Syria’s civil war had begun. AFP Photo

Syria: The Price of Resistance, 22 Mar 2021 Dr. Chandra Muzaffar

JUST - TRANSCEND Media Service

20 Mar 2021 - Few nations in recent decades have been targeted by a superpower the way the United States of America has subjected Syria to various forms of attack. Apart from military assaults and acts of political subversion aimed at overthrowing the government in Damascus, the US has also imposed crippling economic sanctions upon Syria, sometimes regarded as the crucible of human civilization.

These sanctions, which intensified in the last few years, have impacted adversely upon a huge segment of the population. They culminated in the Caesar Act of 2020 which prohibits any country or entity from engaging in any economic activity with any firm or institution in Syria. For transgressing the Act, the violating party can also be subjected to punitive action by the U.S.

The wide-ranging sanctions would be one of the primary causes of the humanitarian crisis confronting the Syrian people today. Many of them are in dire need of the essentials of life. Making ends meet has become a major challenge for even the middle-class. It must be emphasized that before the mainly orchestrated unrest beginning in 2011, the government was able to provide for the basic needs of the population and managed one of the best-run health services in West Asia and North Africa (WANA) that provided free medical care to the poor and marginalized.

Yet the mainstream Western media which is echoed by the media in most parts of the world has created the erroneous impression that the humanitarian crisis in Syria is due entirely to the mismanagement and corruption of the Bashar Assad government. While there are acts of omission and commission for which the government should be held responsible, they pale into insignificance compared to the intervention and manipulation by the US elite, Israel and their allies, such as Britain and France and those in WANA (West Asia North Africa). The unjust imposition of sanctions aside, these actors from the West and WANA are also guilty of engineering a sectarian war between the Sunni majority and the Shia minority which failed miserably and of sponsoring terrorist groups such as ISIS that caused death and destruction on a massive scale between 2011 and 2017.

This picture shows what happens when civil war breaks out in this era of bombs and explosive artillery shells. Daraa in the south of Syria, was one of the first areas occupied by Sunni forces in 2011, and one of the last to be retaken by the Alawite regime in 2018. Photo AFP.

These organised and well-funded terrorist groups were defeated by the cohesive strength of the Bashar government and its security forces buttressed by the determined support provided by the Hezbollah, Iran and Russia. On top of all this, Syria’s economy has also been robbed of millions of dollars by the systematic U.S. theft of its oil in the north east of the country, which is under opposition control. The truth about this theft, or about how sanctions, war and terrorism have contributed to the immense suffering of the Syrian people and the current humanitarian crisis has not been highlighted in the media but it is a reality that the Syrians a are painfully aware of.

The media has also distorted the first bombing of the Biden administration on 25th February 2021 against a militia in Syria allegedly backed by Iran. Most newspapers and television networks claimed that the bombing was in retaliation to a February 15th rocket attack in northern Iraq by that Syrian militia which killed a contractor working with the U.S. military. Since the U.S. bombing took place on Syrian territory, the Syrian government rightly condemned it as a violation of its territorial integrity.

China and Russia also condemned it from the perspective of national sovereignty. The western media as a whole side-stepped the sovereignty issue and instead presented the U.S. bombing as a response to Syrian-Iranian aggression. Both Syria and Iran denied any involvement in the February 15 rocket attack arguing that they sought a period of calm to encourage as it were the Biden administration to restore the earlier nuclear deal with Iran, which president Trump had unilaterally aborted.

But the Western media’s agenda against Syria is so heavily skewed that it will not entertain any other interpretation of the U.S. military action. The power of this biased agenda became even more blatant recently when the media ignored completely a huge scandal involving the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’ (OPCW) investigation into the alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria in 2018.

When the OPCW published its final report in March 2019, some OPCW inspectors involved in the actual investigation raised fundamental and substantive questions about the report’s conclusions. These questions cast doubt about the claims of Western governments and the Western media of Syrian government involvement in the chemical attack. The inspectors wanted their views heard by the OPCW management, which refused to grant them a hearing. Instead it chose to publicly condemn the inspectors for speaking out.

It is because of the unbecoming conduct of the OPCW leadership, that five of its former inspectors and the first Director-General of the OPCW Jose Bustani decided to express their deep concern in a public statement recently. The statement has also been endorsed by outstanding public figures such as Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk and John Avery Scales. It is telling that the statement has received so little attention from the media.

If news that is favorable to Syria within the context of the geopolitics of WANA is blocked out of the media, it is because those who dominate the region want it that way. The U.S., Israel and their allies do not want the truth about the interplay of politics and power in WANA to be known to the people. It is because Syria, which is linked to Hezbollah and Iran, has been consistent in opposing the hegemonic power of the U.S., Israel and their allies in WANA that it has had to pay such a high price. It is a price that the triumvirate of resistance is prepared to pay because it cherishes the independence and integrity of the citizens of WANA and the people of the world. _____________________________________________

Dr. Muzaffar is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment, and president of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST). He is the author of the e-book ‘Whither WANA?-Reflections on the Arab Uprisings,’ which is accessible through the JUST website, www.just-international.org.