Syria and The Chinese solution

There is a solution for peace in Syria. All we need is the will to implement it. Yang Jiechi has imagined a way of avoiding France’s hostility to the implementation of the Geneva agreement.

The Chinese solution
by Thierry Meyssan – Voltaire Network – Damascus (Syria) – 7 November 2012

UN-Arab League Special Envoy for Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, and Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi.

The truce that was intended to mark the celebrations for the Muslim feast of the Aid was massively broken in Syria. The government had taken care to block the main roads in order to ensure that any incidents would remain isolated and would not spread. It was a waste of time – a number of brigades of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) had received orders from their sponsors to launch a series of new attacks, and the Syrian Arab Army did not fail to respond. As a result, although certain regions were able to enjoy four days of relative peace, the final assessment at the national level is particularly disappointing.

Whether the truce was a success or a failure therefore depends on where you live. At the diplomatic level, it allows us to evaluate the difficulties that the peace forces will encounter when the Security Council decides to deploy them. The first is the absence of a representative spokesman for the FSA – the second is France’s duplicity.

The FSA is composed of a number of armed groups, each of which obeys its own logic. The whole organisation is supposed to take orders from a central command which is implanted at a NATO base in Turkey. But this is no longer the case, ever since the emergence of bitter rivalry between the different sponsors – France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Each group dedicates more effort to expanding their influence to the detriment of their allies than to overthrowing the regime. The basic brigades obey the groups who directly finance them, and pay no further attention to NATO coordination. Besides this, despite all declarations, the fighters in Syria have never been subordinated to the political councils who meet in Paris, Istanbul and Cairo.

Western leaders are continually calling for a unified FSA command, but in reality, they are afraid of it. Because while unification would provide an interlocutor for peace discussions, it would also discredit and replace the foreign political councils. It would therefore no longer be possible to hide the true nature of this pseudo “revolution” – none of the armed groups are fighting for democracy, and the vast majority of them intend to impose a Sunnite religious dictatorship.

A “Central Command of Syrian Revolutionary Councils” has just been created in Idlib, and it has been approved by about 80% of the FSA forces. It recognises as its spiritual leader Sheikh Adnan al-Arour, who gave a speech on this occasion. Reading a moderate text, whose style was very different from his usual declarations, he praised his listeners for the creation of the central military command, and called for the unification of the three rival foreign political councils, and also for the constitution of a legislative council. This of course means the transfer of legislative power to religious authorities – of which he would humbly accept the leadership – with the aim of imposing Sharia law. He also reminded his listeners that the prime objective of the “revolution” is not to overthrow the institutions but rather the principles of the regime, in other words, secularism and Arab nationalism.

At this point, it must be noted that while the FSA numbers very few Syrian combatants, it has the support of several million civilians, particularly in the North of the country. However, in the various demonstrations which have been organised, the demonstrators have never brandished the portraits of exiled political leaders (Buhran Ghalioum, Abdulbaset Sieda, etc.), but have often chanted the name of Sheikh Al-Arour. They have also notably used his slogans, such as “Christians to Beirut! Alawites to the grave!” The Syrians who support the FSA do not want democracy, but are calling for a Saudi-style dictatorship, which would cleanse Sunnism of its Sufi elements, and repress all religious minorities.

In order to succeed, the truce should have been negotiated by Lakdhar Brahimi, the special envoy of the UN and the Arab League, and Sheikh Adnan Al-Arour. But such an encounter would have marked the end of the dream of the “Arab Spring”, and revealed the fact that the West is financing and arming the most extreme forms of religious sectarianism. …more