Canada Free Press
June 17 2012
Syria does not want Bashar al-Assad. However, does it want … Hafez al-Assad?
– Alexander Maistrovoy Sunday, June 17, 2012
A quarter of a century ago the people of Central Asia and Caucasus
also tasted freedom. It was the taste of blood.
`The first task of the historian is to make a careful sketch of the
manner in which the events he recounts took place. The history of
religious beginnings transports us into a world of women and children,
of brains ardent or foolish. These facts, placed before minds of a
positive order, are absurd and unintelligible, and this is why
countries such as England, of ponderous intellects, find it impossible
to comprehend anything about it’ – this is how Ernest Renan(1)
described how the psychology of the people in the epoch of Jesus was
frustratingly misunderstood by the English philosophers.
Replace `England’ with `West’, ancient history – with the modern times
and you’ll understand the fatal error in the assessment of the events
in Syria.
One glance at the commentaries on current events in Syria reveals that
they were dictated by the same person. The similar expressions and
identical evaluation: `democratic forces’, on the one hand, and the
`repressive regime’ – on the other; the `revolution’ against `the
bloody dictatorship’; the `freedom’ against `tyranny’.
It is a very simplified, schematic picture. It does not explain much,
and does not attempt to explain. Why, even after the massacre in Hula
and Hama, don’t we see mass defections from the Syrian army, although
lower-ranked officers and soldiers are Sunnis and representatives of
other minorities? Why don’t they swing to The Free Syrian Army? Why
hadn’t the resistance and the mass protests spread to Damascus, even
though its population consists of 90% Sunnis? How can one explain the
neutrality of the Kurds (not second, but third class citizens!), and
the Druze? What is The Free Syrian Army? It is evident from the news
reports (including unofficial ones on YouTube), that the militants
don’t have a shortage of weaponry (including RPGs and heavy machine
guns) and ammunition. Who supplies the arms and ammo to them? Finally,
there isn’t any evidence that the massacre in Hula and Hama was
accomplished by special units deployed by Assad. Can we rule out the
possibility that the infamous gloomy `RaÄ?ak massacre’ repeats itself?
I’m not going to whitewash the Assad regime. But what is in fact
happening in this country? Have the Western clichés become a reality?
We are called upon to reject `ill-founded fears.’ After all, `the
situation could not be worse than it is in Syria now anyway’ believes
Lee Smith (The Weekly Standard). This is a typical example of Western
optimism and naivety. I’m sure that it could be worse, much worse,
because I know how violence and hatred in the East can be spiraled
when the regime loses power.
¦ In the middle of the 80s Uzbekistan was the epitome of a `New
Historical Community’ ` `Soviet People’ (a type of `multiculturalism’)
with a diversity of nationalities peacefully existing side by side
with each other. However in the late 80s the firm grip of the regime
has weakened and in May 1989 the dormant fervors sprang out. The first
victims were Russians; the second were Meskhetian Turks that were
transferred here from the Meskheti region of Georgia by Stalin in the
40s. This massacre entered history as `Pogrom in Fergana Valley’. We
still do not know how many Turks were slaughtered. Armed with
crowbars, pitchforks and axes, the crowds burned alive, dismembered
and raped people under the slogan `Uzbekistan for Uzbeks’; `Strangle
the Turks, smother the Russians’ and `Long live the Islamic flag’.
`Snapshots – (in Fergana) testimony of debauchery, of madness and
sadism: burnt corpse; murdered man and a teenager (probably father and
son) and a bludgeon ` the murder weapon; mutilated corpse of a woman,
thrown into a ditch; burned-out houses. ¦Approaching Kokand …we saw
pillars of black smoke and then bright torches of burning houses. We
were able to distinguish angry faces, sticks in hands¦ They were
thugs, 25-30 years of age. They threatened us with fists and
bludgeons; others tossed stones at the helicopter with impotent rage.
We saw how they dragged Turkish girls from the buses and raped them.
We saw how they threw a Russian man from the roof of a house ¦and
then, burnt him alive … ‘ (2) (Resembles Syrian `sketches’, or
doesn’t it?).
The pogroms recurred in June 1990 in Osh (this time ` the Kyrgyz were
the victims), and again in 1991 – in Namangan. Mass atrocities ended
only when Islam Karimov, the current Uzbekistan president, came to
power and suppressed the mad crowds with an iron fist. From that time
on Uzbekistan has been a stable country with many people coexisting
peacefully. When the 1997 riots renewed in Namangan, Karimov
rigorously suppressed them again. The West rushed to accuse him of
violation of human rights without realizing that hadn’t he done it
with maximum determination and force, there wouldn’t be any `human
rights’ or humans left in Namangan in particular, and in the country
in general.
In Kazakhstan, in 1986 the nationalists attempted to settle old scores
with the Russians. By a pogrom in the center of Alma-Ata, a large
crowd armed with sticks and stones demanded to elect a Kazakh native
to be the First Secretary of the Communist Party. Many were killed and
hundreds injured as a result of the pogrom. The period of turmoil
ended when the current President Nursultan Nazarbayev came to power.
Since then Kazakhstan has been a prosperous and rapidly developing
country. Like Uzbekistan, it is not a liberal democracy, but people
who live here have the basic rights – the rights to life and feeling
of security.
Events in Tajikistan evolved in a similar matter. In February, 1990
crowds of rioters, screaming `Death to Armenians’, destroyed homes of
Armenians and other minorities. Arsons, mass murders, cruel rapes
swept Dushanbe, life was paralyzed. Rioters burned people in their own
homes, caught them, tortured to death, raped girls and women and to
end with – murdered them. The country was blazing several years until
Emomalii Rahmon took power into his hands in 1994. Since then,
Tajikistan is rarely mentioned in the international news reports. Life
went back to normal in this country.
Pogroms of Armenians, provoked by the Karabakh conflict, swept
Azerbaijan in 1989-90. At first, there was the Sumgait in February
1988. `Thugs broke into the previously marked apartments. Armenians
were killed in their own homes, but sometimes they were pulled out to
the streets or to the yards for public mockery. Only a few were
`lucky’ to die from an ax or a knife. Most died in a painful
humiliation and suffering. Murderers pounded them, tormented, doused
them with gasoline and burned them alive. Gang-rapes of women and
girls occurred often in front of their relatives. Eventually, the
torturers killed their victims. They didn’t have mercy for neither old
men nor for children’.(3)
`I saw dismembered bodies with my own eyes; one body was chopped by an
ax; legs, arms were chopped off from the body ` almost nothing was
left. They (murderers) collected leaves from the ground, tossed them
over the corpses, then poured gasoline from cars and fired them up.
These bodies looked horrible `, – wrote British journalist Thomas de
Waal.(4)
Pogroms resumed in Baku in 1990. According to de Waal, an area densely
populated by Armenians turned into a scene of mass murder: people were
thrown from the balconies of the upper floors, lynched, and burned
alive. Rape was accompanied by sadism and barbarity.
A period of instability ended when Heydar Aliyev, a tough and dodgy
politician, came to power, and subsequently handed over the authority
to his son – Ilham Aliyev. Now Azerbaijan, as other Central Asia
republics, is the authoritarian regime with quasi-democratic
institutions, but regardless is very popular among the people, because
it provides the main thing that they need – security, stability and
tranquility.
The Middle East is not that different from Central Asia and the
Caucasus: there are same unwritten laws and rules. An example of this
was the massacre of Christians by Palestinian militants in Damour
(Lebanon) and retaliation in the Sabra and Shatila by Christian
Phalangists. Similar things are occurring in Libya today. We are yet
to see a repetition of the atrocities in Iraq, Egypt, Yemen and
elsewhere, where the regime is unable to restrain the instinctual
brutality of the crowd.
Alas, (as politically incorrect as it may sound) the Middle and the
Central East (excluding the fiasco of the Ataturk experiment in
Turkey) have always known only two forms of existence (I emphasize –
not the reign, but the existence): the domination of crazed mobs or
despotism (in the form autocracy, military junta or theocracy). There
is no other choice, and there never will be. Without any doubt the
second form of existence (with all its flaws) is preferred, because it
sets rigorous game rules and allows the mass of ordinary people to
survive.
The Syrians are very well aware of this eternal order of things. I
think they would prefer Hafez al-Assad’s tyranny to empty and
meaningless declarations about `revolution,’ `democracy,’ `liberal
values’and `human rights’.
1.`The Life of Jesus’
2.The colonel and journalist Peter Studenkin
3.Officer of USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs Victor Krivipuskov
4.Thomas de Waal Black Garden
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