Redefining Civil war

Syria : Legitimizing Intervention
Farooque Chowdhury

Path for "legitimized", direct, external military interven tion in Syria is being paved. The covert external military intervention now being carried out in the strategically positioned country has been defined as civil war.

In a meaningful move the Red Cross has defined external intervention in Syria : "non-international armed conflict", the effectually, technical term for civil war. Herve Ladsous, the UN's peacekeeping chief, said in June: Syria is in a state of civil war.

But facts are revealing themselves. It has now come out that most of the dead in the village Tremseh were armed rebels although the interventionists initially decried it as a massacre of civilians. Now, debate is going on as whether heavy arms, artillery and tanks were used or not while a complete uncertain, volatile situation rages on.

The situation has been traced by Ali Haidar, the Syrian national reconciliation minister and head of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP): "Syria is on top of a volcano." "The army is incapable of cleaning up the ground completely and ending the armed insurgency without a political solution to the crisis. The insurgents cannot do so either", said Haidar.

The volcano top is a perfect landing ground for interventionist forces in Syria. The ground got and has been prepared long ago. Haidar said: "The situation is a continuation of a [...] deep and comprehensive structural crisis on all levels of Syrian life. Its final form [...] is a situation of continuous violence [...] This [...] crisis goes back many years. No one was able to solve the problems [...and] the bearers of the foreign project were able to interfere in the path of the crisis. They took advantage of the exuberance and fervor of Syrian youth and their rightful demands to impose a violent image onto the political mobilization."

However, initiatives are being taken to salvage the situation. Building the Syrian State (BSS), one of the Syrian opposition organizations based in Syria, in a statement from Damascus on July 12, 2012 has invited "all political forces, civil groups, youth groups, and public figures at home and abroad who are working on radically changing the system of government by the adoption of all peaceful means" to a conference on 'Saving the Syrian Homeland' in Damascus on July 28, 2012.

Referring to the situation as "threatening the social fabric and national sovereignty [...]" the statement called on all "to rescue the Syrian homeland, from the [...] possibilities of collapse."

The statement said Syrians are now facing two catastrophic options : "Assad or We'll Burn the Country", "the slogan promoted by the authority", and "Burn the Country Until Assad Falls", "the slogan adopted by some opposition parties".

The statement acknowledged the situation in Syria: "civil strife, the threat of civil war", displacement of hundreds of thousands of Syrians, the needs of about two million Syrians for food, meals, drinking water, the escalation of "armed conflict that has become the master of the situation, where it kills about 150 Syrians a day", escalating terrorism and sabotage threatening the security and stability of the country, living conditions pushing dozens of families everyday below the poverty line, "[t]he economic situation that is about to collapse", the migration of human resources, private capital, most of the middle class, and the brain drain.

It observed the "continued detention of thousands of protesters, political activists, and peaceful civilians", [...] the disappearance of a large number of them [...]."

Citing the internationalization of the Syrian crisis the statement said "several international parties" are "in control over the situation more so than any Syrian party, including the authority." The reality "threatens an enduring Syrian crisis, subject to and at the mercy of international disputes and consensus."

No external interference is possible without quislings. Quislings can't operate without favorable objective condition. No external interference is possible without unaware, misinformed and disorganized or unorganized masses, without a crowd.

The timing for external interference in Syria was not decided all of a sudden. The condition for external interference was not created overnight. Fabrics were torn slowly covering a long period of time. Mistrust was sown repeatedly. Autocracy unknowingly became party to the job. Accomplices of the quislings slept in the quarter of autocracy and worked silently for a long time.

Quislings are created bit by bit. Their accomplices are organized bit by bit. It's a brick by brick work; it's meticulous and well orchestrated work. Hollowness is created all around, in different spheres and at different levels. Possible alternate leadership is deactivated, is kept busy with some other irrelevant agenda, is kept refrained from carrying out immediate, essential political and organizational work, is kept isolated from prospective constituency, and is kept away from essential theoretical work.

Frontier
Vol. 45, No. 6, Aug 19-25, 2012