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Not too late for shame

Why don’t we talk more about civil society in Syria?

A cursory search of “Syria” in Google News will produce a plethora of articles and papers about the intentions, interests, and actions of foreign powers, military groups, radical militias, and the Syrian government. In common discussion both among the policy community and the greater American public, the civil conflict in Syria is almost exclusively seen through the lens of great-power politics. There are many reasons for this:

• As Americans, we care about what our government does abroad, and consider crises with this in mind.
• It is natural when analyzing conflicts to focus on the main actors, i.e. states and military groups.
• Larger social organizations like governments and militias use press releases, a strong online presence, and propaganda to gain visibility abroad.
• Small, local organizations, or disorganized civil society are harder to place in the public eye.

The adage that “one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic” still holds. The media industry can only run so many horror stories of bombed civilians, destroyed hospitals, or sniped children before the general public shouts “enough,” and switches off. There is comfort in ignorance. Tragedy only sells in small quantities.

It has become easy to see the Syrian civil conflict as a giant game of chess between half a dozen actors and to forget the millions of lives that have been impacted by the war. Netanyahu’s latest outburst or Trump’s mood today can begin to matter more than the fifty civilians massacred in the latest Russian airstrike. It is easy, when presented with such a deluge of information and traumatic events, to filter out the bloody noise of individual annihilation and stick to the clean, sanitary puppet show of great-power politics.

For me, the bubble burst on July 13, when the Middle East Institute welcomed Syrian journalist and civil activist Raed Fares to speak at a roundtable about the state of civil society in northwestern Syria. Fares, who has survived multiple assassination attempts by ISIS and Jabat al-Nusra, founded the Union of Revolutionary Bureaus (URB) in the city of Kafranbel, located in the northern region of Idlib. Their main activity is running the FM radio station Radio Fresh, as well as overseeing women centers and other civil society endeavors around the city.

What struck home the hardest while listening to Fares is the realization of how dissociated I had become from the pain and horror of individual people living and fighting in Syria. Some might say that is for the best: emotion and objectivity don’t mix well. Good research doesn’t come from the heart.

Phasing out emotion, however, as well as concentrating on objective, feasible policy-making, can make us forget about the true victims of the Syrian civil war. National interests may take precedence over foreign lives in the minds of many, but that doesn’t mean that local casualties and damage should stop mattering. This civil war will end someday. Many would argue it is already over. The process of reconstruction is just around the corner. The state of civil society matters.

This is especially the case in Idlib. Fares is currently visiting the United States to try to rescue funding for his organization cut by the Trump administration, without which he will likely have to shut down the URB. He warned that the disappearance of secular, democracy-promoting organisms such as the URB directly profits jihadi groups such as HTS and al-Qaeda, who become the default service providers and political mouthpieces for a tired and frustrated population.

A journalist told me that Syria stories consistently are the least-read media pieces. Americans are tired of hearing about Syria. After seven years of the same-old, depressing stories coming out of the country, they apparently would rather hear about almost anything else.

The consequence, according to Fares, is a fairly similar conclusion in Syria, albeit for wildly different reasons. After seven years of blood, seven years of bombs, seven years of poverty and misery, the Syrian people are ready for the conflict to be over, regardless of who wins. They just want something resembling stability and normalcy. Currently, only Bashar al-Assad can provide this.

If anything, this is the most significant sign that Assad has won. In the territories currently or soon to be under his control, the appetite for systemic change and popular upheaval has been utterly annihilated, leaving a despot who massacres his own people as their only hope for proximate relief. Who can blame them? This is just a symbol of the moral failure reached by the international community when it comes to the Syrian people.

The policy community and the greater public need to acknowledge and focus on the plight of Syrians. Forgetting about the Syrian people is counter-productive. Stabilization is the current buzzword when it comes to Syria, and it cannot occur without the help and interest of the local population. Neither can peace-building and reconstruction, whether or not the American government is involved. Policy think-tanks and media outlets need to make a greater effort to broadcast the voices of the Syrian population, and to make sure that their hopes and needs are part of the conversation surrounding their future.

Not only is shutting out the Syrian people counter-productive, it is also wrong. Justice and morality might seem like privileges that can wait for stability and security to be restored. Local populations, however, don’t forget past injustices easily. The Syrian people, and the greater Arab world, will remember how we treated them at their hour of greatest need. It is probably already too late for redemption. It is not, however, too late for shame.

Bad assumptions make bad policy

The Post recently published Jamal Khashoggi’s “It’s time to divide Syria.” A few assertions that Khashoggi made jump out as pertinent examples of biases and assumptions that can often be found in Western media reports about Syria. Here are a few examples of this:

To bring about a permanent peace in Syria, the southern part of the country must be protected. Victory for Assad there is not a complete solution so much as it is a pause. The territories governed by Assad are ruled by fear and a loss of hope for prosperity.

Assad has been responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of his own people. He has chemically attacked his compatriots and will go down in history as one of the cruellest and bloodiest despots in modern history. This can lead people to assume that he has managed to stay in power only by keeping the population under his control in a constant state of fear and oppression. It is this assumption – that Assad’s dictatorship commanded little or no popular support – that led international actors, particularly regional powers such as Turkey and Qatar, to believe that Assad’s regime would collapse quickly in 2011.

They were ultimately proven wrong. Syrian sectarian tensions, as well as the government’s historical use of clientelism and patronage to foster elite support, provided Assad with broad support from some ethnic minorities in Syria – particularly his own group, the Alawis. In addition, many non-minority Sunnis see Assad as the sole source of stability in the country. Judging and condemning Assad for the way in which he has treated his people is justified and right. It is, however, a tenuous and possibly counter-productive justification for intervention, particularly if we repeat the mistakes of Iraq in failing to properly plan for the aftermath.

The United States should propose partition in Syria. Assad can keep what he controls, and the rebels can form local governments and establish a new entity. With international recognition and support, it would be possible to hold elections for local councils [and] curtail radicalized individuals […].

Portraying Islamist and jihadist rebels as “radicalized individuals” makes them sound like a few bad apples within a more moderate rebel ensemble. Yet broad swathes of the Syrian opposition are radical, with the salafist Ahrar al-Sham or the jihadist Tahrir al-Sham among the largest and most effective opposition groups in Syria today. These are not just individuals but unavoidable strategic actors, determined power players, who will have a role to play in Syria for years to come.

The ideological composition of the opposition, and its fragmented nature, mean that distinguishing between “radical” and “moderate” elements is near-impossible. Curtailing radical groups would not only require more military power than any international actor is willing to currently provide, it would also require a level of insight and decisiveness in determining who needs to be curtailed and who should participate in governing a new Syria that no foreigners currently possess.

The assertion that we can – and should – eliminate radical elements of the opposition also underestimates the support these groups command within the population. American hostility and distaste for radical Islam clouds the fact that for many Syrians, particularly those who are Sunni Arabs, these groups are a viable and even desirable alternative to Assad’s rule. Many also see them as a necessary evil to counter creeping Iranian influence in Syria, a sort of counter-Hezbollah that will fight fire with fire.

What would Khashoggi recommend if his elected local councils installed radical Muslims in power? More generally, Western commentators should not assume that radical elements in Syria will be “curtail[ed]” by the Syrian population once it votes.

Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State will always be threats, but they will likely be rejected by the local Syrian community if there are international and regional forces supporting Syrian aspirations for moderate civilian rule.

Many Syrians want peace and stability more than they want “moderate civilian rule;” many fear that a transition to a more democratic form of government would prove a new source of chaos and instability, as it was in Iraq after 2003 and Egypt after 2012.

The assumption that democracy is something people inherently yearn for has plagued Western interpretation of Middle Eastern political crises for decades. It was particularly visible during the “Arab Spring” uprisings of 2010-11, when news organizations such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal heralded the popular desire for democratic rule in the region.

Of course there are large numbers of local activists and citizens who call and hope for more popular representation and participation across the Middle East; but assuming this a basic and widespread concern for everyone is misleading. Not because they are inherently attached to strongman rule or too passive for civic participation, but because democracy is for many a privilege that comes after security and prosperity. If foreign powers intervened in Syria assuming that its citizens are on the same page as they are about what Syria should look like post-civil war, they could be in for a big surprise.

We should stop making assumptions and generalizations that we can’t back up with evidence. Western powers have too often intervened in Middle Eastern politics – often with destructive consequences – because of false assumptions and an inflated belief in the obviousness and infallibility of their liberal and democratic values.

The United States could do a lot to help the Syrian population today: more humanitarian assistance to the displaced Syrians in the South, and more political support to ensure that Syrian Kurdish interests are represented in negotiations about the future of Syria, for instance. For productive American involvement in the Syrian conflict to happen, however, it can’t be obscured by flashier plans based on misleading statements; they may sound more appealing, but are not grounded in reality. Accurate information should be a prerequisite, not an afterthought, of American foreign policymaking in the Middle East.