Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Syria: voting in the ruins

The one thing the great majority of Syrians would have wanted to vote for was not on the ballot paper
Syria's presidential election and its foregone conclusion will be presented by the authorities in Damascus as an instance of democracy still functioning in adversity, and as a statement of resolve. It is an election, if such a one-sided exercise can be so called, which says "We survived, and will ultimately prevail". To the regime's opponents, and to many outside the Middle East, it is a sham, a joke and an impertinence which mocks those who have died and are still dying.
In truth, what it represents above all is failure, an accumulation of multiple and repeated failures at the personal, national and international levels. In the beginning it was the failure of one man, Bashar al-Assad, to understand what leadership means which set Syria on the road to ruin. In the shadow of a father who had always dealt ruthlessly with opposition and under the influence of family and advisers steeped in a political culture based on the three principles of never apologise, never concede and never compromise, the young president prevaricated and blundered. It is hard now to remember the hopes raised, in the early stages of the conflict, when it was announced that he would be making a "reform" speech.
Time and again he came to the rostrum with nothing more to offer than windy rhetoric, conspiracy theories about foreign plots to destroy Syria, and vague references to changes which, he always stressed, the government had been planning anyway. Time and again he failed to distinguish between critics and enemies. Time and again he refused to recognise that his security forces had committed atrocities, or that his government's lackadaisical economic policies had impoverished and embittered many rural Syrians. Lost in a weird cloud of self-belief, he floated above the worsening crisis. He had caused it, he was in it, but he seemed to understand it not at all.
A country's failure came next. Syrians remembered the disarray their nation fell after the French left in 1946. They had seen Lebanon slip into civil war, had both manipulated and tried to manage that conflict. They therefore should have known better when the same danger threatened them, but those lessons went unlearned. Then came the failure of western countries who, in their anxiety to be ahead of the curve after being well behind it in Tunisia and Egypt, wrote the Syrian regime off too early and thus forfeited any mediating role. Then came the failure of the regional powers, especially Iran and Saudi Arabia, who turned the Syrian struggle into a proxy war in their efforts to isolate and damage each other.
What a record of folly it has been, and continues to be. And so we arrive at an election in which the one thing the great majority of Syrians would have wanted to vote for, which is peace, was not on the ballot paper.

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