Friday 6 September 2013
All that was false in the idea
and practice of humanitarian interventions exploded in a condensed form apropos
Syria. OK, there is a
bad dictator who is (allegedly) using poisonous gas against the population
of his own state – but who is opposing his regime? It seems that whatever
remained of the democratic-secular resistance is now more or less drowned in
the mess of fundamentalist Islamist groups supported by Turkey and Saudi
Arabia, with a strong presence of al-Qaida in the shadows.
As to Bashar al-Assad, his
Syria at least pretended to be a secular state, so no wonder Christian and
other minorities now tend to take his side against the Sunni rebels. In short,
we are dealing with an obscure conflict, vaguely resembling the Libyan revolt
against Colonel Gaddafi – there are no clear political stakes, no signs of a
broad emancipatory-democratic coalition, just a complex network of religious
and ethnic alliances overdetermined by the influence of superpowers (US
and western Europe on the one side, Russia
and China on the other). In such conditions, any direct military
intervention means political madness with incalculable risks – say, what if
radical Islamists take over after Assad's fall? So will the US repeat their
Afghanistan mistake of arming the future al-Qaida and Taliban cadres?
In such a messy situation,
military intervention can only be justified by a short-term self-destructive
opportunism. The moral outrage evoked to provide a rational cover for the
compulsion-to-intervene ("We cannot allow the use of poisonous gas on
civil population!") is fake. Faced with a weird ethics that justifies
taking the side of one fundamentalist-criminal group against another, one
cannot but sympathise with Ron Paul's reaction to John McCain's advocacy of
strong intervention: "With politicians like these, who needs
terrorists?"
The situation in Syria should
be compared with the one in Egypt. Now that the Egyptian army has decided to
break the stalemate and cleanse the public space of the Islamist protesters,
and the result is hundreds, maybe thousands, of dead, one should take a step
back and focus on the absent third party in the ongoing conflict: where are the
agents of the Tahrir Square protests from two years ago? Is their role now not
weirdly similar to the role of Muslim Brotherhood back then – that of the
surprised impassive observers? With the military coup in Egypt, it seems as if the
circle has somehow closed: the protesters who toppled Mubarak, demanding
democracy, passively supported a military coup d'etat which abolished democracy
… what is going on?
The most common reading was
proposed, among others, by
Francis Fukuyama: the protest movement that toppled Mubarak was
predominantly the revolt of the educated middle class, with the poor workers
and farmers reduced to the role of (sympathetic) observers. But once the gates
of democracy were open, the Muslim Brotherhood, whose social base is the poor
majority, won democratic elections and formed a government dominated by Muslim
fundamentalists, so that, understandably, the original core of secular
protesters turned against them and was ready to endorse even a military coup as
a way to stop them.
But such a simplified vision
ignores a key feature of the protest movement: the explosion of heterogeneous
organisations (of students, women and workers) in which civil society began to
articulate its interests outside the scope of state and religious institutions.
This vast network of new social units, much more than the overthrow of Mubarak,
is the principal gain of the Arab spring; it is an ongoing process, independent
of big political changes like the coup; it goes deeper than the
religious/liberal divide.
Even in the case of clearly
fundamentalist movements, one should be careful not to miss their social
component. The Taliban are regularly presented as a fundamentalist Islamist
group enforcing with terror its rule – however, when, in the spring of 2009,
they took over the Swat valley in Pakistan, the New York Times reported that
they engineered "a
class revolt that exploits profound fissures between a small group of
wealthy landlords and their landless tenants". If, however, by
"taking advantage" of the farmers' plight, the Taliban "[raised]
alarm about the risks to Pakistan, which remains largely feudal", what prevented
liberal democrats in Pakistan as well as the US from similarly "taking
advantage" of this plight and trying to help the landless farmers? The sad
implication of this omission is that the feudal forces in Pakistan are the
"natural ally" of the liberal democracy … The only way for the
civil-democratic protesters to avoid being sidestepped by religious
fundamentalists is thus to adopt a much more radical agenda of social and
economic emancipation.
And this brings us back to
Syria: the ongoing struggle there is ultimately a false one. The only thing to
keep in mind is that this pseudo-struggle thrives because of the absent third,
a strong radical-emancipatory opposition whose elements were clearly
perceptible in Egypt. As we used to say almost half a century ago, one doesn't
have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows in Syria: towards
Afghanistan. Even if Assad somehow wins and stabilises the situation, his
victory will probably breed an explosion similar to the Taliban revolution
which will sweep over Syria
in a couple of years. What can save us from this prospect is only the
radicalisation of the struggle for freedom and democracy into a struggle for
social and economic justice.
So what is happening in Syria
these days? Nothing really special, except that China is one step closer to
becoming the world's new superpower while its competitors are eagerly weakening
each other.
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