Reports are abound by international organizations
about the responsibility of the Syrian government for the human rights
violations in the ongoing conflict in Syria, now in its fourth year, but the responsibility
of the insurgents has been kept away from media spotlight for political
reasons.
However, the horrible image of the “revolutionary”
performance imposed itself on the media and public opinion to an extent that it
has become impossible to black it out anymore.
Internationally last Thursday, for example, the
U.S. envoy to the United Nations, Samantha Power, said that Russia’s and
China’s vetoes against a United
Nations Security Council resolution to refer allegations of war crimes in Syria
to the International Criminal Court (ICC) “protect monstrous
terrorist organizations operating in Syria … who are pursuing a fundamentalist
assault on the Syrian people that knows no decency or humanity.”
Regionally on the same day, The Yemeni Coordination
Committee for the Support of Syrian Revolution dissolved itself in protest
against what it called in a statement “the diversion and transformation of the
leaders of the revolution and opposition into terrorist gangs and groups.”
Since U.S. President Barak Obama imposed sanctions on
April 29, 2011 on some Syrian officials reportedly accused of using violence
against civilians, the U.S.
Their blackout
of the insurgents’ responsibility could not be avoided otherwise those sponsors
would be held accountable as well and consequently could not continue their
support to the insurgents with impunity, because without their support the
insurgents would not have survived.
Their reluctance to arm the Syrian rebels with advanced
weapons lest they fall into the hands of the terrorist organizations could not
cover up their initial and ongoing arming and recruitment efforts, which
empowered the militarization of the peaceful civilian protests with its most
extreme Syrian and non-Syrian insurgents.
On last April 8, the UN High Commissioner for
Human Rights Navi Pillay was quoted as saying in a briefing to the UN Security Council that the actions of the
forces of the Syrian government "far outweigh" the crimes by the
“opposition” fighters.
Statistics
Tell a Different Story
However,
scrutiny of the statistics of the death toll and the facts of the humanitarian
fallout of the conflict tell a different story. On this May 19, the UK-based
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said it had documented more than
162,000 deaths in the conflict until this May 17, more than 61 thousand of them
were government troops, 42,701 rebels and more than 1600 foreign fighters; SOHR
believes that both sides of the combat strongly tend to be very conservative
about their human casualties. The rest were civilians many of whom were victims
of suicide bombing and mortar shells fired by the rebels.
The
breakdown of these figures show the government a victim rather than a culprit
and indicate that the actions of the rebels “far outweigh” those of the
government, contrary to Navi Pillay’s conclusion.
“Questioning
the Syrian ‘Casualty List’” in the Lebanese Alakhbar on February 28, 2012,
Sharmine Narwani documented that, “The very first incident of casualties from
the Syrian regular army that I could verify dates to 10 April 2011, when gunmen
shot up a bus of soldiers travelling through Banyas, in Tartous, killing nine,”
i.e. few weeks after the first peaceful protests broke out in Syria, a fact
which questions the now wrongfully accepted public knowledge that the
government was the party who initiated the “violence.”
The communiqué issued by the eleven western and
Arab foreign ministers of the core group of the so-called “Friends of Syria”
after their meeting in London
They called the upcoming presidential elections on next
June 3 “illegitimate” and a “parody of democracy,” ignoring the fact that any
power vacuum in Syria
The inevitable result would be an exacerbation of the humanitarian crisis in the country, rendering their humanitarian rhetoric a parody of humanity.
Worse still, the eleven “Friends of Syria” had
“agreed unanimously” to boost their support to what they described as “the moderate opposition National Coalition (SNC), its Supreme
Military Council and associated moderate armed groups.”
What “moderates” did they refer to?
On last September 25 the BBC quoted a recent study
published by IHS Jane's analyst Charles Lister, which concluded that, “the core
of the Syrian insurgency is composed of Islamist groups of one kind or
another.” “The armed opposition is all too much
a part of the conflict,” Red Maistre wrote in The Northern Star four days
later.
Three years and three months on, the “Friends of Syria” failed
to bring the “regime” down. On the contrary, it has got the military upper hand,
while the organizations which the U.S.
and Saudi Arabia
Whatever
military supplies the “moderate” rebels could get will only prolong the war,
postpone any political settlement and perpetuate and exacerbate the worsening
humanitarian crisis.
Civilian protesters, political opposition and “secular” armed
rebels were hijacked, sidelined and finally dumped by the mainstream
terrorists, whose backbone consists of “foreign fighters,” thus dooming any
political solution for a long time to come and vindicating Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad’s determination on last August 4 that, “No solution can be reached with terror except
by striking it with an iron fist.”
As early as March 2012 Sara Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, had warned that, ““The
Syrian government’s brutal tactics cannot justify abuses by armed opposition
groups.”
Schools, universities, hospitals, health clinics, churches,
mosques, religious monuments, power grids, railways, bridges, oil fields,
historical sites, museum assets, police symbols of public safety and order and
other infrastructure were targeted by the rebels with unprecedented level of
destruction and civilian plight.
A
survey, conducted by the Relief and Works Agency of UN's Microfinance Programs
and released early last April, said it would take 30 years for the Syrian
economy to recover to its 2010 level.
According to the SOHR,
the infighting among rebels has claimed more than five thousand casualties in
2014. The infighting over border crossings and oil fields displaced more than
one hundred thousand civilians in north eastern Syria
As a strategy, the rebels since the very beginning have been
using Syrian civilians en masse as a bargaining chip and as human shields, a
fact which the “Friends of
Syria” have been keen to blackout.
On this May 12, rebels have agreed
to free 1,500 families whom they had
kidnapped and held hostages in Adra, a suburb of the capital Damascus
On May 4, they cut off water supply to some three
million civilians in Syria ’s
second largest city of Aleppo , a collective
punishment reminiscent of a similar horrible practice by Israel in Beirut
Rule, Not Exception
These inhuman tactics are not the exception, but
the norm and rule. Since the very
beginning of their rebellion in March 2011, rebels stormed into Syrian city
centers, where there was no official military presence, and used the civilian
population as human shields against any retaliation by the government forces,
thus unleashing what the United Nations described as the world’s largest
refugee problem.
Civilians have paid the higher price. Syrians now
hold the rebels responsible for their plight. Their sectarian public incubator
has already turned against them in favour of restoring the missing safety,
security and order by the government.
All factions of the rebels claim they are the representatives of the Muslim Sunni
majority, but the overwhelming majority of some six million Syrians who are
displaced internally are Sunnis, now hosted by non-Sunni compatriots in safe
havens under government protection, let alone more than three million refugees
who are also overwhelmingly Sunni Syrians and fled to neighbouring countries
from the areas held by the rebels.
It’s a well-known fact now that creating a
humanitarian crisis in Syria, whether real or fabricated, and holding
the Syrian government responsible for it as a casus belli for foreign military
intervention under the UN 2005 so-called "responsibility to protect"
initiative was from the very beginning of the Syrian conflict the goal of the U.S.-led
so-called "Friends of Syria' coalition.
A second fact was the rush to militarize the Syrian civilian
peaceful protests. When President al-Assad issued in 2011 the first of his six general
amnesties, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went on record with a
public appeal to armed rebels not to lay down their arms in response.
In March
2014 a commission of inquiry
mandated by the United Nations Human Rights Council, chaired by Paulo Pinheiro, for the first time accused
the insurgents in Syria
On
this May 14, Syrian Rev. Michael Rabaheih, from the Greek Orthodox Church, was
quoted by The Washington Post as saying: “If this is freedom, we don’t need
it.”
Rabaheih
was one of some 80,000 Christians who returned to the Old City of Homs, which the opposition once proudly called “the capital of the
revolution,” but which the rebels were forced to evacuate this month. He was
seated next to the grave of the Dutch
priest, Frans van der Lugt, who was assassinated by the rebels a few weeks
earlier, not far from the gravely damaged historic Khalid ibn al-Walid mosque
in the devastated neighbourhoods of Syria’s third largest city, where “little
was left.”
Obviously,
the “Friends of Syria” have failed to artificially create any credible alternative
to the incumbent regime, which, however, did change indeed.
* Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based
in Birzeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. An
edited version of this article was first published by Middle East Eye. nassernicola@ymail.com
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