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​With Assad or with the IS?

What a dreadful choice

Syria's dictator Bashar al Assad

Syria's dictator Bashar al Assad

Try to imagine a Syrian boy who had hoped in democracy and the opportunity to lead an ordinary life in your own country, and this year witnessed Assad’s brutal crackdown, first seeing the regime’s jailers imprison thousands people and then hearing the roar of planes that bombed the rebel-controlled areas of  his own country with gas.

Try to imagine this guy’s disappointment at seeing the world stand still before the onslaught that is being perpetrated on and on in his country, while the shaky dictatorship is being supported by Russia and Iran, which backed the intervention of Iranian volunteers and Hezbollah troops in the defence of the regime.

Try to imagine his sadness about the volte-face of Obama, who had said that the regime, with its merciless shellings on civilians, had crossed the so-called red line, and then had an inexplicable volte-turn, leaving the country in a chaos while hundreds thousands Syrians sought an escape to the West and thronged the refugee camps in Jordan and Turkey.

Try to imagine his trauma in the face of the break-up of Syria, three quarters of its territory being occupied by the IS groups who have started being a fundamentalist state that boasts its killings of infidels, rape of women, slaughter of opponents and persecution of minorities in the name of Allah.

What would you do in his place? Would you still trust the world, when faced with the choice between two dreadful possibilities: to carry on in the bloodiest and most brutal regime of the Mid-East or to find yourself in an Islamist republic that differently from other fundamentalist countries (such as Iran and Saudi Arabia) that extol the assassination of the different as a moral virtue?

At this point would you follow Assad’s troops and those of Russia and Iran (who betrayed your hopes) to fight the IS, as the worst evil, or would you not find the strength to fight those until little time ago were your executioners?

This is the anguish a dear friend of mine, young Syrian writer Shady Hamadi, is experiencing today. With his books, he has fought for many years to tell about the ordeal of Syrians.

Few people then listened to him when he demanded moral and political support for his country’s democratic opposition and today he feels he is put under a great deal of pressure by the many influential opinions published in the newspapers, like the ones of the former EU Commissioner Romano Prodi and the former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who say that the only chance to defeat the IS lies in supporting Assad’s regime.

Like many Syrian democrats, Shady Amadi is experiencing an existential quandary similar for some extents to the one of those who opposed Stalin during World War II, who though had to accept the alliance with the Russian dictator to defeat Hitler. I say for some extents, as in those years there was no clear perception of the Soviet regime and many people thought in the antifascist alliance Stalin would change. As it is widely known, he did not change, although the world’0s antifascist front enabled the defeat of Nazi Germany.

That alliance was strategically right and indispensable, but the people who did not want to recognize the Soviet dictator’s crimes were wrong. The same people who had been horrified by the gas chambers, afterwards would be completely indifferent to the horror of Kolyma and the Stalinist Gulag. In 1950, David Rousset, a great intellectual who had survived Buchenwald and was the author of a book on the Nazi lager system, was put to the pillory by the French progressive circles because he had launched an appeal to all the lager inmates to report the Gulag system to the world’s attention in the pages of the “Figaro Littéraire”. He was assaulted because he questioned Soviet socialism, thus damaging the hopes of the working class, as Sartre would write some years later.

Such a situation shall not be repeated, and in the face of the war on the IS we shall not forget about Assad’s crimes. Fortunately, today nobody is under the illusion that Assad will bring about any justice, unlike what happened with the myth of Soviet communism, but there is nonetheless a risk that in the name of the war on the IS somebody finds an alibi to justify the world’s great silence about Assad’s regime, one that carried out the worst atrocities ever happened in the Middle East.

The IS might advance in Syria, also because the world was not able to isolate Assad.

Gabriele Nissim

Analysis by Gabriele Nissim, Gariwo Chairman

10 November 2015

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