00:00 Jamie Allinson: Thanks [to the organisers] and thanks for this conference. Normally that's just a courtesy you say before you start speaking, but I think in this case it's very meaningful, because we're now coming up to the third anniversary of the Syrian revolution and I can't think of another event of this kind. And that's to do with the myths and really the bad politics around the Syrian revolution that are very obvious on the British left [inaudible], which have prevented this kind of thing from happening. So I think it's something to be thankful for.
00:30 Normally, if I was speaking about Syria [?], I would spend a lot of time debunking those very simplistic ideas — that this is simply a conspiracy of Western powers and Saudi Arabia, using jihadists to overcome a socialist, or at least in some sense anti-neoliberal, resistance regime. But that's already been done [inaudible].
01:00 I would add some points to those made by Joseph earlier, about the nature of the regime and also its relationship to sectarianism. And then I'll talk a bit more about the thing that we actually hear most about in the news, which is presenting this as simply a military conflict. And I'll say that you can't understand the nature of the military conflict itself, and the geopolitical machinations, unless you see this as a popular revolution.
01:30 So, first of all, the most important thing to know about the regime is that it was built for this moment. The regime was built by the father, by Hafez, in order to be counter-revolutionary, to withstand exactly the kind of movement that we see — very consciously so. First of all, three years after his death he was still the president of the Syrian branch of the Baath [inaudible].
02:02 Not only that — and this is important for any discussion of tendencies towards sectarianism — President Hafez personally picked any officer in the armed forces with command over large amounts of firepower: an airplane, or a tank battalion. He personally picked them, he knew their names, knew their families. And he did that so that he would be sure, when this moment came, that they would control the core of the army.
02:34 And that means — not for religious doctrine or reasons, or even in terms of privilege that we should ascribe to these people [?] — that inevitably these are people who are closer to his family, closer to his region, and by and large in this case Alawite. **Not [that it is] Alawites supporting the regime: [it is] the regime taking Alawites hostage against the rest of the country.** This is how sectarianism arises.
03:06 [Interruption about the microphone.]
03:06 So: being [a sectarian] [?] is not something you are, it's something that you do. It's something that is reproduced by the politics of the country that you live in, and it's built into the regime that produced this.
03:06 So if you think about it: if you are in a village where you are having barrels of aviation fuel dropped on you — and I don't understand why this is not a sectarian attack, and attacking somebody with a knife is a sectarian attack — if that's happening to you, and you know almost certainly that the pilot of that plane is an Alawite, then it's much easier to believe the really awful, bigoted, reactionary hatred that people come to give you to explain that.
03:37 If the people who should be denying that stuff are going around saying "you're part of a Western conspiracy to destroy the country", it's an abandonment of responsibility on the part of people who [call themselves] [?] anti-imperialist to let that go on. So it's not surprising that [sectarianism has been] introduced to some extent [inaudible].
04:08 So that's the first point, about the regime. Secondly, if we're going to understand the military situation and the geopolitical situation, as described by Joseph in terms of the contest between these two axes, you cannot explain it unless you see this as a popular uprising.
04:38 The main question here is: why hasn't the regime won? Because this is an army of about 300,000 men. That's quite substantial. They're fighting against groups who are by and large without heavy artillery, without any air defences at all. How is it that this could go on for so long? How is it we reach this essentially [stalemate], where the regime is reduced to relying on its foreign allies?
05:10 The Turkish border is open to supply, if you like, the revolutionary forces; but the rest of the surrounding regional powers — basically Lebanon, Iran, and in fact increasingly Iraq — are all on the Assad side. How is it that with these forces he can't win?
05:10 So the reason he can't win is that his forces have been whittled down [?]. You didn't get a lot of defections of whole units, but basically people, conscripts, left throughout the summer of 2011 [and] 2012. So now you have a hardcore, mainly in the air force, which is completely loyal to the regime; and on that basis [he is] expanding a truly sectarian recruitment of the so-called [National Defence Forces] — which are essentially recruited on [inaudible].
06:15 So he's got down to the forces that he can really rely on. He can even get these guys to fight. But you can't rule the country on that basis; you can't actually go on governing [inaudible].
06:15 And this is why we've reached this stalemate, coming into this meeting at Geneva — Geneva II. We can't explain how you get to that point unless you understand that most of the country doesn't want to be governed by Assad. That's the basic fact.
06:46 What's going on [at] Geneva II? Geneva I was so successful, then; let's have a Geneva II, that's really going to go somewhere. It's based upon essentially something that Joseph mentioned earlier, which is a convergence amongst these geopolitical axes on what they would like to see in Syria — with a small difference, and that's the person of Bashar.
07:17 So really, when people say that this is a Western-backed rebellion, an imperialist-backed rebellion — my God, you've got nothing to worry about from an imperialist-backed rebellion if this is one [?], because they are not doing anything. I'm not saying that I want that to happen; it's simply a fact. On the other side you have very clearly Russia and Iran pouring money, arms, credits into this.
07:49 And I think they know, to some extent since the Ghouta attack, that they can't do that indefinitely, and this is a reason why they're willing even to have negotiations [inaudible]. But this isn't going to go anywhere in the near term. It may result, I think, in some sort of compromise around a semi-Assadism [?], but that would be something far in the future.
07:49 I think that both the US and Russia in particular are coming to see this as [something] that they just want to manage. Their aim is to manage this, rather than in any sense to support the revolution [inaudible].
08:19 I've said — I'm not just [making a debating] point — when you look at the dreadful suffering, who couldn't say we want peace? Who couldn't say that you want to see an end to this? But the future with Assad looks like the present, basically. So any route to the future that includes this regime is delaying [it] into the future: five, seven, ten years.
08:51 When is it okay for people to demonstrate against the Assad regime? When will they not be judged for fighting back against this militarised regime, this regime which has been militarised for forty years? So really, I don't think there is a future in that direction.
08:51 [With that] in mind, this is what I want to take on — some of the points which we couldn't talk about fully earlier: this idea that the Syrian revolutionaries do not exist. It has been proven quite false in the past couple of months, in the struggle against the reactionaries, against Daesh, against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.
09:21 As you all know, they've been driven out, and faced military opposition by other Islamists in some cases — including the Islamic Front, which is also quite reactionary. But that's not the sole story here. [Across] the whole of the northern belt of Syria [inaudible], basically the Islamic State come in after the revolution has expelled the state forces, and they try and govern according to their reactionary ideas.
09:51 And what's very encouraging is that Syrians, [and] Syrian revolutionaries, don't stand for that sort of nonsense, basically. And they demonstrated continually, as they did against the regime — and it was clear in their slogans, when they were saying that the Islamic State and the regime are one, that these [are] two regimes. And it's because of that popular pressure, which is freely available for anybody to see, in Raqqa [inaudible] and all across the north, that they lost, that they're weak.
10:23 It's been proven that the future of Syria does not have to be under the heel of Islamist reaction — because the people [who] are fighting the regime have been fighting these guys as well, and in many cases succeeding.
10:57 So, having taken those things — I just want to talk a little bit about the origin and the spread of these [myths] [?] about the Syrian revolution, and why they're so prevalent on the left and the liberal left in Britain.
10:57 One reason is simply that there are very few sources of information that people are willing to look to and look for. It's not that they're absent, even in English — we have the blogs that were mentioned in the forum, there are many such sources. But there is something in the mainstream media, and it's an absolute disgrace that the left is willing to take this up, which is essentially a view that the Middle East, Islamic countries, are about Islamism: everything is about crazy Muslims with beards who cut people's heads off.
11:29 And this is the editor's-eye view of the world — for the BBC, for the *Guardian*, for the *Times*, for the *Telegraph*, for everything. It took about three months, six months, of the Arab revolutions to have some distancing from that, and then they went straight back to the same old narrative. Now, the job of people on the left, or [of a] critical media, is not to support that kind of narrative, it is to criticise it — but that hasn't been done. That's been completely replayed, actually, and completely supported.
11:59 So if you look at any given week [inaudible], every single story that you see will be along the lines of: look at these guys eating somebody's heart, look at these guys, are they crazy [inaudible]. And to be fair, in many cases they can't report on what's actually going on on the ground; it's a dangerous situation. But they will react to this [inaudible], which is then replayed in almost every kind of left-wing analysis that you can [find].
12:31 This fits into, I think, a kind of conspiratorial view of the world [?], which simply imagines that — you will say, I'll draw back the curtain, I'm going to show you what's really going on. I'm sorry: the people who are really doing [it] don't know what's going on. That's the truth of the world that we live in. You will not get to this hard land of the conspiracy where you know what's happening.
13:01 This can be even worse if you get a taxi anywhere in the Arab world: somehow this guy has a direct line to [inaudible] and all the plans that they have made for every single thing that's happened. But that's quite an infectious way [of thinking] [?], which I think has taken over some of the British left.
13:32 Finally, both in the region and in terms of the local communist parties — Joseph mentioned Syria was blessed with no fewer than four communist parties, only [just] more than enough to go around; but one of them was simply named after its leader, Bagdash. So it shows you the kind of politics involved, where the name is just the guy who runs it.
13:32 So in the Arab communist parties, and in the European but especially the British left, there is a kind of legacy of what we broadly call Stalinism [?]: the idea that social change, that politics — as was mentioned before — is something that's conducted by people at the top, something that is done by elites. And you look at what they do, at what they might think; you look at their interactions as states, in terms of their geopolitics, and that is what politics is about. And then the only thing you can ever hope to do is to support one group of those elites against another group [inaudible].
14:33 And that, I think, is at the heart of [it]. [Inaudible] their politics onto the Syrian people. And that indicates something really sad, which is a lack of belief in human emancipation.
14:33 [Especially] when we have this morning's story from Ewa about people literally driven back to the Stone Age — living in a museum of cave life. So if you have a regime that is prepared to drive people back to the Stone Age, what are you going to do? Do you really have the right to judge how people react to that regime?
15:05 And yet still we see the Syrians managing their own lives, organising collectively. They are still maintaining a belief in their revolution, they believe in that human emancipation [inaudible].
15:35 And I hope that when we have the British revolution — and it's complicated and messy and horrible and weird [inaudible] — I would hope that the Syrians don't judge us as harshly [as we have judged them] [?].
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