00:01 Gilbert Achcar: In the series of announcements: for anyone interested in Syria, I very much recommend tomorrow at SOAS [?], 7pm, if you can make it at that time. There is the Syrian woman writer Samar Yazbek, the author of *The Crossing*, which is, among other books — *The Crossing* is one of the best books written about the present situation — and she would be reading from and discussing it tomorrow, the 5 p.m. [?], at SOAS. So if you are interested in the public, and in literature, and in Syria and all that. So [inaudible] the topic as you [inaudible]: the prospects for peace.
01:06 We want to maybe start by saying that the short answer is very, very, very little prospect for peace at the present time. There's absolutely no factor, nothing that shows that we are anywhere on the road, on the way to peace today in Syria. The last glimmers [?] of hope created on this issue were a few weeks ago, when you had this US–Russian [?] ceasefire agreement, which actually was completely flawed from the start. That was obvious. That was a [inaudible] agreement, and one more time one in which — although this might sound unusual, but I mean — the United States, or the Obama administration I should say, John Kerry, were acting as if they were naive, and getting into an agreement that was obviously tailored [?] to Russia's role and Russia's interest, and doomed to fail. And a number of people said as soon as it was announced that it was going to fail — I, for one, but there were many others — and then indeed, as we saw, it collapsed very quickly.
02:43 And now, to understand the present situation, we have maybe to try to sketch what has been happening since the beginning of the uprising in Syria. Because at the beginning there was an uprising there as in other countries of the region. The Syrian uprising was no exception from that angle. And I'd even say that actually, if we were to classify the Arab countries on a scale of oppression, of conditions requiring revolt, the Syrian regime definitely ranked among the top countries in that regard.
03:50 In the sense that not only you had there the socio-economic problems that were at the roots of the explosions in countries like Tunisia or Egypt — and you had them to a higher degree even [?], in the sense that the quite terrible situation in the Syrian countryside was aggravated by drought two years before the uprising. But the social conditions there were a product of the neoliberal policies of the Assad regime over the last 20 years, from the 90s, and after the turn of the century accelerated under Bashar [?], when he inherited power from his father in the year 2000. And you had deindustrialisation, fiscal reform [?] and the reduction [?] of state investment, rising unemployment, terrible inflation, and very high pressure on the cost of living. For people familiar with Syria like myself, what you would usually hear from Syrians before 2011 was [inaudible] complaints about the cost of living and all that.
05:32 So it was a very difficult condition socially, and in the framework of a regime compared to which Mubarak's Egypt was definitely more liberal and more [inaudible] — and I'm not kidding here or exaggerating. But there's a huge difference between political conditions in Mubarak's Egypt, where the opposition could organise — where you had even a huge organisation, which was half one foot in the opposition, one foot collaborating with the regime, which was the Muslim Brotherhood, and you had left-wing opposition, Nasserist [?] opposition — they could organise all sorts of protests, demonstrations, sit-ins and all that. All this was completely out of the question in a country like Syria. No one would dare do that; otherwise you would find yourself in jail for as many years as the regime would wish.
06:34 I know — I mean, I know personally a number of friends who've been in jail. I mean friends who were members of the Marxist tradition [?], opposition in Syria, and many, many actually who spent between 15, 17, 18 years of their life in jail. You enter jail at the age of 30, you leave jail at 45 [?], 50. You've spent, you know, what someone like me at my age would regard as the best years, in jail. That's absolutely [inaudible]. So that's the kind of regime, and you had an uprising against that.
07:10 And actually this was a country in which no political opposition had been able to really organise for a very long period, and this contributed to the fact that it was actually also one of the most democratic uprisings, in the sense of networks of young people mainly using the social media, that helped [inaudible] in overcoming the weaknesses of organisation. And in organising this — the peaceful revolt [?] — was absolutely remarkable, and I should say heroic in its [inaudible]. I remember, from 2011, when I went to Egypt, the Egyptians were completely admiring [?] of this, saying that if we had faced in Egypt repression like the one they were having in Syria, the movement would have stopped. [inaudible] continue, because the regime was killing people, first in dozens and then hundreds, and kept escalating the repression over the days and weeks [inaudible].
08:47 And so the militarisation of the [inaudible] uprising, the [inaudible] army in Syria, is — I mean, is first and above all the result of the regime's repression. And people who are very smart say they made a big mistake in taking arms [?]. You know, such great advice from outside are of no use or value. One should ask how you react if you have to be facing demonstrations in which you see other people being killed in increasing numbers, and a regime which, as now everybody can see, would not hesitate to kill whatever it takes [?] to survive, to stick to power. And therefore it reached a situation where — I remember one of the prominent opposition figures [?] in Syria who told me [?], at the end of 2011 [?]: "We reach a point where we are afraid of stopping." Which means what? Which means that with a regime like that you can't surrender. If you surrender, you're dead, you're finished, or torture and all that. When I tell you 15, 17 years in jail [?], that involves years of torture — not the 15 years, because after a time no use to torture you — but a few years of torture [?].
10:21 So anyway, and now there — you had the convergence in Syria between the regime and the regional counter-revolution, or the regional counter-revolutions, I would say, because I was thinking of the Gulf countries, which are the linchpin of reaction and counter-revolution in the region. But this applies also to the Iranian regime, which is also a counter-revolutionary regime in its own fashion. But you had a convergence of the regime and its backers — but here what I'm pointing to is the regime and the Gulf countries — a convergence in drowning the Syrian uprising in Islamic fundamentalism.
11:24 The regime from day one started saying these are jihadists and all that, to — on the one hand, to frighten the minorities in Syria, the religious minorities; to frighten also the Sunnis who were secularists [?], who don't like Islamic fundamentalism. And the regime did everything it could to turn that into a self-fulfilling prophecy, not least by releasing from jails in the summer of 2011 the jihadists that were kept in Syrian jails, who were [?] later on at the head of some of the jihadi groups that would proliferate in the years [inaudible].
12:33 The Gulf countries also had an objective interest in turning the Syrian uprising from a democratic, secular one, as it was in the beginning, into one dominated by Islamic fundamentalist [?] forces. Because the revolution [?] was a threat to everyone: the threat [inaudible] to the Syrian regime, then to the monarchies of the Gulf or Jordan or whatever. Whereas a sectarian model of Sunnis [?] against — one against the other — Alawites, or Nusayris [?] as the Wahhabis would put it, that's something that fits perfectly in their ideological perspective. So you had this convergence between the regime favouring the dominance of what I call its preferred enemies, and the Gulf countries favouring the development of their preferred friends. And it happened that the preferred enemy of the regime was the preferred friend of the Gulf countries.
13:37 Anyway, so that's it, in very few words: the tragedy of the Syrian revolution. Again, for a while the main impetus and all that was in continuity with the uprising, and [inaudible] in the year 2012 the — I mean, the dominant force in the armed struggle against the regime were still representative in some way of the initial uprising, before the other groups started developing at their expense.
14:10 And now this situation led in 2013 to — I mean, despite the fact that the regime had huge military superiority in firepower, most of which consists in having the monopoly of air force — of course no one has air means in Syria except the regime and its allies — despite that, in 2013 the regime was losing ground and threatened with defeat. And that's when Iran entered massively to rescue the regime: Iran through its proxies in the region, Hezbollah from Lebanon, Shia militias from Iraq, Afghan refugees in Iran forced to go fight in Syria, etc. And this allowed the regime to redress the military balance, go on the offensive again.
15:51 And yet three years after that, despite this massive intervention, the regime again was on the defensive and losing ground. And this time Russia, during September 2015, intervened, very massive Russian aviation, under the pretext — you know, which also gave way to some great statements by Kerry welcoming the Russian intervention because it's going to fight ISIS; either he is naive or is completely stupid. And what is obvious, what was happening indeed, was that it was most essentially an intervention on the side of the regime. The overwhelming part of the bombing is not about ISIS; it's about the Syrian opposition, the non-ISIS Syrian opposition — which clashed with ISIS much more than the regime clashed with ISIS, by the way. Because ISIS not only had been de facto favoured by the regime, and had been [inaudible] dealing and wheeling with the regime, but there hardly had been, until 2014–15, any direct [?] clashes between the regime and ISIS.
16:56 So why is peace not attained in Syria? For the simple reason that, for a regime like this to accept the concessions — the minimal concessions without which there can be no compromise or no peace, assuming that what we want is compromise and peace, even [not] discussing the victory of the revolutionary side and just discussing in terms of peace, OK — a regime like this will not do the concessions, will not therefore go really for peace, unless it feels threatened, [inaudible] at which it has no other choice, OK? That is, unless it feels compelled to accept these concessions.
18:03 And the most prominent of that is for Assad to step down. Because it's obvious that after such a terrible war — after half a million or more people killed, after half the population displaced or turned into refugees, [inaudible] of 10 million people in this condition, half of them refugees outside the country, that is five million people — well, after all that, and the country destroyed, cities turned into rubble and all, there is no way anyone, you know, would accept a peace whereby this guy [?] would still be the ruler of the country. So, and as long as Assad has Iranian and Russian support, and to a point where he believes that he can win — as he is more and more now, you know, multiplying statements about the fact he's going to reconquer the whole country — there's no way for him to compromise, and therefore no way for peace.
19:43 Now the problem, the key problem here, has been that the United States from the beginning — the Obama administration, I should say; there are disagreements about that in the US establishment, Obama — I mean, for the United States as a whole, I mean the establishment, there was a red line, which was: the regime should not fall. And contrary to those who have difficulty understanding that we are no longer at the time of the neocons [?], we are no longer under George W. Bush, the motto in Washington is not regime change. It's actually about Syrian regime conservation, and that Assad should step down, but the regime should be maintained; otherwise that would be a danger for the stability of the region.
20:44 Now on this they all agree. But then they have these disagreements, with part saying: OK, but we need to give the opposition the means to counterbalance Assad, to a point where we would have the conditions for a compromise à la Yemen [?]. Because Obama had said in 2012: for us in Syria it should be a Yemeni solution [?], that is, the president stepped down. Of course it would be a Yemeni solution [?] today: the president steps down but keeps, you know, the key strings in his hands, and you have a kind of coalition between the opposition and indeed the regime [?].
21:46 And so you had one opinion saying that, and the other — the one that prevailed, Obama's opinion — was refusing to give the Syrian opposition any significant support, and especially military support, in fact letting the Gulf countries and Turkey do that, while knowing perfectly what kind of forces these guys would fund. And vetoing everybody when it comes to the most crucial defensive weapon that the Syrian uprising needed, and that is anti-aircraft weapons. Have you ever heard of planes shot down by the Syrian opposition? Have you even heard of helicopters? Easy target. But a great deal of the bombing is barrel bombs thrown from helicopters — very barbaric, extremely killing, without any discrimination. But from helicopters: easy targets if you have, you know, minimal anti-aircraft weapons.
22:50 But even with that, there have hardly been — there have been very few cases, because the Syrian opposition doesn't have these weapons. And that's not only because Washington refuses to deliver them, but also because Washington prevents its regional allies from delivering these weapons. One example: Turkey produces Stingers [?] — [inaudible] MANPADS — under American licence, and has a big [inaudible]. You don't deliver a single piece of this to the Syrian opposition. That's how it functions. So that's why peace is now not [inaudible] again.
23:22 Now, one reason why they are stepping up — Russia, Iran and the Syrian regime, which is completely dominated by Iran; and the secular regime of the smiling Bashar al-Assad and his smiling spouse are actually in the hands of the mullahs of Tehran — but the reason why they are escalating now, as you can see with the encirclement of the eastern part of Aleppo and the very vicious bombing of that eastern part, is because they are trying to make the most on the ground before the presidential election in the United States. Because they believe, as it seems [?], most probably it will be Hillary Clinton, and she is known to have been on the other side of the discussion [inaudible] about Syria. And therefore, with an administration which would be more willing to do something about Syria, they want to create facts on the ground whereby they could say: look, it's no use to try to do anything. So that's where it stands, and that's the answer to the question. And [inaudible] for me to stop, I stop here.
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