A People's History of Syria--Conclusion: July 2013 to June 2014 Period

During 2013 and 2014, the foreign government-backed Syrian rebel groups’ attempt to violently overthrow Bashar Assad’s historically undemocratic Baath regime continued. In a Sept. 2, 2013 message “to all Communist Parties and Unions around the world,” the secular left Syrian Communist Party (Unified) group indicated, from its point of view, what had happened in Syria between late 2011 and the fall of 2013, in the following way:

“You know that our country- Syria- has been being exposed for more than twenty months, to a war lunched against it by scores of imperialist states, besides other countries that move round them as satellites.

“Their aim is to destroy the Syrian state that stands as an obstacle on the road of those trying to impose the plan of a `greater Middle East’, after breaking down the states in the region and replacing them with small entities fighting one another, to impose absolute domination on the oil and gas resources; to eliminate the Palestinian problem in a way extremely opposite to the interests of the Palestinian people.

“These countries manipulated the mistakes and shortcomings of the regime on the one hand, and the popular movements opposing these shortcomings. The movements were peaceful at first, later they turned into armed ones, which received support on a wide scale from the alliance that emerged consisting of U.S.A, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Turkey occupied the border exits with Syria, to help weapons being smuggled, the entrance of thousands of mercenaries calling themselves as Jihadists who built camps for training supporters and allies…These actions are flagrant violation of the international law which prohibits any country to use its territories to attack its neighbors. We know that Turkey, alone, can never do these things without American, European and Gulf States support….

“Syria never believes that the solution of the problem is a military one, rather, it has ever since the birth of the problem called for a peaceful and political solution through a comprehensive national dialogue…. Importantly enough, the Syrian government has declared a new peaceful initiative.

“The initiatives, farther, emphasize the need for democratic reforms, a new constitution, besides a new general and national pact which is to be prepared by all forces including the opposition….Unfortunately, the initiative has been refused instantly by the armed… groups and those who support it and demand that violence…continue…

“So far the Syrian people have paid a very heavy price, tens of thousands of innocent civilian have been killed. Today Syria is exposed to a human catastrophe.

About three millions Syrian citizens have fled their houses and become internally displaced refugees in neighboring countries living in unbelievably miserable conditions needing food and medicine….”

Estimates of the number of Syrians who have been killed since the initial non-violent street protests began in March 2011 are varied.

As of July 2013, United Nations officials estimated that over 100,000 people in Syria had been killed during the post-March 2011 uprising and armed conflict in Syria, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation [CBC]’s website; while a Wikipedia entry indicates that estimates of the number of people killed during the uprising and armed conflict in Syria between March 2011 and May 2014 vary from 108,000 to 162,000.

Of the people in Syria killed between March 2011 and early 2014 during the uprising and armed conflict, an estimated 30,000 to 37,685 of the slain were members of the Assad Baath regime’s Syrian military and police forces, and an estimated 23,000 more were members of Syrian militias that are loyal to the Baath regime, according to the same Wikipedia entry; while an estimated 42,000 to 62,000 of the dead—including an estimated 13,500 slain foreign Islamic fundamentalist fighters—were members of the armed Syrian insurgent groups attempting to overthrow Assad’s Baath regime.

United Nations officials also estimated that--by the beginning of 2014--of the estimated 22.4 million people who lived in Syria in early 2010, around 2.4 million Syrians had fled from Syria due to the post-March 2011 uprising and armed conflict; and that 75 percent of the refugees from Syria were women and children, according to the CBC’s website. In addition, the same website also noted that United Nations officials estimate that since March 2011, over 4 million people still living within Syria’s own territory have also been displaced, due to the impact of the uprising and armed conflict.

But the history of people who live in Syria seems to indicate that neither Turkish, UK, French, or Israeli military occupation or bombing of Syrian territory--nor the continuation of covert or overt foreign government funding and arming of secular or religiously sectarian armed rebel groups--has ever brought much democratization, freedom, economic justice or domestic peace for the majority of the people who have lived in Syria during the last 150 years.

(end of conclusion. Epilogue to follow.)

A People's History of Syria--Part 6: 1922 to 1925 Period

After being imprisoned in 1922 by French imperialist authorities in Syria for 17 months on Arwad Island, the now-defunct Iron Hand Society’s former leader, Dr. Abdal-Rahman Shahbandar, was then sent into exile by French General Weygand, who was in charge of the French occupation troops in Syria. But by the early Summer of 1924, French authorities apparently felt that Shahbandar no longer represented an anti-imperialist Syrian nationalist political threat to continued French rule in Syria, and so they allowed Shahbandar to return to Syria from exile at that time. As Michael Provence’s The Great Syrian Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism observed, “by 1925 the occupation and pacification of Syria was presumed complete,” and “few imagined that nationalist resistance would emerge in the countryside and spread to the cities—yet this is precisely what happened.”

According to Philip Khoury’s Syria and The French Mandate, after the French government reformed Syria’s judicial system so that “any foreign national involved in a commercial or civil dispute” in Syria could “have his case tried in a court presided over by a French judge” and not by a Syrian judge (and in which “the majority of judges were to be French”), Syrian nationalist lawyers of the Union of Lawyers in Damascus organized protests in 1925. In addition, by 1925, “the stark reality of life in a garrison state in which the French arrested and jailed or exiled scores of their political opponents, using specially constituted military tribunals headed by Frenchmen” also sparked protests in 1925, according to the same book.  The Great Syrian Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism also noted that under French imperialist control of Syria during the first half of the Roaring Twenties, “inflation squeezed people’s income and savings” in Syria, “drought had gripped southern Syria for 3 or 4 years,” the “tax burden on cultivators had risen,” and “heavy-handed direct military rule nurtured nationalist and anti-imperialist feeling among the mandate population.” 

Syria and the French Mandate also observed that discontent with French colonial rule in Syria increased among Muslims in Syria after French authorities transferred “the Syrian section of the Muslim-owned Hejaz Railway to a French railroad company in 1924” because the Hejaz Railway had been “the only railway in Syria not built and owned by Europeans.” In addition, because “the French treated Syria as an imperialist possession to be exploited in the `old’ colonial manner” and “their economic policies” just “promoted French economic interests,” in 1924 “in Aleppo…a French group received the electricity and tramways concession” and were “guaranteed revenues of 8 percent of the invested capital” by French authorities, according to the same book.

So when the nationalist Syrian People’s Party--that the formerly jailed and exiled Iron-Hand Society leader Shahbandar now led--called for a protest in Damascus against the visit of Lord Balfour (the UK imperialist politician whose declaration during World War I had expressed UK government support for the Zionist movement’s establishment of settlements in UK imperialist-controlled Palestine during the 1920s) on Apr. 8, 1925, according to Syria and The French Mandate, the following happened:

“Huge demonstrations in the town were organized against him. Some 10,000 protesters, including hundreds of high school students, gathered at the Umayyad Mosque. While police and gendarmes tried to break up the crowd, Balfour made a hurried exodus to Beirut, escorted by French troops and airplanes. Twenty-six casualties were reported.”

By June 1925, “some 1,000 persons in Damascus” had joined the secular nationalist People’s Party that Dr. Shahbandar led; although, “in spite of its popular support” the urban-based People’s Party was still “essentially an elitist organization” controlled by absentee Syrian landowners, Syrian merchants and Syrian intellectuals, according to the same book. But even without the Damascus-based elitist People’s Party having any organized link to the mass of Syrians who lived in rural areas, French imperialist rule was so unpopular in Syria that in the Summer of 1925 another revolt of people in Syria against the military occupation of their country by French imperialist troops erupted.

(end of part 6)