When Syrian president Bashar Al Assad made his first public speech in a year last month, he admitted that his regime is facing military setbacks and difficulties.
The speech also featured a new definition of the Syrian identity, stipulating that being Syrian “is not about carrying a Syrian passport, nor about residing in Syria, but about defending Syria”.
In Al Ittihad, the Abu Dhabi-based Arabic-language sister newspaper of The National, Khalis Jalbi wrote that Mr Al Assad's speech defined citizenship as “believing in the regime and defending it, as his ‘Shabiha’ henchmen do along the coast and as Hizbollah fighters do when Hassan Nasrallah alleges that the road to Jerusalem is through Zabadani”.
His perception of citizenship is one of jihad and the killing of Syrian children. He said it is also valued in the billions of dollars Tehran has poured into the regime to keep it alive.
“Citizenship for him is the displacement of the masses and a demographic change in Homs and Damascus. He bestows citizenship upon those who defend Assad’s Syria,” the writer said.
This is a misperception, because it is the ones who genuinely feel a true belonging to the nation and to their land who are fighting the outsiders. The problem with Mr Al Assad and those who support his regime is that they believe that this is their age, he wrote.
“We are witnesses to the age of sectarian wars that remind us of the Thirty Years War in Central Europe. We are also witnessing the rise of Iranian power, about which Egyptian writers have advised that we not oppose but instead negotiate with them.
“We may have to learn Persian after English and Chinese as these are the languages of the future. We are living in a dreadful Arab age, so let us prepare ourselves for the worst.”
Hazem Saghia, writing in the pan-Arab daily Al Hayat, suggested that one of Mr Al Assad's greatest victories – and the greatest harm he has brought upon his own country – could possibly be that he pushed the revolution towards becoming a militarised conflict.
“The continuous violence Mr Al Assad exerted has helped him succeed in imposing civil war, making counter-violence the only choice for the future,” he wrote.
“He thus pulled the revolution away from the universal pattern of the uprisings that occurred in Central and Eastern Europe between 1989 and 1991, and instead he dragged the country back to the period stretching from 1917 to the end of the Cold War, where violence was a declared tool and an end in itself.”
There appears to be an impressive global reluctance to support the Syrians, or even to create a buffer no-fly zone where no barrel bombs are dropped, he noted.
“The meeting between ‘Obamism’ and the Syrian Revolution is one that turned sour for various reasons that go beyond just individual responsibility.
“Barack Obama has been accused of showing weakness in Syria and partiality in the Middle East. But such is not the case in his own country.”
“This doctrine of Obamism is also being tested in Iraq, where it has been met with Arab conservatism, as general as the term may be. Arabs have always been the exception to democracy in the world. When their uprisings began, they quickly turned into sheer violence.”
Mr Obama may have lost the chance to give his policies in the Middle East a dimension that matches those of his various other accomplishments in the United States and to give the Syrian revolution the universal dimension it requires in today’s world, he concluded.
Translated by Carla Mirza
CMirza@thenational.ae
