Crocodile tears over Aleppo

Watching live television pictures from the Syrian city of Aleppo in the past week, I could not help but marvel at the hypocrisy of Western diplomats, politicians and journalists as they struggle to put a spin on events, wriggle themselves out of all responsibility for the sordid events and attempt to pile up blame on […]

Watching live television pictures from the Syrian city of Aleppo in the past week, I could not help but marvel at the hypocrisy of Western diplomats, politicians and journalists as they struggle to put a spin on events, wriggle themselves out of all responsibility for the sordid events and attempt to pile up blame on others who were also victims in the worst civil war of modern times. No one tries harder in that regard than CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, the leading media apologist for imperialist miscalculations. 

Tens of thousands of civilians including women, children, the elderly, the sick and infants are steaming out of Aleppo, having endured years of artillery barrage and barrel bombs. Like all humans my heart aches at the sight of this human misery, misfortune and folly rolled into one. I have special distaste for barrel bombs and shells exploding in city centres, killing people all around and turning a 1,500 year old city into a smouldering ruin.

In all man-made disaster situations, ultimate responsibility for the deaths and destruction must go to the person who started it. There is a saying in Hausa that we know the cause of turmoil but we don’t know its course. Syria was a very stable and relatively prosperous country until five years ago when some of its citizens, goaded on by Westerners and Sunni Arab governments, took up arms against their government. If we believe Amanpour’s spin, it was a fight for democracy and against President Bashar al-Assad’s despotic rule which was a continuation of his father President Hafiz al-Assad’s brutal regime. In 2011Western governments and their know-all civil society groups had already encouraged rebellions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen and had supplied to it the dubious name “Arab spring.”

I am not given to I told you so-ism but before anyone says my views today are a conversion on the road to Damascus, let me remind you of a piece I published on this page in February 2011 titled “Arabs, welcome to the pit.” It was a reminder to Arab youths not to throw away the baby with the bathwater. Black African youths that threw many countries into turmoil in the early 1990s in the name of “democratisation” gained from it nothing commensurate to the lives and limbs lost. Many African countries got multiparty democracy and the chance to vote in elections every few years but to what end? 

Africa is more liberal democratic than Arabia is but black Africans will love to exchange socio-economic situations with the Arabs. I am not talking about the superrich ones in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait or Bahrain. I am talking about the average ones. Despite Christiane Amanpour’s exertions to find words to describe the Aleppo refugees’ situation as the most desperate imaginable, we Africans can see from their clothes and their physical state that they are better off than most Africans who are living in peace, including in Nigeria. 

If it is true that the Syrian rebels rose against Assad because they wanted Western-style liberal democracy, why did the Saudis, Kuwaitis, Qataris and Emiratis rush to their aid with billions of dollars and lethal weapons? The last time I checked, all these countries were absolute monarchies with no constitutions, political parties, functional parliaments or labour unions. Western nations that bombed Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya and then rushed heavy weapons to the Syrian rebels were the same ones that looked the other way when the Egyptian military rolled back a popular revolution and overthrew an elected government. I am not even referring to their record a few decades ago when the United States propped up the world’s nastiest dictators including the Shah of Iran, Ferdinand Marcos, Mobutu Sese Seko, Pak Chung-hee, Augusto Pinochet, Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier, Anastasio Somoza, Ephrain Rios Montt, Francisco Franco, Antonio Salazar, Ian Smith and South Africa’s apartheid regimes. 

Western diplomats and journalists say at every turn that the Assads’ regime violates human rights and they particularly refer to the Hama episode of 1982 when Hafiz al-Assad put down an armed uprising. You would think that the US, which just shipped the most advanced fighter planes [F-35s] to Israel to help it maintain its illegal occupation of Palestine, cannot be taken seriously when it complains about the Assads’ deed at Hama. In the last five years when the Syrian civil war progressed from one disastrous turn to another, the US and its Western and Arab allies prolonged the agony with their unreasonable insistence that there cannot be a solution until Assad is removed. No lesson at all was learnt from Iraq, where a million lives were lost since 2003 and the only gain, if you listen to Western politicians, is that “the world is better off without Saddam Hussein.” No lesson is learnt from Libya, which descended into chaos after Gaddafi’s murder. I shook my head last week when I heard a Western diplomat saying on CNN that Assad must go because if he does not go, the refugees that fled to Europe will not go back home. Okay, let them stay there. 

Even the civilians streaming out of eastern Aleppo, you sometimes wonder if they are as innocent as CNN wants us to believe. When the rebels seized eastern Aleppo and it became a deadly war zone, I thought anyone who really cared for the lives of innocents should have worked for the evacuation of civilians from there. Western and UN “mediators” did none of that. Instead, every now and then, they demanded safe passage to deliver food and medicines to eastern Aleppo so that the people can stay put. In other words, they aided and abetted the rebels’ using the civilians as human shields, without which they would have been flushed out of the city long ago. Even after regime forces overran Aleppo, these civilians are asking to go to rebel held Idlib, there to be used again as human shields.

So, despite all the hypocrisy and propaganda about democracy and human rights, the West’s real reason for starting a war in Syria is geo-political. The Assads have been strategic allies of the Russians since USSR days, essentially because of their implacable opposition to Israel and its policies in the Middle East. One would have thought all Arabs will love the Assads for that but Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States want him out because his Alawite sect is a branch of Shi’a. Luckily for Assad he has the Russians, Iranians, Iraqi Shiites and Lebanese Hezbollah on his side.

Nobody apparently counselled the Syrian rebels that no matter how deep you think your grievance is, if you decide to go to war, you ought to know the consequences of losing a war. No amount of moralising about war crimes, crimes against humanity, summary executions etc will save losers of a war from utter misery. If I were Assad, why should I grant safe passage to rebel fighters to join their comrades in Idlib and resume fighting? The young men and their commanders who took up arms have condemned their wives, elders and children to suffering and death, when with a little more patience and wisdom, the problems can be overcome. 

In saying these I am not relying on my wisdom, assuming I have any. In my secondary school days I read a passage in British philosopher Bertrand Russell’s small book Has Man A Future? It was addressed to Westerners who during the Cold War mouthed the anti-Communist slogan “better dead than red.” Russell said the slogan “is irresponsible because if Communism is as bad as its worst opponents say, if we are alive there is always room for improvement.” 250,000 Syrians have already died in this conflict because some people believe it is “better dead than under Assad.” All ye Africans who think your grudge is deep enough to wish to resort to arms, tarry awhile and remember what one of the 20th Century’s greatest thinkers said.