It took the Tunisian people just over a month to oust the regime of Zine Al Abidine Bin Ali. At the end of that revolution, the president was forced to leave the country for Saudi Arabia. Similarly, president Hosni Mubarak of Egypt could not last more than 18 days or so after the Egyptian people took to the streets. He had to resign. President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen manoeuvred a bit, but did not last long. The huge demonstrations against his rule forced him out of office by means of an agreement with the opposition parties sponsored by the Gulf Cooperation Council.

However, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi — like Syrian President Bashar Al Assad is now doing — refused to bow to pressure and used military force against protesters. Were it not for Nato help, the Libyan revolution may have dragged on. It took about eight months with foreign help to topple Gaddafi’s regime. The man himself was brutally killed.

Unlike in Libya’sv case, nobody seems prepared to help the Syrian people bring down Al Assad’s regime. The Arab League together with the European Union and the UN managed only to impose sanctions on Al Assad, which is hardly enough.

Asked if he was afraid of the Arab Spring reaching Syria — long before the revolution started in the country — Al Assad told an American newspaper that “Syria is different from Egypt or Tunisia”.

Nobody could construe the president’s answer until the Syrian revolution was half a year old. Now people and commentators are beginning to see the difference that the president alluded to in that interview.

Syria has proved to be really different from Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya. It’s not that it is less dictatorial or more democratic. It’s not that Syrians had no reason to revolt against the regime. The fact is that there isn’t an international consensus on the removal of its regime. Besides, the structure of the regime itself in Syria is matchless.

Iron and fire

For example, the Tunisian army refused to fire a single shot at demonstrators and advised the president to flee the country. The Egyptian army helped protect demonstrators in public squares instead of firing at them. The Syrian army, however, has remained at the beck and call of the regime. While the Egyptian and Tunisian armies are real national armies at the service of the country at large, the Syrian army is more of a factional army.

It is Al Assad’s army as some critics argue. It has no problem at all in doing what is required of it by the regime, even if it is asked to kill its own people. That is why it set off to quell the revolution with iron and fire all over the country. And although it has been fighting the demonstrators and rebels for more than 16 months, it is still ready to go on.

It is true that tens of thousands of soldiers have defected, but that has not affected the firepower of the Syrian army, nor its morale. We have seen how the army has destroyed whole cities and villages ruthlessly.

Vested interests

The situation in Syria is not only different in that the army is determined to protect the regime for ideological or sectarian reasons. It is also different because Russia, China, Iran and some other countries have scuttled international efforts to help the Syrian people topple the regime.

Russia and China used their UN Security Council veto three times to block resolutions meant to punish Al Assad’s regime. Iran has never stopped helping the Syrian government both economically and militarily. In other words, there are too many countries which have vested interests in preventing the fall of the Syrian regime.

Russia would like to return to the international political arena as a superpower through the Syrian door. That is why it is refusing to bow to western pressure to change its position on Syria. Similarly, Iran is utilising the Syrian crisis to bargain with the international community, and the West in particular, over its nuclear programme. Besides, Iran wouldn’t like to lose an extremely important regional ally such as Syria, which forms a vital and strategic passage to the Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Syria is also part of the so-called Shiite Crescent, which also comprises Iran, Iraq, part of Lebanon and even part of Yemen.

In short, the struggle for Syria is quite fierce among the east and the west, and that is why the revolution is taking so long to produce a result, and it could take even longer.

Nobody is quite certain how the situation in Syria is going to unravel. Will the Syrian people manage to topple the regime singlehandedly? No solution is possible without an international agreement between those who support the Syrian regime and those who support the Syrian opposition.

 

Dr Faisal Al Qasim is a Syrian journalist based in Doha.