It was a pleasant afternoon in Damascus, Syria. Miriam had just finished her lunch with her nine-year-old daughter Noor and her husband when a group of Syrian soldiers barged into their house and started thrashing her husband. Noor and Miriam ran to the soldiers and started crying and begging to stop the needless beating. Noor grabbed the legs of one of the soldiers- hysterically pleading to stop- but was ruthlessly kicked away. Miriam’s husband was eventually beaten to death for no reason at all. He was simply a construction worker. After all this Miriam broke down and said “all I want to do is go back and visit my husband’s grave. That’s all I want.”
Blatantly speaking, the word ‘middle east’ continues to arouse seeing passions across the globe. It seems to carry the baton of constant civil wars, radicalism, political fragility, the pinnacle of orthodoxy, and forever endangerment of even the most fundamental human rights. Evidently, these representations have reached the very status of truisms in this area.
The ongoing predicament cannot be understood without some historical perspective. On one level, Middle East crisis predominantly boils down to ampere political clash between the Arabs and the Jews. It began in late 19th and the early 20th century when Jews from around the globe began swarming their ancient biblical homeland in Palestine, motivated by a modern Jewish nationalist ideology called Zionism. After World War 1, Palestine was received by British just the way Lebanon fell under the French. In 1921, when British carved Palestine into two political entities: Jordan and East Bank there began a violent struggle for control between the Zionist Jews and Palestinian Arabs for the western half of Palestine. The British handed the matter to UN, which proposed the partition of western Palestine into two states- one for the Jews and the other for Palestinian Arabs. This proposal was accepted by the Jews but declined by the Arabs. Subsequently, on May 14, 1948, the Zionists declared their own state (Israel) and the next day Palestinians, supported by other Arab states like Jordan, Egypt and Syria proclaimed a war to prevent Jewish independence and secure western Palestine.
The results of the war were dynamic. The Zionists not only managed to secure all the areas assigned to them by UN but also annexed parts designated for Palestinians to form their own governments in other areas. However, the Arab states regularly allowed various Palestinians to form their own governments in other areas. However, the Arab states regularly allowed various Palestinians resistance groups to use their land to launch raids against Israel- specifically from Egyptian- occupied Gaza strip. Eventually, in 1964, the Arab League organized all these resistance groups under one umbrella, which was called as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
On the second level though, it is much more bloody, gore, communal and septic in its description. Consider, for example, the Hama Massacre of 1982 in Syria. If you would visit that place in its immediate aftermath, you would think that a tornado had swept back and forth for more than a week over there. But it was not an effort of Mother Nature. In its November 1983 report Syria, Amnesty international estimates 10,000 to 25,000 dead, mostly civilians; and thousands left homeless. This incident is frequently overlooked in various textbooks on the Middle Eastern crisis; it is either dismissed as an anomaly or sanitized in the political-science jargon as a case of ‘system overload or ‘a crisis of legitimacy”. The massacre, which was ruthlessly carried out by Hafez al-Assad’s regime against the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama not only outlines various obliterated Human Rights but also gives holistic lessons regarding the political traditions involved in the Middle Eastern crisis as a whole.
Hama has always been a Sunni Muslim town known for its religiousness. Throughout modern Syrian history, Hama was a hothouse for conservative Muslim fundamentalist organizations raiding against the secular central government in Damascus. Unsurprisingly, it turned out to be a persistence source of exasperation for Hafez Assad after he, as defense Minister, grabbed power in a coup de tat on November 16, 1970. Assad and his main allies were not Sunni Muslims but Alawites (a splinter sect of Islam with numerous Christian-like tenets). Not long after Assad seized power, the Muslim Brotherhood, a loosely knit underground coalition of Sunni fundamentalist guerrilla groups started working towards capsizing his regime by the means of bloody campaigns, assassinations, and bombings. In brotherhood literature, Assad was frequently tagged as “an enemy of Allah” or a “Maronite”. Assad countered the civil opposition by declaring a state emergency and distributing arms to his Baath Party loyalists to liquidate the guerrillas.
In early 1980, a coalition of clerics and trade unionists in Hama issued a manifesto demanding that Assad acknowledged the Human Rights Charter, terminate the state of emergency and hold free elections. Assad’s younger brother Rifaat urged Assad to reject the plea and called for an all-out war against the Brotherhood. Patrick Seale, in his biography of Assad, claims that Rifaat told Assad that Stalin had sacrificed 10 million to secure theBolshevik revolution and so Syria must do the same. On June 26, 1980, when Assad was almost killed by two grenades thrown bu Brotherhood assassins, Assad gave in to Rifaat”s argument. His retribution was quick to come. The next morning at 3:00 AM, Rifaat’s soldier raided the Tadmur prison that housed hundreds of arrested Muslim Brothers and according to Amnesty International, the soldiers “were divided into groups of 10 and once inside the prison, were order to kill the prisoners are reported to have been killed…”
Throughout the next year, Assad’s regime was swift to carry out surprise searches of civilians in Hama and assault them on its whims and fancies. For example, the treatment meted out to those who were sent to government jails was testified by a student to Amnesty, “Whenever a person is tortured, he is ordered to strip naked. Inside the room, there is an electric apparatus, a Russian tool for ripping out fingernails, pincers, and scissors for plucking flesh and an apparatus called the Black Slave, on which they force the torture victim to sit.”
Such was the case before the real Hama massacre. When the real massacre happened in February 1982, the brutally was much more overt, sanguinary and anarchic. Such plays almost snub the very existence of anything such as ‘human rights’. It seems that the only right to exists is that to kill or be killed. Ironically, the appalling abuses of human rights in February 1982 can be as brutally replicated in February of 2017(exactly 35 years later). Consider for example Amnesty International’s report regarding Syria’s Sednaya prison – called “human slaughterhouse”- where reportedly 5000 to 13000 detainees were hanged in mass hangings.The report states, “The process of the hangings is authorized by officials at the highest levels of the government. Death sentences are approved by the Grand Mufti of Syria and by either the Minister of Defence or the Chief of Staff of the Army who are deputized to act on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad.”
When these questions were asked to Bashar al-Assad in an interview in 2017, he appeared least worried, “so Amnesty International knows more about Syria than me,” he said, “First of all, execution is part of Syrian law. If the Syrian government or institution wants to do it, they can make it legally because it’s been there for decades.” When asked what was the point of committing these executions in secret trails and without any lawyers, he bluntly said, “Why do they need it? If they can make it legally, they don’t need anything secret.”
This very statement snatches away, from the Syrian civilians, the basic right to life. Article 3 of the Universal Declaration states that “everyone has the right to life, liberty, and personal security”. The Human Rights Committee in its General Comment 6 (1982) on Article 6 of ICCPR declared this right to be a pre-eminent right from which no deprivation is allowed even during a state emergency that threatens the life of a nation.so when the Hama Massacre happened in 1982, mass hangings in Sednaya prison (2011-2015) or when Miria’s husband was remorselessly beaten to death in Damascus, there has been a consistent condemnation of natural human rights by the state. Such vicious violations are grabbed by justifying such acts as “a part of the Syrian law”- laying down a long road from the ongoing calamitous treatment of the civilians in these countries to the basic standards expressed by UDHR.
However, to perceive such heinous incidents exclusively from a felonious point of view robs one the chance to understand the Middle Eastern situation as a whole, for example, the case of Hama Massacre again- as it braches a plethora of human rights but also provides a deeper insight into the socio-political traditions at force in such sensitive areas. What happened in Hama was a result of roughly two different socio-political customs operating in the Middle East as a whole.
First, are the customs of ‘tribe like politics’ – a primordial form of political interaction characterized by cruel, survivalist quality all bound by a strong tribe-like spirit of solidarity. For example, when the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat returned to Cairo from his historic visit Jerusalem in 1977 after leading his army across the Suez Canal in the 1973 war and constantly kept referring to his people as “Ya, Sha’ab October’-Oh, you people of October –he was basically referring to the Egyptians’ triumph over Israel in the early stages of the 1973 war. Likewise, a tribe makes concessions or compromises provided they emerge from proven strength and chivalry in the wake of victory. That’s what Sadat aimed to do when he used that reference 18 times. And so, the Hama massacre was ultimately a tribal clash between the Alawite sect (Hafez Assad) and the Sunni Muslim sect (Muslim Brotherhood) in a game where you either do or it is done to you. Asaad didn’t see the Sunnis as his fellow citizens but as members of an alien tribe.
The second custom in play is that of ‘authoritarianism’ which is rather a persistence of tribal affiliations. In heterogeneous Middle Eastern countries like Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Lebanon, people have witnessed consistent waves of rulers who haven’t enjoyed much legitimacy from their people. As the population is highly fragmented (Maronites, Alawites, Sunnis, and Shias), the modern autocrats become insecure and respond to the threats with chemical attacks and bombs. Coming back to Hama, the massacre that was played out was, therefore, a reaction by a vulnerable modern authoritarian (Hafez Assad) who was not enjoying full legitimacy from his people. Similarly in 1998 when Saddam Hussein dropped chemical warheads on the Kurdish town of Halabja, he was basically doing so to legitimize his authority in the minds of Iraqi Kurdish tribesmen who had been seeking independence with the help of Iran.
To conclude, there really can’t be must justifications regarding the atrocities inflicted upon the innocent civilians, whatsoever. On 21 August 2013, for example, 281 to 1423 people were killed in Damascus’ suburb of Ghouta by a chemical weapon launched by Assad. Morally, it spotlighted the debauchery of Syria’s strategy to deal with civil problems. Moreover, at present, the involvement of the West into the already futile scenario has mitigated the basic livelihood of millions of civilians in other sensitive parts of the region: reportedly, 27 million Yemenis are on the brink of starvation and 3.3 million have been categorized as severely malnourished. Such a plight guarantees severe impoverishment of universal entitlements such as the right to life or personal security. This persistence deprivation exemplifies today’s leaders, whose vision of tomorrow is yesterday.
The Liberal Indian Site 