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Syrian Dissidents Establish National Transitional Council

Posted by: Linda Carbonell on October 2, 2011.

Syrians celebrating National Council (citizen photo, transmitted by AP and Shaam News Network)

I’m not being insulting or demeaning here – there actually is a point to this paragraph. Several years ago, a group of animal behavior scientists conducted an experiment with squirrels. They set up a series of seven obstacles to a bird feeder. The subject squirrel took a full day to conquer the first obstacle. The second day, he immediately went around the first one and spent the day figuring out the second one. After seven days of this pattern, the squirrel had demonstrated that he could learn and retain information, build on that information and hell itself can’t stop a squirrel from getting to a bird feeder. Which is why I was not the least bit surprised when our neighborhood alpha squirrel, having figured out that he had to hang by his rear toenails from a one-inch square pole to get to the bird feeder, triumphantly stood on his hind legs on our garage roof, pumped both front paws in the air and earned the name Leonardo.

The point is this – in all new endeavors, there is a learning period. As each obstacle is overcome, the subjects learn and adapt, eventually moving straight to the goal.

When the Tunisian revolution began last January, it ended in the removal of President Zine Ben Ali, but there was no structure to replace his government, so the transition has been chaotic and disorganized. In February, when Hosni Mubarak was removed in Egypt, the Army stepped in to supervise the transition to short-circuit any devolution into anarchy, but has had difficulty finding a way to do it while repressing their basic tendency to authoritarianism. In Libya, the rebels had watched the first two, seen what they did and learned to pre-empt an Army take-over of the transition and prevent chaos by creating an alternative government in Benghazi. The National Transitional Council was able to organize the revolutionary army, maintain bureaucratic order in the territories they held and provide the sympathetic nations of the world with a negotiating entity. Each revolution has learned from the previous one.

The Syrian people have been protesting the Assad regime since March, though the first attempts at protest date back to late January. The protests have spread from city to city. Whole towns have fled across the border into Turkey. The Assad forces attacked a half dozen major cities with vicious military might during Ramadan. There is not in Syria a clear territorial division the way there was in Libya. The protesters do not hold any city or province. They are spread out across all of Libya with no central organization. Nonetheless, they have just established a Syrian National Council, a fairly loose group of dissident leaders from various factions with the common goal of creating an alternative government for the day when they are needed. The SNC has accused Bashar Assad of pushing the nation to the brink of civil war. The creation of the SNC may easily be the declaration of that war.

Soldiers have individually and in groups defected over the course of the last four months, and the dissidents have started to assemble guns and weapons. Gunmen ambushed the son of a close Assad ally, the top Sunni cleric, Grand Mufti Ahmad Badreddine Hassoun. Photos of armed dissidents (and pictures of armed regime security men in civilian clothing) have been broadcast to “prove” to the citizens that the rebellion is an invasion by either a terrorist group or a foreign force of some kind. The Army is the wild card in this rebellion, much the way it was in Egypt. The leadership is from the minority Alawite Shia sect, while the soldiers are mostly Sunni. Since the rise of Hafez al-Assad in 1970, only Alawites have been allowed to hold positions of power, even though the Shia represent less than 15% of the ethnically and religiously diverse population.

In a very bold move, American ambassador Robert Ford (whose confirmation has been held up by recalcitrant Republicans in the Senate) has made contact with the dissidents, while coming under rotten egg attack in his vehicle. The Al Baath newspaper, the official mouth of the regime, said that Ford has been supporting the rebels and should expect more “unpleasant treatment” if he continues to do so. The attacks on Ford prompted Secretary of State Clinton to upbraid our Senate for delaying Ford’s confirmation, and caused the State Department to summon the Syrian ambassador for a little chat. On Thursday, Ford visited Hassan Abdul-Azim, a prominent opposition figure in Damascus, the latest in a series of expeditions outside his embassy in defiance of “requests” by the regime that he stay in the embassy compound. Both the compound and Ford’s home have been the sites of minor attacks.

On the heels of five days of intense battles between army defectors and the regime’s forces, Bourhan Ghalioun, a major opposition leader, read out the formal founding statement of the Syrian National Council at a news conference in Istanbul, Turkey. He accused the regime of trying to foment sectarian violence to retain power. He said, “I think that [the Assad] regime has completely lost the world’s trust. The world is waiting for a united Syrian [opposition] that can provide the alternative to this regime, so taht they can recognize it. The council denounces the [regime’s] policy of sectarian incitement…which threatens national unity and is pushing the country to the brink of civil war.” In one of their most unbelievable moves, the regime attacked the coastal city of Latakia, an Alawite enclave which also contains a large Palestinian population.

The dissidents have hesitated to start an all out war with the Assad regime in part because they were not ready and in part because of the memory of the last time Syrians tried to wrest their nation from the Assads. In 1982, Hafez al-Assad sent a force into the city of Hamas where up to 20,000 civilians were indiscriminately killed. The number of dead dissidents in this rebellion is approaching 3,000 throughout the country. The Assad regime is specifically President Bashar al-Assad, his brother Maher who is head of the security forces and their brother-in-law, Gen. Assef Shawqat, deputy chief of the Army. The senior councils and advisors are mostly left over from Hafez’s time. When Hafez died, in 2000, the constitution had to be amended to allow Bashar to assume the presidency. He was too young at the time, being only 35. His English-born wife, Asma al-Assad, was an investment banker before their marriage and may be the financial mind behind the regime.

Until last week, the protesters had tried to keep the rebellion peaceful, making certain that no one took up arms even to defend themselves when snipers fired on demonstrations and funerals. But there is only so long any people will allow themselves to be mowed down with machine guns or have their homes shelled out from under themselves. The first incidents took place in April and May when, according to some witnesses, defecting soldiers fired on the security forces to protect protesters.

The announcement of the formation of the Syrian National Council resulted in Syrians going into the streets in the southern and central provinces to celebrate, even if they were being a bit premature about it. The Council is an attempt to umbrella all the various dissident groups and build cross-ethnic and intra-sectarian unity. Syria has had a history of relatively peaceful relations among its diverse population groups, but it can be a fragile peace if the wrong buttons are pushed.

The Syrian people have endured 41 years of a brutal, de facto monarchy. Bashar al-Assad’s promised reforms have never materialized. It was thought that Bashar was being blocked by the old guard left by his father, his elder handlers, but his actions since March have proven that he is indeed his father’s son and heir – and heir to a murderous nature that will broach no threat to his absolute power.

Europe, which has the strongest trade ties with Syria, has imposed sanctions including a ban on importation of Syrian oil and further sanctions are being pursued by several governments including the United States. It is unlikely that there will be action similar to that in Libya because there are no clear front lines and the population of Syria is far denser than that of Libya. It would be practically impossible to use airstrikes effectively to aid the rebellion.