What is well forgotten is the Mid East is that the present regime of
national borders were never art of a historical solution at all.
They were established out of the Ottoman Dispensation as a parceling
out of land to the two victorious imperial powers still standing in
1918. Do not think for a second that the deciding minds thought that
this new regime was anything but permanent. It all was a natural
continuation of centuries of history.
As all wise imperialists, they then empowered an ethnic minority
whose loyalty was naturally forced to act as their cats paw. This
plan always has a bad ending and we have had the joy of unraveling
what was created.
What holds true for Syria and the Alawites today, also holds true for
Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq. Iraq is now partially resolved and the
rest are not. The best solution is also the most difficult in the
short term and that is to set up individual homelands that are
autonomous. Since the cultures are fairly similar. It would make
good sense to establish a recognized Alawite city state, as well
additional city states specific to other ethnic groups. What they
represent is an escape hatch for any outbreak of tribalism.
These provide natural refugia if it becomes necessary.
Today Israel is a natural refugia for the Jewish people even though
plenty of non jews work and live happily inside Is real.
Since the Alawites had a prior independent status, restoring it
somewhat as a city state is fairly practical.
The next
boat people
Aug 24, 2012 10:44 PM
ET
Syria’s Alawites
may take to the sea, like the Vietnamese
If President Bashar
al-Assad and his Alawite minority lose Syria’s civil war to the
Sunni majority, as Western governments have predicted for more than a
year now, the real bloodbath begins. The Sunnis, in revenge for four
decades of often-murderous Assad family rule, are sure to seek
retribution for the 20,000 brutally killed by Assad in the last 18
months; for the 10,000 wiped out by Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s
father, in a chemical-weapons massacre that put down a 1982
rebellion; and for the countless indignities and injustices
throughout the period when the Alawite minority ruled over the Sunni
majority.
Anticipating wholesale
slaughter — calls for genocide against the Alawites abound — many
if not most of the country’s two million-plus Alawites would flee
in panic. Because Syria’s immediate neighbours to the north, south
and east have neither the capacity nor the desire to accept large
numbers of Alawites — seen as heretics by Sunni and Shia Muslims
alike — many Alawites will take to the sea in an attempt to get to
the West. This would create the greatest refugee crisis for the West
since the end of the Vietnamese civil war in the 1970s, which saw the
West first detain and then ultimately resettle more than one million
boat people in the 1970s and 1980s.
A humanitarian
disaster of epic scale is thus unfolding, one that would also strain
Western budgets in this time of austerity — the cost of detaining
Vietnamese refugees in the 1980s, when security was less of an issue,
could cost as much as US$75,000 per person per year. Yet these
looming costs, as well as the looming humanitarian disaster, are
avoidable. Not under the West’s present strategy of regime change —
replacing the Assad regime with a Sunni-led-coalition while keeping
Syria’s borders intact – but by creating a state within Syria’s
present borders for its Alawite population.
Such a state —
called The Alawite State — actually existed after the First World
War, when Alawites rebelled against French colonial rule over their
homeland along the Mediterranean coast in a northwest corner of
present-day Syria. With the blessings of the League of Nations, The
Alawite State lasted from 1920 to 1936, when it joined Syria, a
protectorate of various disparate minorities created by the Western
colonial powers. Alawites — known for thr military prowess —
later became powerful in the fascist Baath Party that has ruled Syria
in a military dictatorship
That fascist Baath
Party is now crumbling, as have other secular regimes in the Middle
East, most of them artificial creations of the British and French in
carving up the spoils of the Ottoman Empire. If the Western powers
today were not adamant in preserving the country’s present borders,
an Alawite state would be a likely outcome — the Alawites are in
fact fortifying their traditional homeland, to allow them a retreat
and, if necessary, a last stand. Syria’s Kurds are likewise
fortifying traditional Kurdish parts of Syria, to protect themselves
from bloodshed regardless of who ultimately assumes power.
But the West opposes a
breakup of Syria, as do the governments of Syria’s neighbouring
states — all fear the consequences of setting a precedent that
encourages the national aspirations of the many other minorities in
the Middle East. Local sectarian wars may well erupt in that
grudge-filled part of the world.
Yet the consequences
of insisting that Syria’s borders remain unchanged, and of forcing
the Alawites and the Sunni majority to live together, are
unconscionable: a continuation of the current killing of Sunni
innocents at the hands of Assad’s Alawite forces, followed by a
killing of Alawite minority innocents should the Sunni rebels win. In
contrast, the case for quickly carving out an Alawite state is
compelling, not least because it raises the prospects of a shortened
and less reprehensible end to the current civil war.
Because Alawites don’t
have a safe harbour in a state of their own, they are fighting
furiously, and if necessary may resort to chemical weapons. If they
do lose, and if the Sunni victors invade and overrun the Alawite
strongholds, laying siege to the Alawite capital of Latakia on the
Mediterranean, their backs will literally be to the sea.
Latakia, as the
country’s largest port, will then oversee a large-scale evacuation
of the populace by sea. And the West would oversee a refugee problem
largely of its making.
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