Staying silent over Syria is costing lives

Bashar al-Assad’s despotic regime has been accused of some of the most obscene acts of violence imaginable. The international community, for the most part, is desperate to be seen to be doing something to stop the bloodshed, but so far – aside from a few anaemic sanctions and some heated rhetoric – no tangible action has been taken. The violence is only escalating.

The uncomfortable reality is that any course of action is going to be extremely distasteful. There are no simple solutions to such a complex problem, and so far proposals have ranged from the unhelpful to the unthinkable. Proponents of military intervention say that failure to take action is the same as being complicit in the murder.

However, critics point out that the complexity of the situation means that such an intervention has no chance of being a legitimate or effective method for restoring peace. Any diplomatic middle ground is a minefield of competing national, ideological and sectarian interests. So far, no one in the elite commentariat, from the right or the left, has taken a break from moral posturing to reflect on how the situation became so hopeless in the first place.

At the most basic level, the problem in Syria is a simple and familiar one. A heavily state-controlled economy is divided between favoured oligarchs and family members. Assad himself heads a multi-billion dollar dynasty, while high inflation and increasing inequality in wealth distribution has seen many Syrians fall below the poverty line. Syria is increasingly a nation of impoverished and disenfranchised people who are totally alienated from any kind of democratic process by a repressive and autocratic regime. Control is assured as long as a monopoly is maintained over the military and judicial institutions.

How long before the tensions created by such a system spill over into violence? We have seen it throughout modern history in just about any country you can think of. From the English Civil War to the Russian Revolution and the Arab Spring, the pattern is familiar; political corruption to alienation to protest to revolution, with varying degrees of success. Syria is the latest in the series.

The regime at the helm of Syria plc. seems to resemble more of an ingeniously organised crime syndicate than a government. At least, ‘government’ as we would use the term. Freedom House, an NGO which conducts research into levels of political freedom and human rights, reported in 2011 that a mere 38 per cent of people on the planet live under governments which can be described as free and respectful of human rights. This percentage has been shrinking for the last six years despite the best efforts of our Arab comrades. Obviously, the parameters and methodology of such a report are open to criticism – you can scrutinise them for yourself on the Freedom House website – but the denouement is indisputable: the vast majority of the human race is ruled by the barrel of a gun.

We rightly consider ourselves lucky to live in a democratic country, but the way in which the democratically elected governments of the world interact with criminal regimes like Syria plays a large part in sustaining them. Russia – hardly a beacon of democracy itself – has been criticised for blocking progress on Syria in the UN, but $4 billion worth of arms contracts means that regime change would spell huge financial losses for a host of Russian business leaders.

But this is chicken feed compared to business dealings between the USA and Saudi Arabia, a regime so despotic it makes Syria look like a democratic utopia. In 2010 the Saudi armed forces purchased $60.5 billion worth of American weaponry. Four months later the same Saudi army marched over the border to Bahrain to help put down a popular uprising that was crushed with such swift brutality that it didn’t even have time to draw the levels of righteous indignation which have put Syria on the map. The Bahraini government, incidentally, is still a multi-million pound customer of the British weapons industry.

Those of us fortunate enough to live in genuinely democratic countries have an obligation to voice our displeasure at the nefarious dealings which legitimise criminal organisations such as the Syrian, Saudi and Bahraini regimes. Our own government has the audacity to pay lip service to the horrors unfolding around the world whilst remaining one of the planet’s leading exporters of weapons. Unless we, as citizens of a democracy, start to demand that our government behaves more responsibly on the world stage, we will all share a degree of the blame if, and when, another tragedy like Syria happens.