The second and final day of a
two-day academic symposium organized by the Arab Center for Research and Policy
Studies was concluded on Saturday, 7 April 2018. Speakers on the second group
of panels offered analyses of how the course of the revolution, which became
increasingly militarized and devolved into a civil war, shaped the internal
dynamics of the actors party to it—the regime, opposition forces and Islamists.
Revolution and War in Syria: the Impact on the
Opposition
Burhan Ghalioun, a leading figure
in the Syrian opposition as well as an academic, offered a
presentation in which he attributed the stalling of the Syrian revolution to a combination of the
failure of political imagination on the part of the political leadership of the
opposition, as well as on the "external factor" which took the form of intervention by
global powers such as Russia and Iran. Ghalioun’s paper affirmed that the fate
of the Syrian revolution was never a foregone conclusion, and that strategic
planning and diplomacy still held out the prospect of turning the tide of the
conflict.
General Mohammed Al Hajj-Ali, a high ranking dissident who
previously was on the General Staff of the Syrian Army, also spoke in the earlier part of the day. Al Hajj-Ali's paper was an
attempt to understand why the Syrian army remained largely intact
structurally—although individual officers and soldiers broke off, particularly in the early period of the revolution, units of the Syrian armed forces remained intact and loyal even as the country’s military
was turned against its own people. Al Hajj-Ali suggested that the reason for
this was due to the capabilities of the Syrian state intelligence apparatus and
the success of the regime’s forces in being able to turn the revolution into an
armed conflict against religious groups.
With Ghalioun and Hajj-Ali
discussing the factors which crippled the Syrian political and military
opposition, respectively, Salam Kawakibi gave an overview of the difficulties faced
by the Syrian opposition when trying to make inroads into Arab public opinion,
and particularly leftist and nationalist public opinion. Kawakibi tried to explain why the
leftist-nationalist traditions which dominated Arab public discourse have thus
far failed to champion the cause of the Syrian revolution, in contrast to
fervent support for the 2011 rebellions in both Tunisia and Egypt. The speaker
claimed that the credulity with which the Arab leftist-nationalist elite
accepted that the Syrian popular uprising was the byproduct of “knee-jerk
reactions” on the part of people who simply gave the Syrian regime—previously aligned
with progressive Arab causes—excessive credibility.
Two further panels discussed how
the course of the Syrian revolution affected both the internal structures of
the Syrian regime, and latterly how the course of the popular uprising impacted
the internal discourse of Islamist groups on the ground in Syria. Radwan
Ziadeh, elaborating on a theme first put forward by General Hajj-Ali, pointed
out that the inability of the regime to deploy its formal military effectively against
peaceful protesters meant that they became increasingly reliant, over time, on
a series of both Syrian and non-Syrian (particularly Iranian, Iraqi and
Lebanese) non-state actors. In contrast, speakers on the final panel sought to
dissect the long-term impacts on Islamist groups due to the praxis of the
Syrian revolution. These included Thomas Pierret, Ahmad Abazeid and Hamzeh
Almoustafa.
Further information on the proceedings
of the symposium will be made available in the coming months.