Abyss’ edge

Filipinos and Czechs, among others, toppled dictatorships through non-violent revolts. People Power in 1986 and Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Uprising in 1989 installed democratic governments, without bloodshed.

In India’s “Salt Tax” protest of 1930, the venerated Mohandas Gandhi and demonstrators marched to the sea coast, protesting against colonial rule. Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution drove out Syrian occupiers.

Sandwiched between Lebanon and Turkey, the Syrian Arab Republic is a strategic country. “You can’t make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria,” former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote. Now, Syria is twisting in the vortex of an international crisis.

There are is 22.5 million Syrians. Most are youngsters. The median age is 22 years. Sunnis make up 74 percent of the population. Other Muslim branches account for 16 percent, Christians make up 10. The nation hosts 1.5 million Iraqi and Palestenian refugees.

Since March, Syrians have marched, seeking freedoms that Filipinos since Edsa I take for granted. They have waged People Power rallies, often at the end of Friday prayers. Students are the most vocal demographic in these protests.

Damascus’ response has been exceptionally brutal, even by Middle Eastern feudal standards. President Bashar al-Assad and his embedded autocracy have wielded total power for more than four decades. The regime unleashed tanks, troops and snipers on the people.

Tens of thousands have been detained. The death toll on civilians now exceeds 1,650—and is still rising. The massive slaughter is blanketed by North Korean style censorship. Only state TV broadcasts propaganda. Phones are dead. Facebook and YouTube are verboten and foreign journalists banned.

End immediately the use of troops against civilian protesters, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon urged Assad. “Stop mass arrests of protesters” and let in humanitarian agencies.

Bonn, Paris and Washington ratcheted the pressure by lashing again Assad’s use of force and drafting new sanctions. But the most stinging slaps to Assad’s regime were delivered by Moscow, a traditional ally, and the Middle East’s heavyweight, Saudi Arabia.

If Assad does not stop the killing and “urgently launch reforms, a sad fate awaits him,” Russian President Dimitry Medvedev predicted. “We will also be forced to ultimately take some decisions on Syria.”

“End the death machine and bloodshed,” Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah demanded in a blunt statement broadcast by al-Arabiya television across the Middle East. The monarch called “for acts of wisdom before it is too late… Either it (Syria) chooses wisdom on its own or it will be pulled down into the depths of turmoil and loss.”

The Saudi king’s statement capped a week that saw the muzzled 22-member Arab League and six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council rediscover their tongues. Enough of the blood-letting, both groups demanded. They lashed at Damascus’ “excessive use of force.”

As we go to press, the news from Syria says troops continue to quell protestors in the town of Deir al-Zour. Is Bashar al-Assad listening? Or has he already blundered beyond a “point of no return”? Is Syria now in a free fall?

Assad presides over institutions created during 30 years of his father’s dictatorial rule. He has little wiggle room. Even if he wants—which is debatable—the old guard has invariably opted for violence.

There is, too, the once unimaginable spectacle of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak facing trial in a hospital bed. That unnerves Assad, as it does autocrats from North Africa and Arab states.

Syria could well plunge into a civil war. That would unlock old ethnic and sectarian tensions, cautions Ali Khan of Cambridge University. “The result may follow the Libyan scenario rather than the Egyptian or Tunisian model.”

“So what happened to the Arab Spring?” asked Sydney Morning Herald journalist Paul McGeough. Middle East elections and revolts led commentators to welcome the Arab Spring—about 160 of them, according to one news database. With today’s results, McGeough said, “it seems we don’t like the term any more—only 23 mentions in the past six months. Funny that.”

“Given Syria’s geographical peg, a civil war could spiral into a proxy battle fought by regional powers like Saudi Arabia versus Iran,” the Washington Post fears. Collapse of Syria’s Shiite rulers would give rise to a new Sunni state along Iraq’s long western border.

Iran would lose its only Arab ally. Instability in Syria is virtually guaranteed to exacerbate sectarian divides in Lebanon. The big question, as always, is how will a tough Israel react?

People Power has been aptly called “post-modern coup d’ état.” But not all popular golpes have happy endings, Viewpoint noted earlier. The Uzbekistan revolt over rigged polls was brutally crushed. Before that, China’s commissars crushed the Tiananmen Square demonstrations.

The outcomes of Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolt and Burma’s Saffron Uprising were different. “The Tunisian army did not fire on the people,” Nobel Laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi told the BBC’s 2011 Reith Lectures. “The Burmese army did.” So, did the Syrian military. Moammar Gadhafi’s soldiers did likewise in their shrunken Libyan enclaves.

In contrast, People Power here saw teenagers put flowers into the gun barrels lofted by befuddled Marines. No wonder our hearts go out to the Syrians in the streets.

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