Take a stand on Syria
WAYNE KUBLALSINGH Monday, January 25 2016
“THE POOR fishermen don’t even want to fish. They fed up of finding babies in their nets.†These are the words of a rescuer of migrants in Greece. Hundreds of thousands of migrants are fleeing the Middle East, North Africa, by sea. The Mediterranean seems overwhelmed with the drowned. In 2015, there were 1,015,078 crossings by sea alone (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees).
Fifty per cent were women and children.
In 2015, there were 3,500 reported cases of drowning. So far in 2016, there have been over 36,000 arrivals by sea, with 87 drowned or missing. Europe is overwhelmed with refugees, migrants. Syrians.
And Iraqis, Afghans, Libyans and other North Africans.
This “refugee crisis†was clearly something the Western leaders did not foresee when they began their programme to clean up the secular leaders of the Middle East in the 1990s. Their latest victim is Syria.
A mere four months ago, the mantra of Western leaders, Barack Obama, David Cameron, and Francois Hollande of France, was “Assad must go.†Now, with the entrance of Russia to protect the State and interests of Assad, the eminence of ISIS, and the refugee crisis, these leaders have pulled back.
It is now ISIS must die.
As usual, the ordinary Red Indian, Afro-American slave, Mexican, Latin America, South East Asian, African, Middle Eastern man, woman, child must pay the consequences.
Many of the buildings in Syrian towns and villages look like broken nets which fish have swum through. Like skulls with two empty holes for eyes and ten holes for bullets. In this game of global war, 60 nations bombing Syria, east and west, and over 50 armed jihadi, resistance militia groups on the ground, there is little interest over ordinary Syrians, only political, military, economic interests. Ordinary Syrians must eat dust.
Look at this jigsaw. ISIS and the US are sworn enemies. Both ISIS and the US are fighting to decimate Assad. The Turks and the US are allies, both members of NATO . The Turks were buying oil from ISIS; and some of its militia perhaps trained in Turkey. The Russians and the US, as usual, are “frenemiesâ€.
Both are bombing ISIS, but the former is supporting Assad, the latter wants him destroyed.
In this grand genocidal gambit for global dominance, what power does the ordinary gunless townswoman, villager, trader, shopkeeper, teacher, farmer, student, child possess? None. Save the power to stay or go. Stay and endure the bombs, guns, or sell their goods, estates, trinkets and walk. Walk and where there is nowhere to walk, hire a human smuggler, a boat, a ferry, a truck.
In the fog of that faraway war many of our leaders and citizens in our Caribbean nations have also lost their way. We say we do not like ISIS. ISIS is were the most narrow, parochial, sectarian, violent, neurotic, fanatical, racist, sexist, self-justifying, perfidious, hypocritical, fundamentalist, insecure, and self-exonerating order you could find anywhere on the planet.
But the forces which gave birth to ISIS, to the US and its leaders, the puritanist, sadistic terror impulse, is also the most narrow, parochial, sectarian, violent, neurotic, fanatical, racist, sexist, self-justifying, perfidious, hypocritical, fundamentalist, insecure, and self-exonerating order on the planet.
Our duty is not, perhaps, to fight for false choices between ISIS and the West, the US. Not to engage in a Manichean witch-hunt for alleged ISIS Caribbean fighters. We need to shift our horizons, make an intellectual and moral shift.
Our duty must be to look to the ordinary Syrians, the ordinary sufferers.
For how they suffer. Our Caribbean leaders and the leaders of political and civil groups must look to support, not ISIS or the West, in their danse macabre of terror, but the ordinary Syrians both within and without Syria. This is not a neutral stand. It is standing for something. Demand the following: * European respect and non-violence towards Syrian and all migrants.
* The primacy of United Nations efforts to achieve a non-interventionist, non-military solution to the Syrian crisis.
* An embargo on the sales and supply of all military hardware by nation states to all interventionist movements in Syria.
* The creation of an international fund to rescue Syrian refugees in the Middle East, as well as Europe.
* A reiteration to end all sectarian, religious violence.
* A reiteration of respect for the sovereignty and rights of national entities and independent states, and the rights of peoples to practise, choice-free, within religious sects and denominations.
