24 / 5 / 2012 : Political assessment issued by SYRCU

 The Syrian cause has witnessed important developments

On the Domestic Level:

Elections: the regime sought to do elections, on the one hand to show that the majority of population supports the reforms offered by the president which confers legitimacy, which has already been corroded, upon the current regime. On the other hand, it delivers an external message which gives the Russians bigger space to maneuver with the other powers in the world, in the international diplomatic circles. In a diplomatic maneuver aiming at cramming the opposition in the corner and wasting even more time, the regime proposed launching comprehensive national dialogue with the opposition leaderships concerning all the laws issued during the crisis including the constitution.. The discussion was conditioned to be made in the newly elected parliament (al-Ba’ath Party has taken over 60% of the seats in the parliament, not to mention the seats of its allies in the National Unity List and the “independent” businessmen who are allied with the regime).

That would mean restricting all the opposition in the Popular Front for Change and Liberation (lead by Kadri Jamil and Ali Haidar) without considering the other parties that boycotted the elections. This means, of course, the inevitable failure of Anan’s mission in finding a political solution.

The management of the parliamentary elections reflected the domination of the hardliners in the regime over the course of events in the country, on the one hand, and it showed the regime’s failure to comprehend the big developments in the Syrian community in the past period on the other hand. The delay in announcing the voting results confirms the dilemma the regime finding itself in. All the regime loyalists won in the elections through fraud, hence the independent candidates and members of the newly formed political parties who lost elections raised their voices accusing the regime with lack of integrity in elections.

Popular Committees: The regime has created an atmosphere of mugging, stealing and kidnapping throughout the past 14 months.

Now the regime is working on forming more popular committees in the towns and quarters, (those committees were limited, in the first months of the crisis, to the regions where minorities live, but now they are being formed in the regions of the majority of Sunnis), despite the threat such committees have on the social security because of the possibility of employing them to serve the security apparatus which haven’t been able, till now, to have back their control over the opposing streets.

Blasts inside cities among civilians: Explosions targeting civilians and around the security branches, has increased lately, to suggest the presence of extremist groups and holding them responsible for those terrorist acts which were denounced by all the opposition groups, both political and military ones.

We believe that when the regime promotes the presence of Qaeda operatives it aims suggesting that Islamic hardliners are dominating the revolutionary dynamic in Syria aims at the following:

- Pressurize the silent majority which hasn’t joined the revolution yet to prevent them from doing so or sympathizing with it, making use of the fact that people still remember what happened in Iraq and they fear the chaos that might happen.

- Pressurize the regional and international powers, which are afraid of the buildup of al-Qaeda threats, especially the US and Israel.

- Shifting the issue in Syria from human rights issue to combating terrorism, so giving the regime legitimacy to strike it inside the country and dry up the resources of supporting, financing and arming it from outside. By doing so, the task of Annan would lose its main course represented in the six points, especially ending violence, so as to get a declaration about the presence of those parties which would justify the presence of its military vehicles and heavy security members everywhere, after the first report submitted by Kofi Annan which confirmed that the military forces and heavy vehicles remain in the cities and confirmed the continuity of violation of the plan by the regime.

The show up of Ja’afari in the Security Council is believed to be a sign of a plan drawn by the regime to devise such explosions, whether they have been committed by its security apparatus or through some extremists who are penetrated by the regime and who were released from prisons in the past period by virtue of the amnesty presidential decrees.

This diplomatic campaign was crowned by the interview made by the head of the regime with a Russian TV channel where he tried to confirm the priority to combat “terrorism that is not seeking reforms”, warning Europe and neighboring countries and whoever lending a helping hand to the opposition of the risks of chaos that may hit Syria and its repercussions among them.

However, when the observers didn’t mention or convict “the acts of the armed terrorist groups” the regime’s anger rose and it ordered its press to attack the observers’ mission. Nevertheless, the UN and Annan focused on implementing the plan , especially ending violence of the regime, releasing prisoners and stopping all torture practices in prisons, in addition to demanding the regime to allow the UN having a direct authority in distributing humanitarian aids.

The Economic Aspect: The events of last week exposed the magnitude of the crisis the regime is suffering from on the economic level, especially with the government decision to raise diesel prices by 25%, decreasing the allocations of diesel to private gas stations by half, decreasing the amounts of gas for households uses, raising electricity prices for industrial uses in addition to a complete failure to control prices, inflation, unemployment and exchange rates which have started to go up again after a couple of weeks of stability and decrease.

The Revolutionary Forces: Those forces felt the political vacuum and the gap that is growing bigger in the opposition front. So those forces started working on two levels; the first is an attempt to reorganize themselves and the other one is to put pressure on the Syrian National Council to consider their demands.

The Military Aspect: The battle for Rastan was a new turn in the context of the military development. Casualties of the regime forces left no doubt that arming and training the FSA has made significant strides, while targeting one of the observers teams for the fourth time shows that the regime is fed up with what has been achieved by the observers and its will to limit their tasks.

Annan’s Mission: The continuous visits of Annan’s envoys to Damascus suggests that there’s no will to limit the mission within the frame of watching the cease-fire but to expand it to implementing all the six points of Annan’s plan provided for in the Security Council resolution 2042; a matter the opposition should make use of in order to change balance on the ground to their advantage and in order to embarrass the regime.

On the Regional Level :

Saudi Arabia warned that confidence in Annan’s plan has started to decline, and the clash between KSA and Syria reached a new level where Riyadh rejected Damascus’s accusations to KSA of arming opposition and called the Syrian regime to stop interfering in Lebanon, after igniting problems in Tripoli which reflects the regime’s tendency to create chaos in the whole region and threatening the west of instability and extremists (a trick the regime used three years ago in Naher al-Bared camp). In addition to the regime's will to pressurize Najib Mikati’s government to drop the long followed policy of self-distance, not to mention the least to be done which is deploying the Lebanese army (at least in the intervening time) in the city to ensure controlling Syrian dissidents and the alleged arms smuggling.

The tension between Tehran and Riyadh has also risen against the backdrop of the Saudi efforts for unity with Bahrain.

As for Iranians and Turks, they have put an end to the deterioration of their relations after the exchange of the Turkish journalists and the Iranian visitors and engineers who were captives in Syria. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan rushed to warn from going with the region into a sectarian conflict on the background of the events in Tripoli and the attempts to give the revolution sectarian character. Erdogan asserted that Turkey’s support is coming from humanitarian consideration, calling upon “those who love al-Hussein” (namely the Shia) to understand the base of the conflict.

Israel, in the meanwhile, has changed its stance toward the Syrian regime through welcoming the overthrow of Assad from power, in a quasi-Yemeni Solution.

On the international level:

The US administration has made a shift in its undecided policy toward Syria, due to domestic pressures (republicans, columnists and the think tanks) reflected in getting in the tendency to unify proposition on the one hand, and approving Saudi’s and Qatari’s decision to arm the opposition on the other hand, provided that the US shall coordinate the process and define to whom those weapons shall be delivered.

However, Moscow felt that Annan plan is threatened by the practices of the regime, the opposition, KSA, Qatar and USA, a matter that led it to respond to all those parties; it criticized the attempts to obstruct the international observers’ mission in its comment on what happened to a team of the observers in Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib. It also confronted the efforts to arm opposition, and under the pretext of the fear from breaking the balance of powers between the regime and the military opposition.

Russia has threatened to provide the regime with light weapons, new tanks and offensive weapons (in an implicit message to Israel to pressurize the west to stand against arming opposition). Then the story of training Syrian opponents in Kosovo was used by Russia on two levels; the first against Kosovo and NATO, and the second to mobilize the Russians to support the state’s policy toward Syria, especially by creating a link between Syrian opposition and Kosovo, which doesn’t have much respect and not even recognition by most Russians. The absence of the new Russian President Vladimir Putin in the G8 Summit and sending his Prime Minister Medvedev could be a sign that this meeting is just a chit chat without real or qualitative progress in the pending issues with Washington.

The remaining question about the destiny of Annan Plan and the possible scenarios:
Extending Annan’s Mission, which will be made either to create good conditions for reaching an understanding between the active parties in the Syrian Crisis and producing a political course that can change the status quo, a quasi-Yemeni solution for example. Or the decision of extension would be made to reflect the international will to control the conflict until the emergence of new developments. The Failure of Annan’s Mission,  in the light of the absence of a Russian-American agreement about the Syrian issue, and the surge of some regional powers to interfere more, this would lead the conditions on the ground to be under grave development concerning failing Annan’s mission and going to the unknown, whether getting in an even more sever conflict between the regime and the opposition or losing control over the conditions and getting into a civil war in some areas in the country, and that’s dependent to domestic and foreign conditions that can allow such a scenario