A few years ago, at the apex of the civil war, a document known as the “Alawite Appeal” to the French High Commissioner during the French Mandate in Syria and Lebanon during the 1930s, started to circulate again.
The situation at the time was a far cry from what it is today.
The Syrian state, under the rule of Bashar al-Assad, had begun to regain its strength after the decisive air force intervention of Russia as well as the deployment and the arming of the country’s ground forces by Iran.
At the time, the course of the war seemed to be shifting in favour of the Assad regime. It seemed all a matter of time as fighting remained relative stalemate. With Assad not taking into consideration the time factor and leaving issues indefinitely unresolved, the regime acted on the premise that the war could be put on hold and be revisited when it decide to do so. Time, as we know now, was running against Assad, and additional regional factors came astonishingly to change the equation.
Doctors usually warn patients of the side effects of any medication. But the Syrian patient did not pay attention to the serious side effects.
This led to the collapse of the regime at a stunning pace. The Alawite fighters aligned with Assad lost the war along with the regime. President Bashar al-Assad and his family are now refugees in Moscow.
After weeks of relative calm, Syria stands today on the threshold of a new phase of civil strife. While the distribution of the “Alawite Appeal” document a few years ago was an odd occurrence, given that it reflected the weakness of the Alawites at a time the regime was regaining ground, the appeal would reflect today the dangerous reality of the Alawites being indeed weak, having sought refuge under the Syrian state as it emerged from the process of state formation after World War I.
Initially, the appeal sounded more like a call for the minorities of the Levant to be part of a structure that would protect them. The sheikhs of the Alawite sect voiced an historic concern that they shared socially and came to express politically. The concern of the minorities subsequently remained present in the Alawites’ minds even as they won the war, gained control of power in the Syrian state, and received the backing of a major world power, such as Russia, and a key regional state, such as Iran.
What we know from history is that the French High Commissioner did the opposite of what the Alawite sheikhs had requested from him. He did not go along with the transformation of the “Sanjak of Latakia” into the state of the “Alawite Mountain”. The French thought that Greater Syria, under the French mandate, was the Alawites’ best guarantor. They deemed granting Lebanon its independence was a sufficient measure. The remaining territory was supposed to be enough to establish a viable state capable of protecting minorities and accommodating their concerns.
But the Syrian Arab state, which inherited its rule from the French mandate, was unable to accommodate the concerns of its minorities.
Many factors came into the picture in the region, the most important of which was political Islam. Secular nationalist Syria evolved into an anguish-ridden political project, especially when it became a battleground pitting the two ancient “empires” of Persia (Iran) and the Ottoman Empire (Turkey).
The Alawite sheikhs’ appeal reflected a bewildering foresight. It demonstrated the sheikhs’ ability to assume that things would not change, but rather occasionally calm down before erupting again. The Alawites, by calling for the their independent state in the “Alawite Mountain” only wanted to save their grandchildren and their “enemies'” grandchildren from the current macabre fate of victims’ bodies piling up in the forests of western Syria, after being killed or killed and burned by the hundreds, in a scene that some have deluded themselves into believing would never happen.
The concerns which minorities expressed in their appeal to France dates back almost a century now. But the appeal reflected the realisation that the political, social and sectarian make-up in Syria could not allow minorities to coexist or reach a level of humanity were the horrific images shared today on social media would be unthinkable.
Perhaps the French High Commissioner at the time decided not to establish the “Alawite Mountain” state because in doing so he would create a Sunni Arab Syrian state without a geographic extension to the coast, and that the Syrian coast of today, which extends from southern Turkey to near the northern edge of Lebanon, could coexist with the local populations and economic life in historical regions known for their openness and tolerance, such as Damascus, Aleppo and Homs.
What happened however was that the project became more complicated until reaching a frightening stage of brutal killings and score-settling with sectarian and minority overtones.
There were recent indications of minorities’ alarm, which were illustrated by the joint statement issued by the Syrian churches of the Greek Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox and Greek Catholic patriarchs, as well as the Kurds’ calls on the new authorities to prevent bloodshed and the warnings from the Druze during the past few weeks.
History has given Christians, Kurds and Druze the exceptional ability to detect signs of looming danger before it befalls the region.
They have always been classified as minorities, and with that comes awareness and wariness of developments around them. Almost a hundred years ago, the Alawites were a “minority” and so they had enough social and political justifications to petition the French High Commissioner. But their sense of being in the minority eroded after the Baath Party seized power in Syria, and President Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar ruled on the basis of an Arab-nationalist political platform, which served largely to buttress the Alawite family’s authority while subjugating the rest of the country.
The Alawites subsequently forgot that they are a minority, and are now paying a heavy price for that.
Recent developments have sparked considerable shock. Widely-circulated cartoons showed Syrian interim president, Ahmad al-Sharaa, sitting next to the former Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, while trying to “cheat” on an exam, they were both taking at the same time, as Sharaa sought to copy Assad’s methods.
The most worrisome occurrence has been Sharaa’s statement that the killing of hundreds of civilians on the basis of sect and identity was predictable. His statement epitomised the level of disregard for lives in the region today. Without pinning blame on anyone, one can say that this particular way of dealing with death in the region has sadly become the new normal. Faced with Sharaa’s statements one is left speechless. One could maybe use the words of any Christian cleric, Kurdish tribal sheikh or politically-aware Druze leader to try to remind Sharaa and those around him that what is happening these days is not fate nor pre-ordained destiny.
To what extent can Sharaa, who knew of the risks of unrest after seizing power, accommodate the concerns of minorities? It is difficult to say.
It is not reassuring that one of the most frequent answers offered by media outlets close to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and to the interim president’s office is that the state will strike with an iron fist.
Some of the answers seemed to have been all prepared in advance and those who formulated them did not even bother to make any modifications so that they would not be seem too similar even when the outlets differed.
The anxiety which prevails among minorities is exactly what Iran needs. Tehran creates its own majority from the ranks of minorities as it thrives on their fears and presents itself as their protector.
There is a significant Shia human population. The problem however is that that those in charge of this population are Iranians, which prevents the population from becoming a majority bloc. Confusion increases among loyalists, especially with the turbaned clerics shepherding this mass of people insisting that they are Persians. Putting aside the polemic about being the descendents of Prophet’s lineage, there are issues of a different kind at play. Anyone who goes to Iran knows that the country is proud of its Persian identity, and is even more proud of being considered a “minority”.
Of course, the minority experience in Lebanon and its related attempt at harmony did not succeed, as the party of the oppressed, Hezbollah, exercised its own share of arrogance and forgot, at the height of the conflict, that it must be part of a social fabric which tolerates and accepts others, and steers away from the language of treason and intimidation, for which it is paying a high price today.
What is said about Hezbollah can be said about the wide range of pro-Iran parties and militias in Iraq. The extent of the mistakes that were committed in the name of being for or against minorities is so great that it is difficult to come up with a different description.
Take the case of a Shia militia which moves hundreds of kilometres between southern and northern Iraq to extend its control over a Christian village on the pretext of protecting it from the intimidation of ISIS, while everyone knows what its real goals are.
What we are experiencing in Syria in these crucial moments is a very dangerous phase that sums up the chaos which political Islam, with its Sunni and Shia incarnations, has deliberately created and disseminated throughout the region, transforming the legitimate concerns of minorities about their future into a feeling of terror about an impending dark fate that is tragically illustrated by the gruesome images coming from Syria’s coastal regions.
Haitham El Zobaidi is the Executive Editor of Al Arab Publishing House