Active promotion of revolutions has been very prominent right from 1790s when the French revolutionaries jumped on the bandwagon for internationalist diplomacy. Over the years, this process of ‘exporting the revolutions‘ has been used by super-powers to thrash the flawed government of developing countries and impose imperialism. They mostly express their impeccability when questioned about the clandestine manner in which they train outside revolutionaries, militants and rebels. But there are few who pay the price. For example, ‘By challenging the legitimacy of all foreign interventions, Bolsheviks invited all foreign governments to challenge their own.’ Interestingly, the Syrian uprising has provided an opportunistic platform to western powers to use their alliances and hegemony to overthrow Assad regime.
In a meeting of Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Saudi Arabia has backed the arming of Syrian guerrilla groups. Riyadh has been transporting arms to Syria through the Sunni tribal ally groups in Iraq and Lebanon. As Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, Qatar’s prime minister has also backed the arming of Syrian rebels. FSA is being funneled with Russian Anti-tank missiles and sophisticated weapons system from various sympathizers from Assad’s military. Even Libyan interim leader Mustafa Abdul Jalil has supported Syrian rebels as around 600 Libyans have transported on Syrian soil to fight as volunteers.
The Free Syrian Army which is disorganized, cluttered into groups of rebels, has definitely become a fiction mailbox, pretending to reach out to innocent civilians. Marc Lynch has intelligently questioned if the process of arming FSA would lead to any immediate results. He predicts three outcomes out of this phenomenon. First, the rebels use the arms for their defence or secondly, they overpower the Syrian military and force them to surrender. Finally, the rebels and the military can even out each other’s power and eventually negotiate. What most powers do not think about is that since FSA contains several groups, often splitting due to their lack of agreement. The entire rat race to get arms would cause severe competition in these armed gangs, leading to further chaos and militancy.
Unfortunately, Syria is not like China or Iran where the foreign interventionists and their real agendas can be filtered or understood. For example, the British Embassy in Peking was burnt by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution in 1967. The US Embassy seizure in Tehran in 1979 during the Iranian revolution has permanently soured US-Iran relations. At the same time, history is replete with examples where the ‘Syria chapter’ has been repeated, on and on.
- Soviet provisions used to supply arms, training and advisers through Comintern to underground military units in communist countries.
- Chinese supported the Vietnam for opposition to France from 1950-1954.
- Cuba provided aid to Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua after 1977.
- People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen provided bases and trainings to arm guerrillas to Oman and North Yemen. After its establishment in 1967, it also deployed guerrillas for sporadic clashes with Saudi Arabia.
- Bolsheviks attempted to assist revolutionaries in Mongolia, Iran and Poland in the 1920s.
- Iran supported militants in Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan.
On the other hand, just like Russia is supporting arms supplies to Syria, USSR was also involved in arming China and Vietnam during 1950s, Cuba and Vietnam during 1960s and Angola and Mozambique during 1970s. Well, it was Cuba and Vietnam which caused US and USSR to drift apart, eventually dodging the nuclear war in 1962.
Therefore, this entire trend of arming the revolutionaries by powerful nations is not new. One can find the residue of Marxist internationalist agenda of creating continuous and inevitable world wide revolutionary upheaval in such attempts. Very often, the thin defining line differentiating revolution from nationalism is erased.
In Syria, the uprisings are being used as an ‘instrument’ where the internationalism of western and Arab powers is being adopted for their own selfish interests rather than social justice and social order. There is an evident gap in the overlapping of revolutionary aspiration and capability because most of the Syrian rebels are fighting on abstract and anonymous grounds. It makes them vulnerable and eventuate into mortals fighting on lost cause.
shubhdachaudhary 