Change of sentiment: Will Syrians gain from Arabs embracing Assad?

CATHRIN SCHAER

Death by consuming poison is a thousand times easier than reconciling with the criminal gang that destroyed Syria and exterminated its people,” an official statement by the Syrian Islamic Council, an Istanbul-based organisation set up in 2014 to represent the religious interests of the Syrian opposition, said.

There’s no doubt that many Syrians who participated in the peaceful anti-government revolutions of 2011 feel the same way, whether they are religious or not. But there is also no doubt that reconciliation with the Syrian government, headed by the dictator Bashar Assad, is coming — at least in the Middle East.

After the brutal crackdowns on protesters that eventually led to a civil war, Syria was suspended from the pan-Arab organisation for regional cooperation, the Arab League, in 2011 and many Arab nations cut official ties.

But over the past five years that has slowly been changing, with countries like the United Arab Emirates and Jordan quietly re-establishing contact. More recently, there has been an acceleration in that process — a flurry of activity that, some observers suggest, could end up with Syria being readmitted to the Arab League at its next summit in mid-May. Even if that doesn’t happen, Syria might be allowed back as an “observer” state, they say.

The signs are there. For example, Syria’s foreign minister met with his counterpart in Egypt this month, their first encounter in over a decade. Also this month, Tunisia announced it would appoint a new ambassador in Damascus after cutting ties in 2012. And this week, Syria’s foreign minister and deputy prime minister arrived in Saudi Arabia on a previously unannounced visit, the first since 2011.

Previously, Saudi Arabia was staunchly opposed to recognising the Assad regime, having supported opposition fighters during the civil war. The Saudis were one of the last holdouts to bringing the Assad regime back in from the cold.

But in February, Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud told journalists at the Munich Security Conference that, “in the Arab world there is a growing consensus that the status quo [in Syria] is not workable.”

He added, however, that any reconciliation would have to take into account the region’s problems with Syrian refugees as well as the suffering of Syrian civilians inside the country.

An estimated 90% of Syrians now live under the poverty line, the local currency has devalued by 75% and inflation is running at an estimated 55%. There are continuous power and water outages and, with 6.8 million of them, Syria also has the highest number of internally displaced persons in the world.

But could Syria’s neighbours help with any of this? Any immediate benefit from warmer relations between Syria and its neighbours seems unlikely because this process is not really about ordinary Syrians, experts told DW.

These moves are “most definitely not driven by a primary focus on the plight of Syrians inside the country or any unified regional desire to improve the country’s pretty desperate circumstances,” Julien Barnes-Dacey, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said.

“This is first and foremost about the regional order and about the external ramifications of the Syrian conflict for the region, in terms of issues like Captagon flows and refugees.”