Prof. Zikrur Rahman, former Indian Ambassador to Palestine and former Director, India-Arab Cultural Centre, Centre for West Asian Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, said that dictator and repressive ruler Bashar Al-Assad has termed his own fellow citizens as terrorists and traitors. And he treated them brutally. He was addressing a public meeting on “Syria: Humanitarian Crisis and Global Silence” at the headquarters of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind in New Delhi on 17 December.
Expressing concern over the failure of UN in solving the Syria crisis, Prof. Rahman said, “Today is a very sad day because the United Nations has announced this morning that Aleppo, the second biggest city of Syria, has been turning into a hell. And it is taking all responsibility for this. It has failed in all its efforts to stop violating human rights.”
He also shed light on the history of persecution and massacre committed by Hafez al-Assad, the father of Bashar Al-Assad, who massacred 80,000 people in Hama city within 10 days in 1982. Hafiz al-Assad, who was a socialist, was a very repressive and dictatorial ruler.
Explaining the reasons which paved the way for an anti-government movement in Syria, Prof. Rahman, who had visited Syria many times as a representative of the Indian government, said, “In 2011, the Arab Spring that started from Tunisia and made domino effect on all countries, made an undeniable impact on Egypt. During that time, 11 teenagers who came out and wrote slogans on the walls that they also want something, they want employment, they want home and the government should realise its responsibility in Damascus, the capital of Syria. At midnight the government arrested all of them, murdered one of them and hanged him at Banu Umayya intersection. This gave birth to the anti-government movement in the country. Thousands of people started flocking to the roads of cities like Damascus, Aleppo and Homs. Then he (Assad), having realised that his government was at stake, played new tactics: Let the Sunni group fighting against the government in Iraq enter his own country; when they entered the country, the Assad regime announced they were of the ISIL (Islamic State in Syria and Levant). This group was been supported by Russia. You would be surprised to know that all the ISIS people are socialists, Nasarites and communists from Saddam Hussein government who were removed by the new government. When they entered Syria, the government declared all local people who were fighting against the government as terrorists.”
Rejecting the claim of civil war in Syria, he further said, “The Syrian war is not civil war. Civil war is when people or groups fight each other. It has been named civil war but it isn’t. This is a war between common citizens and the present government. It is a rebellion against a repressive ruler. Whether it is Russia or the United States, the agreement of all of them is that no matter how many lives are lost, they are not going to ‘destabilise’ Syria now by effecting a change in the government.”
Clarifying the sectarianism involved in the Syrian war, he said, “People think this is a war between Shias and Sunnis. There is no record of war between Shias and Sunnis in Islam. The war has taken place between Muslims and Christians, and Protestants and Catholics. But in Islam a war never took place between Shias and Sunnis. Nor is it expected now”.