: John McHugo
: Syria A Recent History
: Saqi Books
: 9780863567636
: 1
: CHF 8.60
:
: Regional- und Ländergeschichte
: English
: 304
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Syria's descent into civil war has already claimed an estimated 200,000 lives while nearly nine million people have fled their homes. This is now the greatest humanitarian and political crisis of the twenty-first century. In this timely account, John McHugo charts the history of Syria from the First World War to the present and considers why Syria's foundations as a nation have proved so fragile. He examines the country's thwarted attempts at independence under French rule before turning to more recent events: sectarian tensions, the pressures of international conflicts, two generations of rule by the Assads and the rise of ISIS. As the conflict in Syria rages on, McHugo provides a rare and authoritative guide to a complex nation that demandsour attention.

After studying Arabic and Islamic studies at Oxford University and the American University in Cairo in the early 1970s, John McHugo's career as an international lawyer took him to a number of Arab countries including Egypt, Oman and Bahrain over a period of more than a quarter of a century. He is an honorary Senior Fellow at the Centre for Syrian Studies at St Andrews, and a board member of the Council for Arab-British Understanding and the British Egyptian Society. He has also written on legal aspects of the Arab-Israeli dispute and advised Tim Farron, when he was leader of the Liberal Democrats, on Palestinian issues. His publications include A Concise History of Sunnis and Shi'is, A Concise History of the Arabs and Syria: A Recent History.

Preface


I


The sufferings of the Syrian people since their country descended into civil war in 2011–12 need no recapitulation. The statistics, even if provisional, are terrible. Nobody knows for certain the numbers of dead or injured. Accurate statistics are hard to come by in a war zone, and the numbers are bound to rise. As of December 2014, estimates of those killed have reached 200,000.1 Out of a population of almost 22.5 million people, over 3.2 million have fled the country,2 while 6.45 million are internally displaced and 4.6 million ‘in need of humanitarian assistance in besieged/hard to access areas’.3

To the English-speaking world, Syria is a far-off country which relatively few people have made a serious effort to understand. The “Arab Spring” aroused great interest and excitement, but as the crackdown on protesters in Syria evolved into civil war and a man-made humanitarian crisis began, disaster fatigue seemed all too often to be the general reaction to what was happening. Despite energetic advertising campaigns by relief charities, at first only occasional incidents such as the death of theSunday Times reporter Marie Colvin in Homs in February 2012 brought the unfolding catastrophe home.

For a couple of weeks, the use of chemical weapons in the Damascus suburbs of Ain Tarma and Zamalka which killed hundreds of people on 21 August 2013 shook the world, but it was not enough to persuade British Members of Parliament to give their government the discretion to use force for humanitarian intervention. It was the same with other major world players. As soon as agreement was reached with the Syrian government about the decommissioning and destruction of its chemical weapons, the issue largely faded from the headlines. The killing of Syrians by conventional weaponry and their deaths by starvation, disease and hypothermia did not capture our attention in the same way. Soon enough, public compassion had moved on to fresh humanitarian disasters in other parts of the world.

Following the failure of the talks in Geneva between the Syrian government and opposition politicians on 15 February 2014, the international mediator, Lakhdar Brahimi, stated that he had no alternative but to apologise to the Syrian people.4 The fighting does not yet seem to have run its course. When the conflict ends – and no one can say when that will be – the world will be presented with yet another traumatised Arab nation. In 1947–9, the majority of the indigenous Arabs of Palestine were forced to flee their homes. Many of them and their descendants are refugees to this day. Among many people in the West, their story remains a taboo topic. But the Palestine problem is just one cause of instability in the region. In the mid-1970s, Lebanon exploded into a civil war which lasted until 1990 and whose embers smoulder still. Then, following the US-led invasion in 2003, Iraq disintegrated along sectarian and ethnic lines. Each of these countries borders Syria, and their tragedies caused severe problems for the Syrian government of the day and Syrian society as a whole. Now it is the turn of Syria itself to look destruction in the face after decades of draconian rule by a government that overreacted to the smallest signs of dissent.

Is the sequential implosion of these closely connected Arab countries just a coincidence? Or is there a deeper, underlying cause that brought conflict to them? In either case, what lessons can be learned? This book provides pointers towards an answer to these questions by reviewing the history of Syria since the Great War of 1914–8, whose one hundredth anniversary the world commemorated in 2014. While the descent into civil war in 2011–2 was certainly the resu