Kavitha Krishnan

I’m thinking about Indian friends who call Assad a secular leader. What does that term mean to them?
1) Assad killed so many Syrian civilians for the crime of opposition, that the UN stopped counting the toll. Eventually the UN estimated the toll to be 4 lakh. These include 4000 Palestinians killed in the bombings on the Yarmouk refugee camp.
2) Syrians forced to flee Assad constitute the world’s largest refugee crisis. These refugees include Palestinian refugees in Syria, doubly displaced.

So is “secular” a code word that means he was killing the wrong people?

– Assad was killing, terrorising & displacing people whose identity was inconvenient for our narratives?
– Or that these killed and displaced people don’t count to us because the killers – Assad and Russia – weren’t American?
– Don’t Palestinian minorities in Syria count as minorities?

– Or do you insist all these people don’t really count because they were jihadists and ISIS/Al Qaeda etc? Exactly as Israel insists all Palestinian civilians are terrorists? You say Assad was fighting a war on terror, using the same language Israel does now?

– The prisoners left to suffocate by the regime in its final moments – their lives do not matter to you?
– The families desperate to know if their disappeared loved ones might be alive in those prisons – they don’t count?
– The women released from prisons – you don’t want to hear them?
– The little children born in the dungeons of those dreadful prisons, seeing open air for the first time today – they don’t count to you?

Well, if you decide who is human and whose lives matter based on geopolitics, please don’t delude yourself that you are against fascism. You may be against Modi in the specific circumstances as an Indian citizen. But the Constitutional rights you want here – you are fine if Syrians, Uyghurs, Palestinians and other “inconvenient” people don’t have them.

Please note: the government to come may commit its own crimes – and when it does Syrians will protest that too. Even before they take power we must speak (as democratic Syrians are doing) for the minorities who are fearful. I’ve posted for instance a video of Kurdish women fleeing because they fear the Turkey-backed SNA. But you who say Assad is secular aren’t really concerned about the lives of those minorities are you? You’re just mentioning them now as an alibi for Assad.

By the way, Israel has reportedly bombed chemical weapons caches in Damascus. The chemical weapons you said didn’t exist. If Israel had a problem with Assad it could have destroyed its weapons long ago. Actually it seems to have a problem only with the Syrian opposition forces laying hands on Assad’s weapons.

Actual people – including Palestinian minorities in Syria, minorities in Syria or Ukraine – are just placeholders in your geopolitical story, you can’t see events from the point of view of their lives, actions, hopes, fears.