No Safety Without A Comprehensive Political Solution!

No Safety Without A Comprehensive Political Solution!

More than a week has passed since the US- Turkish announcement of reaching an agreement on a “safe zone” in the northeast of Syria, and the various facts and statements confirmed what we went to in the previous Kassioun editorial, when we described the agreement as a “mutual lying” between the US and Turkey, through which each seeking to trap the other. Since the first hours after the announcement, signs of this have emerged through the absence of any effective practical steps, as well as through a series of Turkish-American mutual statements, some of which carried a more escalating tone than before the agreement.

One of the "virtues" of this agreement, despite its being a placebo, is that it is a new alarm bell for some Syrian parties distributed on different barricades, which are drawing strength from the US and the West, publicly or equivocally, as well as those drawing strength from Turkey, that their guaranteed open path towards further losses and retreat is to continue their obstinacy and evade from a genuine Syrian-consensus based solution – not a solution imposed by any Syrian party on another – and on the basis of UNSCR 2254, and the achievements the Astana trio platform.

The reality of the daily Syrian situation confirms that the Northeast region is not safe and will not become safe after the US-Turkish agreement, even if that agreement is implemented. Not only is the north-east unsafe, but also Idlib and its environs. Moreover, the whole country is not safe. There is not a single spot in Syria that can be described as safe at various levels. Where there is a relative military safety, there is no political, economic and social safety. At every moment, new risks and setbacks are likely to emerge, that their clear indications are present in a considerable number of Syrian governorates, especially with the continuous and successive worsening of living-standard crises that have no hope, at the seeable prospect, not only for being resolved, but also for even halting their escalation, as long as the prevailed large-scale corruption continues to take control, and as long as the people's voices and their freedoms are still being suppressed under the pretext that "no voice should drown out the voice of the battlefield".

A real safety in Syria will not be achieved in real terms, in all its meanings, without the departure of all foreign forces from Syrian territory, the return of refugees, the lifting of sanctions, the resolution of issues of detainees and missing persons, and reconstruction. All this should be in parallel with the implementation of the comprehensive political solution stipulated in the resolution 2254, and fully, to ensure the right of the Syrians to self-determination, and to open the horizon for them to build a new model, political and socio-economic , that serves the national interest truly and effectively by serving the interests of the vast majority of Syrians, so that to be contrary to the present situation, where very few get rich at the expense of absolute impoverishment of the overwhelming majority. It should be a model that restores Syria's anti-Zionist and anti-colonial role in various forms and phases, and within new coordinates established by a new international balance that promises to end the era of Western bullying, which implies the end of bullying at the lower levels, regionally and locally, which are – regardless of whatever they say about themselves – ultimately linked to the West and its system...

Kassioun Editorial, Issue No. 927, August 19, 2019