The "Components", and the Old and New Syria!

This also includes the rhetoric of "component democracy", which constitutes a regression centuries backwards to the pre-national state, i.e. to that period if our history before equal citizenship regardless of nationality, religion, sect or clan, was established.

Most dangerous, is the attempt by some to return to the past when Syria itself emerged as a state in the early years of the last century, aiming, by so doing, at distorting the history of that period, and subsequently exploit it as an instrument in the current struggle over the future of Syria.

In this context, some are promoting the claim that the founding fathers of Syria had only agreed with each other, and in the midst of the Great Syrian Revolution, on the basis of representation of their corresponding pre-national "components". Some conclude that establishing a new Syria needs some kind of "consensus of components".

This whole account presented about the founding fathers is the opposite of truth, and it is actually offensive to great national figures who were distinguished above all by their asceticism in seeking any position or privilege for their own; because any talk of consensus on the basis of components would not be consistent without presuming allocation of some "quota" to each of them, which is something that has never existed neither in the minds of the founding fathers nor in their real practice or in the realities of the Great Syrian Revolution they made.

Attempts to strengthen the rhetoric of
"majority and minority" on a sectarian and nationalist (or ethinic) basis are attempts that lie within the American and Zionist plots to transfer Syria from its current crisis to multiple deeper and more destructive crises, and to convert it from one state in which there is a corrupt but centralized political and economic structure to a state (or several states) dominated by a group of warlords, sectarian, and nationalist lords, all under false and misleading titles pretending to take care of the “components” and their rights.

The problem in Syria has never been, at any time, a problem between this or that “component”, although specific discriminatory policies were one of the tools used to discriminate between the Syrians and to obscure the true division between them, namely, the division between a few looting minority who are cross-sectarian and cross-nationalist, on the one side, and the looted and oppressed majority, who are also cross-sectarian and cross-nationalist, on the other side.

What was and remains required is a political democracy, not a so-called "components democracy". Political democracy means: people taking sides on the basis of their deep interests, primarily socio-economic interests. This kind of alignment is the only thing that can maintain a united Syria, and it is the only basis for converging the struggles of the looted against their internal and external looters.

It should be kept in mind that those local forces who praise the rhetoric of "components" are trying to transform the Syrians into a group of deaf sectarian, tribal, and nationalist herds, in order to climb up on the expanse of them and claim that they are the ones who represent them, for nothing but to steal representation and turn it into a springboard for intra-warlords negotiations.

UNSC Resolution 2254, which is essentially has to do with the right of Syrian people to self-determination, means the right of Syrias to determine their own fate, but not as sects, nationalities, etc., i.e. not as "components". It is the pillaging few and the historical enemies of the country and its people, who are the stakeholders in separating the Syrian people apart into "components", while the plundered majority is the only real stakeholder in the unity of Syria, and in well-establishing a national alignment which necessarily includes a socio-economic stance biased to the people, and a patriotic stance biased against the Zionists and the U.S.

Kassioun Editorial no. 972, June 29, 2020.