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Another Year… No Solution but a Political One
A few days separate us from the end of a year that is, by all accounts, the most catastrophic for Syria and the Syrian people. While the world is preoccupied these days with counting its Coronavirus-related losses, the pandemic itself almost seems just a small detail in the long list of tragedies that Syrians are experiencing.
If there are essential Syria-specific conclusions that can be drawn from 2020, they certainly include the following:
First: The continued absence and obstruction of a comprehensive political solution has raised in an unprecedented manner the risk of turning the “de facto partition” into a permanent one. The three parts of Syria are living very different conditions, though they are all bad. Day by day, this divergence increases, supported by the rhetoric and behavior of Syrian extremists and warlords, and the American-Zionist efforts to perpetuate and deepen the “quagmire”.
Second: The toxic fruits of the Western blockade and sanctions continue to grow and inflate; where they affect all aspects of life, including medicine and food. Moreover, after the sanctions contributed to the fulfillment of the first phase of their tasks, which is represented by bringing Syrians into a general state of severe exhaustion, the second phase is now starting through the selective heightening and tightening of sanctions on specific Syrian regions, such that this policy contributes additionally to perpetuating the partition.
Third: The speed at which the living conditions of Syrians in 2020 is collapsing reached 34 times the average speed of collapse during the preceding years of the crisis. As for corruption, by benefiting from sanctions in particular, from the absence of a political solution in general, and in accordance with the popular saying, “no sound rises above the sound of the battle”, has multiplied its plundering and brutality many times what it was in 2011.
Fourth: In parallel, the extremists from the Syrian sides, benefiting from the aforementioned factors, and even by invoking them, have continued during the past year to obstruct the political solution, and have begun to tie their survival – rightly so – with the persistence of the “battle” and the catastrophe, even if the matter reaches the point of transforming the temporary partition into a permanent one.
Fifth: In the hands of these people, the Constitutional Committee will remain at a standstill. This reaffirms what we have said repeatedly that the Committee is merely a key to the solution, while the solution itself is the full implementation of UNSC Resolution 2254, including the transitional governing body. What this means is that the clear conclusion here is that the Committee should be preserved and sabotaging it prevented, but at the same time the coordinates of its work, including the location, should change by actually starting to implement 2254.
Finally: After the massive accumulation of problems left by the last few years, 2021 must be a better year for Syrians, in which the collapse must be stopped by starting the political solution, which alone guarantees ending the existential threat to the Syrian state itself.
Turning 2021 into the year of implementing Resolution 2254 is a patriotic and existential mission of the highest degree, which should be advanced against the will of the extremists on all sides.
In the end, it is the will of the Syrian people that will rise above everything, but this will only happen through persistent daily struggle, through “the boring, dark, monotonous work”, as revolutionaries called it at the beginning of the twentieth century.
