Kassioun Editorial 1165: How Do We Confront the Risk of Fragmentation?

The project that targeted and continues to target Syria, as we have emphasized repeatedly and for many years, includes a maximum and a minimum objective. The maximum objective is completely ending Syria, and the minimum is ending its functional role in the sense of its specific geopolitical positioning within the international and regional conflict.

Today, we are witnessing that the maximum objective has not been attained, and the minimum also has not reached the point of no return, though it has come a long way in being achieved.

The struggle to restore the unity of Syria and its people, and to stop the negative processes working against this unity, has become focused on getting Syria out of the comprehensive crisis, at the heart of which is the political crisis. Objectively, this can happen through only one path, which is that of the political solution represented by the full implementation of UNSC Resolution 2254, which would open the door before the Syrian people to self-determination. This is because the Syrian people are the ones who have the actual political will to get their country out of its crisis and reunite it, unlike the extremist elites who have proven in every possible way that they are ready to fight until the last drop of Syrian blood and sweat, in order to preserve narrow personal interests and against the interest of the overwhelming and oppressed majority of Syrians, the impoverished and plundered 90%, who are distributed in the various parts of Syria and all over the world, as well as among the current various temporary political alignments.

In the context of the struggle for Syrian unity, special attention should be paid to all the projects the West presents as “partial solutions” or “temporary solutions”. Those include talk about decentralization, to which applies the saying “a truthful word by which a falsehood is intended”.

Centralization and decentralization are two tools for organizing authority, responsibilities, powers, and rights within the entire country, and they are dialectically interconnected. Strong centralization requires strong decentralization, and vice versa. What is being promoted in an intentionally simplistic way is the contradiction between centralization and decentralization, which is intended to pave the way towards fragmentation, either through insistence on absolute centralization, or through an opposite insistence on absolute decentralization.

Among the dangerous matters to which attention should be paid within these proposals are the attempts to link the idea of decentralization with the idea of “local identities”, which takes decentralization out of its direct role in directly representing the interests of people in the different regions, and their contribution to authority, to another, opposite field that ends up transforming the country into a set of local farms controlled by the guardians of those “identities”, whether national, religious, sectarian, or otherwise.

It should also not be forgotten that the issue of fragmentation through decentralization and then federalization, and through exploiting the issue of sanctions and the method of distributing them at times, and selectively using the issue of “early recovery” at other times, is nothing but part of the American “step for step” project in essence.

Pushing towards a political solution on the basis of UNSC Resolution 2254, with all that it requires of making concessions from the various sides for the benefit of the Syrian people, is the only antidote to the complete fragmentation, to which we are getting closer with every additional day of delay within the current tragic conditions.

(النسخة العربية)