Siria, antes de que empiece

No es novedad para los lectores de este blog nuestra obsesión por el Medio Oriente y por las paradojas de la Historia. El Imperio está por dar uno más de sus manotazos para destruir un país y dejar sumido en el caos a una parte más de aquella región del mundo, probablemente pensando en rediseñarlo a gusto y semejanza, o más acertadamente, sacar el petróleo y mantener la justificación a su elevadísimo gasto militar. Leyendo aquí y allá encontramos esto:

"Employing the age-old “divide and rule” tactic of occupying powers, France fostered the Alawite, Druze and Kurd minorities to counteract the post World War I anti-colonial Arab nationalism that swept much of the Syrian Sunni majority. They created a semi-independent Alawite state on Syria’s Mediterranean coast and recruited hitherto downtrodden if not enslaved Alawites to man their occupying army.

Following Syrian independence, the Alawites persevered in their military calling. They created the cadre of officers that eventually took over the country and brought Hafez Assad to power in 1970. Sunni attempts to wrest back control of Syria from the “heretic” Alawites culminated in 1982 in the massacre of 20,000 Muslim Brotherhood members at Hama, in what Thomas Friedman famously described as “Hama rules.”

Bashar has now added his own “Ghouta Rules” to mark the chemical attack against his own people in the suburbs in Damascus. It runs in the family, like father like son, or maybe not:

10. In 1936, in a concession to Sunni nationalists, France decided to reincorporate the Alawite State, then called the Government of Latakiya, into Syria proper. In a last ditch effort to reverse that decision, separatist Alawite leaders – who wanted nothing to do with Islam – petitioned France’s Jewish prime minister, Leon Blum. In a letter influenced by the Great Arab Revolt that had just erupted in Palestine – and has since been lamented as the “lost cause of Alawite Zionism” – the Alawites wrote:

“The condition of the Jews in Palestine is the strongest and most explicit evidence of the militancy of the Islamic issue vis-à-vis those who do not belong to Islam. These good Jews contributed to the Arabs with civilization and peace, scattered gold, and established prosperity in Palestine without harming anyone or taking anything by force, yet the Muslims declare holy war against them and never hesitated in slaughtering their women and children, despite the presence of England in Palestine and France in Syria.”

“Therefore we ask you to consider the dreadful and terrible fate that awaits the Alawites if they are forced to be annexed to Syria, when it will be free from the oversight of the Mandate, and it will be in their power to implement the laws that stem from its religion.”

The most famous signatory of that the letter to Blum was Sulayman Assad, Hafez’s father and Bashar’s grandfather, two apples that obviously fell far away from the tree, at least as far as Jews are concerned. "


Curiosidades de la Historia...