Grieve Aylan Kurdi but don't live under the delusion that his death will bring out something better. The sheer weight of human suffering we see today won't change how the Syrian war protagonists play their deadly game
The photograph of the body of Aylan Kurdi — a three-year old Syrian toddler refugee — washed up on a Turkish beach, has predictably stirred up a major media frenzy. Aylan Kurdi, of course, was not the first child killed while trying to flee the conflict, and realistically, he will not be the last. But in many ways, this photo may be to the Syrian conflict what the ‘Afghan girl’ — Sharbat Gula’s photo on National Geographic cover — was to the Afghan War.
However, if Afghanistan is anything to go by, then Syria hasn’t even seen the worst yet. In much the same way that the Afghan girl never brought anything but newspapers op-eds, Aylan Kurdi’s death will not change the politics on the ground. But perhaps the more important lesson for the world and for India — besotted as we are with candlelight protests and feel good India-Pakistan films — is that public opinion is almost irrelevant to international relations.
We will hear a lot of public statements of outrage from politicians and basically anyone who wants to have a future in public life; we will have human rights organisations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch milk this for all its worth to make a few millions and secure funding for another few years; but beyond that the question is: What does the future hold for Syria and EuropeIJ
Syria, we have to assume, much like Afghanistan, will be a broken and dysfunctional country for the next 25 to 30 years at the very least. All its institutions have been destroyed, its educated classes have migrated, presumably settlling and invariably integrating into foreign countries. Those who remain, especially the children, have missed out on far too much education over the last few years, and society as a whole has been brutalised, skewing its sense of right and wrong and what is socially acceptable or not.
So, in addition to having a devastated landscape, Syria will have to cope with a lack of its highly educated and wealthy citizens and it will also be burdened with an infinitely more polarised population that will be more prone to radicalisation due to years of brutalisation and depravation. In many ways, what we are seeing is the end of the nation state.
European states, largely through wars and enforced homogenisation, achieved linguistic homogeneity and made this the basis of their nationhood. Arab Republics, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly linguistically homogenous, but a persistent lack of governance means that other identity factors, such as region, sect, and religion and so on, also become salient.
The European human rights and identity discourse shares much of the blame here. Having had centuries to solidify the linguistic state concept largely intact from the wars of religion that plagued the continent previously, modern Europe we should not forget was a bastion of xenophobia and racism — and this did not end on May 2, 1945, with the fall of the Reichstag building.
Far from it, the victorious Allies imposed the brutal ethnic homogenisation of Europe, ensuring that the German minorities were kicked out of their traditional lands, leaving much of central Europe both linguistically and ethnically homogenised. It was this more or less homogenised Europe that, after many years of development, could afford to take a more lenient view of Basque nationalism or Scottish devolution or Irish and Flemish separatism in the 21st century.
By then, Europe had had after more than 300 years to construct a supra-national identity — the European Union that could deal with such fissiparous tendencies much better. In this Europe, talk of separatism no longer means the severing of economic ties and breaking of traditional trade routes. This is not the norm but the exception.
Everywhere else, the partitioning of countries leads to bitter acrimony and wars — like between Ethiopia and Eritrea, between India and Pakistan, and between North Korea and South Korea. The Arab world and Syria were no exception. The notion of Syria as a secular state is what kept it together. How else could Alawites, Christians, Shias and Sunnis (further subdivided into Sunni Kurds and Sunni ethnic Arabs) form one nation, if not by discarding religion in politicsIJ
The frequently mentioned counter example is lebanon — where all politics is denominational. But lebanon is a country that has virtually no sovereign authority with every faction, every denomination being a tool in the hands of a foreign power. Rafiq Hariri who heads the Sunnis has his entire family based in Saudi Arabia, his business interests linked to the Saudis and basically dances to Saudi tunes. Hezbollah and Amal are largely seen as taking orders from Syria and Iran, while the Druze and Christians variously shift their loyalties and alliances. This was never going to be a feasible solution for Syria.
This is the reason that Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, when he agreed to elections, that insisted that the political parties not be formed on ethnic or religious grounds. This proved a bridge too far for Turkey, and the Saudis, who desperately wanted to break the ‘Shia arc’ and needed an expressly denominational non-Shia Government in Syria.
These are some of the micro politics and historical narratives that have fed into the royal mess that is Syria today, with its impact stretching far into Turkey and Iraq. To simply blame Mr Assad for governance failure or being brutal as the monocausal starter of this chain of events is both true and false.
To blame the Turks and Saudis for playing what they thought was a smart game is naïve. Blaming Mr Assad for simply trying to survive is simply disingenuous. To blame Europe and America for starting and sustaining this crisis, though accurate, is futile.
As things stand today almost no one is to blame and everyone is to blame, but it will be a mistake to assume that the sheer weight of human suffering we are witnessing today is about to change anything in how each of the protagonists of the Syria tragedy play out their deadly game. By all means grieve Aylan Kurdi, but don’t live under the delusion that his death meant something and will bring out something better.
(The writer is Coordinatorof the National Security Programme at the Observer Research Foundation in Delhi)
