Arab Leaders and Aleppo: Insanity Overtakes
Humanity
Mahboob A Khawaja
Does
Authoritarian Insanity have another Name?
Authoritarian
leaders kill people just as butcher slaughter cattle. Casual allusion and
changing power metaphors hardly distinguish between people and animals across
the Arab world. The cycle of dreadful
humanitarian crisis unfolding in Aleppo is baffling as if global humanity and
institutions do not exist for other than Americans and Europeans. All
advancements of knowledge-based humanity, law s and preservation of life and
human dignity and international institutions appear null and void. Our failure
to grasp the compelling realities of authoritarian atrocities against the
helpless civilians makes us feel to be standing at some of the darkest timeline
of history. Is the surrender of Aleppo to powerful insanity inevitable? Given the informed and resourceful 21st
century global community, we were capable to avert the bombardment and to
extend security and sense of humanity to the besieged population. Yet, the UNO
Security Council and US-Russia kept on talking and talking about paper
resolution, abstract dialogue and no concrete action to preserve human dignity
and freedom. If values of human life and wisdom were the signs of intelligence
and responsibility, the situation warranted an urgent powerful intervention to
safeguard the entrenched people of Aleppo. Witnessing the authoritarian
cruelty, bombardment and the on-going cold blooded massacres of innocent
civilians in Aleppo, the conscientious Arab masses wonder if there are any Arab
leaders to offer sense of security to the people. Shocking as is to discover that there are no
Arab leaders to protect the people in conflict situations. They are foreign
agents of influence imposed on the helpless Arabian people. The entrenched
people kept on calling upon the global humanity to come to rescue them but it
was an illusion turned fantasy and nothing else. The global humanity, the UNO,
America and humanitarian protection laws are just empty words devoid of life,
morality and just written in school books with dry ink that means nothing to
the suffering humanity in Aleppo. Abdullah 72 years old man carried his seventy
years old wounded wife on a wooden cart and was waiting for medical help but
shell fell and Al-Jazeera reporter showed the clips how she died there in split
second but Abdullah kept on moving with the dead body in search of the unknown.
London-based Al-Jazeera moderator asked 15 years old school girl -Aminah
Abubaker, if she was safe and had enough food. She answered, for two weeks, we
are hiding in the basement watching deaths and destruction and nowhere to go
and no food and no shops around here. Is this catastrophic humanitarian crisis
out of the nowhere? The inhuman political metaphor is sugarcoated by Syria’s
enriched neighbors - a treacherous
cluster of petro-dollar economic prosperity to furbish modernism that prevails
in palaces, not amongst the masses.
While
Steffan de Mustara, Kerry and Larove pretend to be talking about a safe
corridor to allow humanitarian aid and the civilians to depart from the bombardment
in Aleppo, millions are forcibly displaced to become unwelcomed refugees in European
continents, several millions killed and others waiting to be consumed by the
insanity of the Assad regime and its military allies. Are these official honest
and rational or do they think the global mankind is blind. The game is the same
“do nothing” and talk loud. In a global age of knowledge
and information, Arab leaders cannot pretend being ignorant and unaware of the
catastrophic humanitarian crisis unfolding daily on the television screen. The
alleged war crimes is just a scenario for the uncertain future but reality
warranted swift action to safeguard the human lives entrapped in the war zones,
and honor of Muslims and their habitats across Aleppo, Idlib, Baghdad, Mosul
and Yemen. None of the puppets had courage and will to challenge the deliberate
pillage and insanity imposed by the Assad forces and the superpowers. Are there
no Arab Generals and no Arab armies to help the believers? If not, why do these leaders spent billions
of dollars to acquire weapons from the US and Europeans? How could the rest of
the Arab leaders differentiate between their role and what is being carried out
by the Assad regime? Are they all sadistic criminals and violent robbers of
peoples’ right, human dignity and future? Isn’t the same insane egoism and
militarism that brought downfall of Saddam Hussein,Ghaddafi and many others in
the region?
To
uplift their own images, when overwhelming crimes against humanity are shown by
the global news media, some affluent Arab leaders take asylum in the shadow of
British dwindling leadership at a gathering in Bahrain and others sent foreign
ministers to Paris to mourn their own wishful thinking for failure to oust the Syrian
dictator Bashar al-Assad. Often Arab leaders say next to nothing to global
audience. But one of the foreign ministers spoke of Islamic extremism emerging
out of Aleppo if nothing was done. The cynical
minds know nothing about the realities on the ground. Who will do what to
safeguard the besieged people of Aleppo for over several years, is not clear.
It is the ruthless forces of Syrian Government and its military Allies Russia,
Iran and Shiite army of Hezbollah that are fighting against the civilian
population opposing the regime of Bashar Al-Assad. Ironically America, Britain
and France had already destabilized the entire Arab region by continuous aerial
bombardment and deaths and destruction to which the frontline Arab countries
were an essential component. None of the Arab leaders had any imagination or
capacity on how to deal with political problems and approach conflict
management and security paradigm. It is always the Master - USA and Britain
that dictate the oil exporting Arab states in their affairs. All of the
secretive police apparatus are operated by the same egomaniac masters. It is
unthinkable to imagine that Bashar Al-Assad
and his allies could ever escape the accountability by time and history.
Arethe
Arab Rulers Waiting to See the End Game?
Sigmund Freud (Civilization and its Discontent, 1930) noted
that “the inclination to aggression is
an original self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man, and that it
constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.” The Arab Middle East is no
exception. In view of the unstoppable
cycle of political killings and daily bloodbaths across Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Libya,
Yemen, and spill-over to other oil producing Arab nations - and reactionary
militancy against the authoritarian rule and dismantling of the socio-economic
infrastructures - is the Arab world
coming to its own end because of the sadistic dictators? The Arab rulers and the masses live and breathe
in conflicting time zones being unable to see the rationality of people-oriented
governance.Perhaps, the worst is yet to come, surrender to foreign forces as
there are no leaders to think of the future or the Arab armies to defend the
people. Borrowed weapons and corrupt and failed rulers cannot extend moral or
intellectual security to the masses. The question is how to decode treachery,
greed, incompetence and dead conscience to tell the future generation - the
real story of the Arab ruler’s aggressiveness and drudgery interjected and
internalized in egoistic conscience to manage the governance.
Wars
suck out positive human thinking and creative energies to articulate a
sustainable future. How should the
global humanity view the contemporary Arab societies, their war-torn bloody
cultures operated by foreign mercenaries and few authoritarian dictators? What kind of message of civility, moral and
intellectual values do they convey to the watchful eyes of the global
community? What happened to their Islamic culture, values and glorious
civilization? Was the petrodollar a conspiracy (“fitna”) to disconnect the Arab people with the Islamic culture and civilization? The contemporary global affairs warrant
intelligent and competent leadership not kings, not military dictators or dull
prince occupying splendid palaces away from the people. Leaders manage the
crisis when facts of life warrant change and adaptability to the future. Often
crisis unity people of reason but not the Arab rulers.
The
Syrian war will end as it cannot go for ever. Its ripple effects will haunt the
present and future generations for rational answers. The people’s struggle
could soon move to other neighboring Arab societies encouraging masses to rise
against the authoritarian regimes for people-oriented Islamic governance. The
super powers and Iran appear to be on the wrong side of time and history. If
Iranian had Islamic consciousness and unity of the Ummah (nation) as its policy
aim, it was immaterial whether Assad remains in power or not. Professing
shiisim and taking sides with monsters of history and talking about Muslim
unity make no sense to Iranian speaker of the Majlis. They all breathe in
self-geared illusions of wishful thinking. History speaks its own language that
all those leaders and nations claiming to be most powerful on the planet were
destroyed by their own designs and wicked strategies. Those dictators and
political monsters that willfully brutalized the humanity should not go
unchallenged for their crimes and accountability.
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