Assad finally acknowledges the Syrian people

Regardless of whether the Eid al-Adha truce between the Syrian regime and the rebels will stand or not – and I don’t think it will, this truce has revealed that the regime has failed in forcing the Syrian people to surrender. A year and seven months have gone since the outbreak of the Syrian uprising, yet the Syrians are still standing firmly against a regime which sees nothing existing in the country but itself. This regime forgot that nobody can deny the existence of an entire nation, especially if this nation is as strong as the Syrians. If any regime was really capable of denying the existence of its people, the Soviet Union would still exist today. Despite the complacency of the international community led by the United States and the UN Security Council, which is crippled by the Russian-Chinese veto; the Syrian people made an achievement that shouldn't be overlooked; this achievement was to force the regime to acknowledge that it is involved in a military encounter of two rivals, the other rival being the Free Syrian Army. The Syrian people's struggle has forced the regime to stop claiming that the rebels are just a group of terrorists who must be crushed in order to bring normal conditions back to the country. Finally, the Syrian regime -without intending to do- has acknowledged the existence of the Syrian people, although it used to refer to those people as "foreign-backed terrorist groups" up until a few days ago. That was the description which President Hafez Al-Assad used to give to his people when he was speaking to his visitors, as he refused to admit that Syria was witnessing a true popular uprising, and that the people whom he thought were tamed by his father's regime are still alive. The Syrians proved to Assad that they believe only in Freedom, sovereignty and dignity; not in the funny -yet miserable- slogans of the kind of "struggle" and "resistance" which his regime used to hide its dictatorship behind. The Syrian people were the first to know that the fake slogans raised by Assad's regime for many years were nothing but a cover for a steady strategy aimed at turning the entire Syrian people into slaves working in a huge farm owned and run by a group consisted of the members of Assad's family. But we have seen eventually that the Syrian people are still alive and will never surrender to injustice and slavery. The Syrians rose up in March 2011 to declare that they will never accept to be enslaved by their rulers, or to be controlled by a small sectarian minority, which insists to associate the Arab state of Syria to Iran and its Islamic regime. The Syrian uprising will never step back because every Syrian knows that if the uprising fails he will be shot dead by the regime's forces sooner or later, or will be sent to prison with no hope of being released one day. The truce -which the regime has already broken- is only a first step in a long path which will end only with the elimination of the regime that has been as harmful to the Lebanese and all the Arabs as it was to the Syrians. This regime was shameless enough to support a sectarian militia in Lebanon, while it was claiming to be the protector of secularism and Arab nationalism in Syria. As it was shown clearly that the truce of Eid al-Adha will not be respected, the world's sights must be directed at the threats posed by the regime against Syria's unity. On top of these threats is the regime's belief that it can divide Syria into two states: a Sunni state and an Alawite one. This belief is reflected in the regime's ongoing efforts to force the Sunni community out of Homs to make it a Sunni-free area. The Syrian regime has already destroyed several neighbourhoods of Homs, and it looks likely that this regime is depending on the time factor to make a change in the demographic distribution of the country. This would allow it to call for an autonomy for the Alawite community in Syria's north-east. Observing the regime's ongoing destruction of Homs would make anybody feel that the international community's reluctance in helping the rebels is a crime, because allowing the regime to prolong the internal war in Syria will lead only to deepening the rifts among the various communities of the Syrian people. This would allow the extremists to lead the change in the country in the expense of the moderate powers of the Syrian society, who have been struggling against the Syrian regime of throughout four decades.     -- The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent or reflect the editorial policy of Arabstoday.