April 24, 2014 | Quote
Syria Announces Presidential Elections for June
Monday the Syrian regime announced that presidential elections will be held June 3. The State Department dismissed the news. “The fact that you would even think you can hold free and fair elections in the middle of a civil war,” said a State Department spokesman, “is absurd.”
It is surely the case that the reelection of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad will not be free and fair. The last time Syrians went to the polls in 2007, Assad won with 97.62 percent of the vote, a slight increase over his 97.29 tally in 2000. And this was all before Assad started shooting at unarmed protestors in March 2011. Now some 160,000 corpses later, it’s unlikely many Syrians will risk making their opposition to Assad known by voting against him. So yes, as the State Department notes, presidential elections in Syria, and especially now in the middle of a civil war, are absurd. The question then is, why is the Obama administration campaigning on behalf of Assad?
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The administration’s public statements regarding a post-Assad Syria showed that it misunderstood not only the nature of sectarian conflict, but also the thrust of Assad’s particular project. It was Assad after all who had established the rules of the bloody game of revenge that the White House warned his victims not to play. The regime’s campaign of sectarian cleansing is meant to ensure that the Sunni community’s inevitable desire to call in blood debts would compel the Alawites and other minority communities to align themselves with the regime. As Tony Badran, fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote in 2012, the “pattern of deliberate sectarian killings [is] the product of cold deliberation by Assad. The Syrian dictator is seeking to irredeemably tie the fate of the Alawites to his own.”