In brutal cold and hunger, over 40,000 trapped civilians in East Aleppo were still waiting to be evacuated last weekend. Evacuation operations had been stopped the day before by Bachar el Assad. Overwhelmed by the firepower of their enemies, broken by five years of continuous war, all of Aleppo’s neighborhoods have fallen, one by one. Missiles, powder kegs with shrapnel, hospitals ran down by the Russian air force: thousands of people have died under daily fire.
The massacre of a people covered in blood and dust has been exposed on the Internet and all television networks for five years. There are only ruins to hide the corpses from our eyes, just like the comedy of the powerful who try to disguise their responsibility in this massacre. They even play the pseudo-humanitarian, France at the head, congratulating themselves after voting a UN resolution aiming to simply… send “observers”!
A bloodbath rather than losing their grip
At the strategic crossroads of an oil-rich region, Syria guarantees the major powers a grip on the area, but only if an iron regime acts as a cop against its people and in its surroundings. A task started under the bloody reign of Assad, father and son, which resulted in the son being a guest of honor at the Presidential Elysée residence in 2008, 2009 and 2010.
The policy of the imperialist leaders during this conflict was far from their humanitarian claims, instead aiming to maintain a kind of status quo. They distanced themselves from Assad without really hindering him, supporting a few opposition groups of their choice to prepare a possible change of leader. So that nothing actually changes… The great powers just want a cop to maintain social order, no matter whom, no matter how.
Hypocrisy as a Program
Our good socialist government and its big brother Obama, who are indignant today, are responsible for the massacre of a people that has lasted five years. A people to which they offered only one choice: either the Mediterranean cemetery for the refugees, or the ruins of Aleppo for the most deprived survivors.
A disgusting hypocrisy, as the French army is involved in the Battle of Mosul, Iraq, right now. A battle that painstakingly claims to defeat the Islamic state, but which engenders no less violence against civilians than Aleppo. Not to mention the bombing of civilians in Yemen, to which France participates “very discreetly”, as revealed by a senior French army officer last May to the newspaper Le Figaro.
In order to fight terrorism? That is hypocrisy at its finest. During the “Arab Spring” of 2011, Western leaders armed, through their regional allies, Islamist militias that hoped to carve out a stronghold in Syria. Using these militias was done as a protection against the popular uprisings in Syria and throughout the region.
A scorched earth policy
Today’s horror results from the murderous policy of the great powers, either directly through military intervention or by supporting allied dictators. In 2011, at the time of the revolutionary wave against despotic regimes, they were careful not to help the insurgents, who were at the mercy of a regime that used heavy weapons and shock troops to assassinate, kidnap and imprison. They have always been concerned with suppressing popular protest.
Now their faked outrage is an insult. While our emotion and sense of helplessness are great here, we should not express our indignation with those who have armed and helped the massacres, but against them.
