Q+A: Paul Holmes Interviews Robert Fisk, Middle East Expert
Paul Holmes Interviews Robert Fisk, Middle East
Expert.
Points of Interest:
Fisk: imminent collapse of Assad’s regime against armed opposition is “wishful thinking”; sectarian violence to continue.
Assad desires reforms but is losing time so has no choice but fight on.
Syrian Opposition lacks definition and leadership, making it hard for ‘West’ to act.
Assad’s fight for survival will create bloody civil war.
Syria’s uprising very different from Tunisia, Egypt
and the rest: Treating Arab uprisings as the same will
lead to mistakes.
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PAUL HOLMES INTERVIEWS ROBERT
FISK
PAUL HOLMES
A
short time ago, about an hour ago, I spoke to Robert Fisk,
Middle East expert, Middle East historian, author and
columnist with Britain’s Independent newspaper, in Beirut,
and I asked him about that suicide bombing overnight and the
troops said to be massing outside Damascus. What did he make
of it?
ROBERT FISK - Middle East
Expert
Well, I think that the terrible
blood-letting in Syria is going to continue. Um, it’s
going to carry on. We’ve got a situation of near civil war
between the regime and the people, and it’s going to
continue. It’s a terrible thing, because the Syrians
don’t want a civil war, but the regime, which is
effectively an Alawite, um, Shiite dominated regime, uh,
which asks the Christians and Jews to be their supporters -
which they are, in effect, tragically - um, are effectively
fighting the mass of the Sunni Muslim regime - or the Sunni
Muslim group, who are the majority in Syria. And it’s a
great tragedy in that we are seeing in a secular nation a
sectarian war. And the Syrian war is going to continue. But
I would say one thing - that, you know, people say Assad is
about to collapse, because he’s horrible and nasty and he
uses torture - which is true. I think we are being the
victims of wish fulfilment. I’m not sure the regime will
collapse that quickly. I’m not sure that the regime was
going to collapse as swiftly as we think against the armed
opposition. I’m not at all sure that things are going to
follow the way in which our leaders, our Western leaders,
are going to claim.
PAUL So, does
Assad have any desire for reform, and could he do so even if
he wanted? I mean, these emails the other day, the emails
between him and his wife indicate a kind of a terrible
disconnect between them and the rest of the country. So does
he want reform?
ROBERT Well, you
know, I have a feeling- I first met Bashar Assad and his
wife just after his father died of a heart attack, um, 12
years ago, and I got the impression then that he really
wanted to change Syria. His wife is not a stupid woman.
She’s been accused of being Lady Macbeth, Marie
Antoinette, etc, etc. This is trial journalism She is a
tough, ruthless woman, but she’s not stupid, and nor is
her husband. I think that the problem is that, you see,
Bashar al-Assad wants a new Syria. I think he genuinely
wants it. But he can’t move it forward at the speed that
it needs You know, in other words, the end of the Ba’ath
party, the beginning of democracy. And he is faced with a
situation where if he pushes for the kind of democracy he
envisages, or perhaps does - let’s not give him too much
credit. Um, therefore there will be a revolution against
him. A corrective revolution against corrective revolution.
If you’re Syrian, you’ll understand what I mean. Um, and
I think that he can’t do that, and I think he feels that
the best he can do is to just fight on. And I think he’s
wrong. I don’t think the Bashar Assad regime is going to
collapse soon. People who say it’s on the way of going,
that Homs is the Benghazi of Syria - this is rubbish. The
regime in Syria is very tough and very, um, repressive and
knows how to repress people. And I think it will continue
for quite a long time to come. I’m sorry to say, but I
think it will.
PAUL So you’re
pessimistic about the West doing anything or being able to
do anything. Or is it already too late? Is he just squashing
it everywhere it happens?
ROBERT
I’m sorry, I can’t hear you through my earpiece
here. Would you repeat your question,
please?
PAUL So, you don’t sound
optimistic about the West being able to do anything or
wanting to do anything. Do you think the West is going to do
something? Or is it maybe already too late? That he’s
quashing everything?
ROBERT I’ll
tell you frankly. Just before Christmas I was invited to do
an interview on Syrian state television with me, which I did
much against my better wishes and better thoughts. And I was
asked what was the future of the Assad regime, which is
effectively what you’re asking me. And I said Bashar
al-Assad is running out of time very fast, and you can no
longer infantilise the people. You can no longer make them
feel they’re little children going to school and if they
disobey the rules, they’ll be taken away by the headmaster
and beaten by the secret police or killed. And I made this
point, and I said to Syrian television, ‘If you censor
what I say, I’m going to repeat what you censor in my
newspaper.’ And I came back to Beirut here where I’m
speaking to you tonight, and I… (LAUGHS) I turned on my
television. Of course, we can see Syrian television here.
And there was me, and they ran it without a change because
they wanted to let their people know that time was running
out for the regime. Now, there’s something very
interesting in that because, you see, they wanted to let the
people know that the regime wanted change, but the question
is does the regime of Bashar al-Assad really want change, or
does it want a change in a picture? You know, like, ‘We
would like to have a change, but maybe next year.’ And
this is the big question.
PAUL
Hillary Clinton and the American Defence Secretary,
Leon Panetta, the difficulty they face with Syria is that
they don’t really know who this Syrian opposition is. They
haven’t kind of identified anyone particularly of any
strength whom they should help. Do you
agree?
ROBERT Yes, I agree 101%. I
was talking last night in Qatar. I go to Qatar regularly
because they are ‘running the opposition’. (PAUL LAUGHS)
Because Qatar wants to harm Iran like Saudi Arabia does.
They don’t want democracy in Syria. They want to have the
overthrow of Iran’s best friend in the Arab world, who is
Bashar al-Assad. Now, let’s go back to that. I said to
them, ‘What do you want? What is it you’re wanting?’
What the people of Syria want is dignity and justice.
Dignity and justice. They want to feel they own their own
country. And they feel that Assad believes he owns his own
country, like Mubarak thought he was the owner of Egypt and
Ben Ali was the owner of Tunisia. This is preposterous,
ridiculous, stupid. But that’s what they thought. The
great crisis and tragedy in Syria is 1) that the government
does not realise that the people want dignity and 2) that in
fighting to preserve themselves, the regime will produce a
civil war which will kill, with great bloodshed, so many
people, which is a terrible tragedy for Syria itself. We
talk all the time about Haram, you know, the regime is
killing the people. Yes, but we don’t talk about the
actual bloodshed in Syria itself, which is most terrible and
which we should be thinking
about.
PAUL Does the world care
enough about Syria? I only ask that question because, unlike
during the spring in Cairo, the social media round the world
has not really embraced the Syrian cause. That’s why I ask
that, that’s all.
ROBERT Yeah, I
enjoy your stepping back from the question. I think the
Syrians whom I meet in Beirut - and I go to Damascus still.
I can still enter. I think the Syrians are appalled at the
lack of historical knowledge of us Westerners. I think also,
you know, they know what happened in Egypt and Tunisia. But
I always say in my newspaper articles and indeed when I talk
to New Zealand, Egypt was not Tunisia. Bahrain was not
Egypt. Libya was not Bahrain. And Syria is not Libya. Every
Arab country is different. But what you have here is a
country, Syria, whose nationalist idea which was encompassed
in the Ba’athist idea of… (SPEAKS ARAB LANGUAGE), and
your Syrian-Australian viewers will know what I’m talking
about. Um, the idea that there’s a nationalist centre of
Syria is very strong, and you can’t just brush it off the
desk and throw it away, because so many people want to
overthrow Bashar al-Assad. Um, what we have to do, if we
want to be honest - I try to be honest as a journalist - is
to say to the regimes, like Bashar al-Assad - and I met
Bashar al-Assad, I met Asma, his wife, who is a fine lady -
is you have to deal with the reality, not the reality of 20
years ago, but now. And you must stop killing your people.
Because at the end of the day, the situation is very simple:
if you treat your people as infantiles, as children, where
if you go to school and you offend the headmaster, you go to
the police station and you are beaten and killed, is over.
When people lose their fear, they can never get their fear
back. And this is what has happened in Tunisia, in Yemen, in
Libya, in Egypt, and is what is happening now, today, in
Syria.
ENDS