On Haykals' Interview

On Aljazeera last night there was an interview with Mohammad Hassanain Haykal. He talked about the Arab Spring and shared some of his thoughts on what is happening. I agreed with most of the things he said regarding Syria, how the middle classes in Syria (mostly in Damascus and Aleppo) are still quiet as they consider what has happened in Libya and Iraq and so on, and being able to persuade those middle classes to fully join the uprising will be the decisive point of the uprising. He also mentioned how the revolution should not be rushed by seeking foreign intervention (like in Libya) and that the revolution should mature in order for it to be successful.

He obviously looked down on the foreign intervention in Libya and said that it was a black period of the Arab spring (or something along those lines) as it didn't come from the people, which I would have agreed with if Qaddafi didn't plan on eliminating two thirds of the population of Libya. 

One thing I found a bit inaccurate was when he said that most of the protests in Syria are happening in cities and towns that are on the borders. He talked about what happened in Jisr Al Shughour, and hinted at Dera'a where the spark to the revolution took place and how close it is to the Jordanian border and threw in there a possibility of Jordanian secret service involvement in what has happened in Dera'a.

The problem is that most cities and towns in Syria are close to some border, even Damascus and Aleppo are close to the Lebanese and Turkish borders respectively. I don't think that that is an argument that can be made so as to show that there was foreign involvement in the uprising. And even though Damascus and Aleppo are close to borders there are no mass demonstrations taking place. Take for example Der il Zor, which is more inland, that city had alot of protests before the military clamp down. The only factor that determines the size of protests in cities and towns is the presence of security not anything else. For example, during the month before ramadan when Hama was security free, there were protests everyday and on Friday's the protests would be in the hundreds of thousands. For an entire month not one person was martyred and not one was even injured.

If three quarters of the cities in Syria are close to the border then the probability that protests will happen in some of those cities is high. Lets not forget that what happened in Dera'a, the spark to all this was a response by the people to the injustice their own children were put through and the humiliating and barbaric treatment that the families of those children received by regime officials at the time for protesting the ill treatment their children received by security forces. I don't see how foreign powers could have caused this in any way. Not to say that Haykal didn't admit that the demands and grievances of the people of Syria are not legitimate but he could have gone just a bit towards the governments story of events. 

Nevertheless, it was a good interview and the he did have some important points about the revolutions in different Arab countries especially about Yemen that I found interesting. Watch it if you can.