Adonis Asks Syrian President to Step Down

Cairo's AhramOnline reports that prominent Syrian poet Adonis has asked President Bashar al-Assad to step down from his post and adopt a secular strategy:

"President Assad should do something. If I were in his place, I would leave the presidency," Adonis said in an interview with Kuwait's Al-Rai newspaper.

"The least he can do is to resign from his post," the Beirut-based secular intellectual said.

Adonis, whose given name is Ali Ahmed Said, is a member of Assad's Alawite minority. The poet has been criticised by Syrian and Arab writers for not taking a clear position on the bloody crackdown on Syrian protesters.

However, he criticised the opposition for being fragmented and dominated by religious groups, adding the appropriate solution for Syria is to establish a civil state where religion and politics are separated.

In a rundown of the situation in Syria and the world response, The Toronto Star names some other intellectuals who have broken with Assad:

Barack Obama backed the Tunisians and Egyptians after the fact. On Bahrain, he sat by as Saudi troops went in to help the king there cut down the protesters. On Yemen, Obama dilly-dallies as the situation spirals out of control. On Libya, he reluctantly fell behind France and Britain.

On Syria, he didn’t even call for Assad’s ouster, even while being “shocked,” “horrified” and “appalled” by the civilian toll.

With NATO stalled in Libya, there is neither the appetite nor the resources to intervene in Syria under the doctrine of “responsibility to protect.”

The Assad regime thus calculated correctly that it could go on defying not only the will of its people but also the outside world.

It has mowed down protesters with machine gunfire and nail bombs, sprayed from rooftops and tanks. It has cut off water, food, electricity, phones and Internet in city after city. It has let corpses lie in the streets.

The crackdown by the security forces is led by Assad’s brother, Maher. Plainclothes militias led by cousins Munzer and Fawwaz are attacking minority businesses to start sectarian warfare, even as the regime poses as a protector of Christians, Alawites and Druze against the majority Sunni Muslims.

The Assads are Alawites, an offshoot of Shiites, but who incorporate pre-Islamic practices. It was an Alawite group in the army that staged a coup in 1963 and Hafez Assad became president in 1970. Upon his death in 2000, Bashar took over. Like most sons inheriting the dictator’s throne, he marketed himself as modern and progressive. He initiated a “Damascus Spring,” which, predictably, did not last long.

Ruling with an iron fist, father and son did keep communal harmony. But Syria has had no history of sectarian warfare, with the exception of a campaign 30 years ago by a militant wing of the Muslim Brotherhood against the Alawites, to polarize society and rally the majority Sunnis. Now it’s the Assad’s Alawite goons who are trying similar perverse tactics.

But the mass resistance remains ecumenical, with active participation by Christian intellectuals and human rights activists — Michel Kilo, Anwar al-Bonni and Ayman Abdul-Nour. Such prominent Alawites as the thinker Adonis and the playwright Samar Yazbek have broken with Assad.

Assad is also losing foreign allies. Russia is distancing itself. So is Turkey, which had cultivated him as part of a rapprochement with neighbours.

Syria has had a policy of raising its nuisance value — interfering in Lebanon, nurturing Hezbollah and Hamas, hosting controversial Palestinian leaders. Yet it has kept its 1974 ceasefire with Israel. When Assad recently sent protesters across the border into the Golan Heights, he served notice to Israel and the U.S. that the devil they knew could no longer be counted on if he were not given a free hand at home. But the domestic uprising has its own dynamic. Even Hamas and Hezbollah have fallen silent, leaving Iran as Syria’s only true ally.

It's not the first statement of this kind from Adonis. A few weeks ago, he told Italy’s La Repubblica (as reported by Artists Speak Out):

“Democracy presupposes the full separation of religion on the one hand, and politics, social questions and culture on the other,” says the poet, who in May won Germany’s prestigious Goethe Prize. “However this is exactly where the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party has failed. The only goal it pursues is to maintain power. A reactionary power, which needs no revolution to topple it as it carries within it the seed of its own destruction.”

“Now more than ever Syria needs a new political alphabet,” said Adonis. “One that is based on a rejection of the unity of the state and the party. … Only tyrants seek to preserve this unity. Mr President, you are called upon today to put a definitive end to the equation of Syria with the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party. … Events have shown that it has failed right down the line. Arrogance is senseless.”