By John Pickard
The bitter nine-year civil war in Syria was won by the Assad regime only because the Russian government threw its military might behind him. That war left at least half a million dead as well as hundreds of thousands injured. Half of the population were displaced, six and a half million internally and five and a half million fled to Turkey, Jordan and Western Europe.
The Assad regime eventually won by a ruthless and relentless use of air power, artillery and other heavy weaponry to pound every town and city into submission. Apart from Damascus itself, every sizeable city in Syria is now devastated. Syria’s second city, Aleppo was reduced to a wasteland. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians are now trying to exist among heaps of rubble (see picture above).
A report on reliefweb, suggested that about a third of homes in Syria were damaged or destroyed even by 2017, four years before the war ended. “To clear the debris in Aleppo alone”, it says, “would take six years of continuous work and 26 million ‘truck-kilometres’” at the same time pointing out that “there is not yet the equipment, funds, or capacity to carry out this work”.
Another report in the Guardian last year (May 24, 2021) pointed out that “In 2018, the United Nations estimated the cost of destruction from the war at some $388bn, nearly 20 times more than Syria’s entire economy was worth last year”.
Increased use of heavy artillery and rockets
Why is this relevant to the war in Ukraine today? Because there appears to be a shift in the tactics of the invading Russian forces to emulate the tactics used in Syria toward greater use heavy artillery and rocket fire in Ukraine before any commitment of ground troops. It would mean the devastation of besieged cities like Mariupol and Kyiv in the coming weeks. All of this, of course, is assuming that the reports of the Ukraine war that we read in the British press are accurate.
Activists in the labour movement today are seeing pictures of the devastation in Ukraine and the destruction of homes, and now hospitals and schools, and it would be difficult on face value to discount these reports. There is a natural outrage about the human cost of all this destruction. But in between the terrible toll civilian deaths and the shelling there are also issues that are not quite so clear cut.
The Russian army, for example, claimed to have discovered a joint US-Ukraine biological and chemical weapons facility and Western politicians are suggesting that this claim is simply the Russians’ way of preparing the ground for them to start using chemical weapons, again, as in Syria.
Then there is the issue of the Chernobyl power station – at least that part of it still functioning after the disaster of 1986. There were accusations from Kyiv that the Russian occupation of the plant had left it in a dangerous condition because its electrical supply was cut off. The Russian defence Minister replied, saying that “Ukrainian forces had attacked power station lines in the ‘dangerous provocation’” (Guardian March 10). Meanwhile the International Atomic Energy Agency has said the loss of power to the plant “did not have an imminent impact of safety” although it was concerned about the longer term and the rotation of essential staff. You take from these reports what you can.
Zelensky is no amateur when it comes to media
While the awful devastation of the besieged cities seems to be validated by the photographs coming out, the Guardian (March 10) quoted the mayor of Mariupol, speaking in terms of “genocide”. “Russia intends to destroy Ukraine” he is reported as saying, “so he can have Ukraine without Ukrainians.”
One wonders, reading this, how much the press in the UK reports hyperbole unedited. I commented in an earlier article about a Facebook post from a pro-Russian blogger living in Kyiv; his post on Facebook included, “Zelensky said ‘The Russians just launched a nuclear strike and at the moment 5 nuclear bombs are flying at Kiev’…” and I questioned its validity, commenting that the BBC would have mentioned a ‘nuclear attack’.
But perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps Zelensky really is saying outrageous things on Ukrainian TV, and that it goes unreported in the West. How could we know? Zelensky, after all, is no amateur – he is the millionaire owner of a media company, and he had over 4 million followers on Twitter even before he won the presidency, and he won that with a campaign based on social media, rather than traditional means.
On CNN TV there was a report that the Chinese news services were using Russian videos and news stories as if they were true. It is difficult to know what to make of that CNN report, because in the UK (and in the USA) we are not allowed to see English-language Chinese TV service or RT, so we are not in a position to judge for ourselves the validity of this or that news report. We should have that right and it should not be ‘expected’ that we just to accept whatever the BBC and CNN tells us about the war.
The bottom line is this: do we trust the UK mainstream media? And the answer to that has to be a resounding ‘NO’. Socialists have to make honest efforts to read between the lines, check sources and try to fathom what is really going on. We have to firmly cling to a class standpoint in judging the war: its causes, its outcomes and its reportage.
The tragedy is, of course, that while we are trying to see past the grandstanding and blatant jingoism of the likes of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, and the suspicious hyperbole of the Tory press, it is the ordinary workers of Ukraine who are suffering. Let us hope the Ukraine war doesn’t reach the vicious intensity of the conflict in Syria between 2011 and last year.
