Syrian President Bashar Assad should resign if he doesn’t want to repeat the fate of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, while Russia and China should help him to do so, the Middle East expert Tariq Ali told RT.
British historian and journalist Ali considers it unlikely that Syrian president will step down on his own accord.
“He has to be pushed out,” Tariq Ali insists, for which “the Syrian people are doing their best”.
Pressure is being mounted outside Syria by Turkey and NATO for intervention – that would be disastrous and bring enormous bloodshed, like in Libya, believes Tariq Ali.
The expert says both Assad and his father have spilled enough Syrian blood and that “this family is unacceptable”.
“Syria needs a non-sectarian national government to prepare a new constitution," Tariq Ali stressed.
He expressed hope that all the most influential parties, like Russia, China, Iran and even Hezbollah must realize that it is time for President Assad to go and to do so, no peacekeeping force is needed.
Tariq Ali agrees that mounting international pressure on Bashar Assad is needed because simple economic sanctions will not bring the desired results. Countries like Iran and China would not abide them, so it is time for Russia and China to realize they need Assad no more.
He believes that once Assad falls, the new government will keep good relations with Iran, because this will be in the interest of the new democratic government.
“If the Assad clan refuses to relinquish their stronghold on the country, sooner or later something disastrous will happen,” Tariq Ali predicts, threatening a foreign intervention and recalling the inglorious deaths of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi lynched by mobs inspired by the west.
“That is the future that stares them in the face, there is no other future,” Tariq Ali said.
“The fact is that the overwhelming majority of people in Syria want the Assad family out – and that is the key thing that we have to understand and he [Assad] should understand,” Tariq Ali claims.
He also warns about letting Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood take control of the Syrian government. Even if it becomes a moderate one, religious minorities will most probably be targeted to divert attention from economic and social problems.
Writer, journalist and film-maker Tariq Ali was born in Lahore in 1943. He owned his own independent television production company, Bandung, which produced programmes for Channel 4 in the UK during the 1980s. He is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio and contributes articles and journalism to magazines and newspapers including The Guardian and the London Review of Books. He is editorial director of London publishers Verso and is on the board of the New Left Review, for whom he is also an editor. He writes fiction and non-fiction and his non-fiction includes 1968: Marching in the Streets (1998), a social history of the 1960s; Conversations with Edward Said (2005); Rough Music: Blair, Bombs, Baghdad, London, Terror (2005); and Speaking of Empire and Resistance (2005), which takes the form of a series of conversations with the author.
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