Tariq Ali says we are witnessing in Syria "a new form of re-colonisation, which we saw in Iraq and in Libya. Many of the people who first rose against the Assad regime, says Ali, have been sidelined, leaving the Syrian people with limited choices, neither of which they want: either a Western imposed regime, "composed of sundry Syrians who work for the western intelligence agencies", or the Assad regime.
The only way forward, in the interests of all Syrians, he says, is negotiation and discussion. But it is now obvious that the West is not going to let that happen because they are backing the opposition groups who are against any negotiation.
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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