Were I a Shia--or an Alawite (or a Christian for that matter
)--I would make sure I had a
back packed to hightail it out of Syria as quickly as possible.
I just read Barbara Harff's
No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust? Assessing Risks of Genocide and Political Mass Murder since 1955 for my class on ethnic conflict and it opened my eyes to the possibility for future genocides to occur around the globe.
Harff identifies several variables that can be used as early warning identifying markers but there is one that has the biggest demonstrated influence: a formerly dominant minority that loses power due to state failure is 2.5 times more likely to become targets of a genocidal campaign. This means that the Alawite minority and
Christian minority (espousing an economic power instead of a political one) would become the targets when they lose power.
Questions:
Would the Alawites be better off seceding when they lose power and forming their own state in the northwest region of Syria?
Would a post-Assad Syria
be better off (of course what does that mean--better off for who?) without the Alawites and Shia as part of Syria?
Does this idea open the door too wide
for the possibility of ethnic cleansing?
Of note there are other early warning models out there, most notably at the
Sentinel Project.
