Syrian opposition: united, peaceful, and not Islamist. - By Michael Weiss - Slate Magazine - 0 views
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The Henry Jackson Society, the London-based foreign-policy think tank where I work, has spent the last several weeks investigating the Syrian opposition and talking to key figures in six major cities in upheaval. The evidence suggests that this revolution is the most liberal and Western-friendly of any of the Arab Spring uprisings. That it's also the least supported by the West is a tragedy.
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The six oppositionists we spoke to in Syria all regarded the revolution as a confessionally and tribally unified endeavor. The sectarianism, they said, was wholly on Assad's side. Even Kurds have marched under the Syrian flag, something unthinkable in years past. Indeed, May 27 was nicknamed "Azadi Friday" for a Kurdish word meaning freedom, underscoring the solidarity that exists between Syrian Arabs and a long-oppressed tribal minority. The oppositionist in Hama, Syria's fourth-largest city, assured us that Christians had joined in Friday prayers at the Great Mosque in that city. "Druze, Sunni, Alawite and Kurd—we will never stop," echoed our source in Homs, in western Syria.
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Signed by 150 oppositionists both inside Syria and in exile, the statement echoes the demands of the coordinating committees but also addresses how to transition Syria from a totalitarian dictatorship to a pluralist democracy. It's explicitly based on the Eastern European, Latin American, and South African models
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