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Geopolitics

Triumph Of Immunity: Why Assad's Return To The Arab League Matters

Two pressing factors have weighed on the Arab League to reintegrate the accused war criminal: refugees and narcotics. But it speaks to a larger weakness of the international community to see that justice is carried out.

Triumph Of Immunity: Why Assad's Return To The Arab League Matters

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad arrives in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Pierre Haski

-Analysis-

PARIS — Sweet revenge! That's how it looked for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, arriving Thursday in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to attend the Arab League summit. It's a first appearance in more than a decade, since the exclusion of Damascus from the regional organization. Syria was reintegrated on May 7 and Assad’s presence at the Jeddah Summit marks his great return.

Syria had been excluded from the Arab League when Assad’s regime repressed what was initially a peaceful, popular uprising in 2011, in the wake of the Arab Spring revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. It's since been a decade in which he tortured and slaughtered, used chemical weapons, besieged cities. And yet, he’s still here, fundamentally thanks to the support of Russia and Iran.


And even if millions of Syrians are still taking refuge abroad, even if the country is still divided and partly beyond the control of the central power in Damascus, Assad survived. The man himself can now revel in this unexpected success.

Refugee dilemma

Instead, for those hoping for a political solution in Syria, as well as those seeking justice for the crimes committed, Syria's reintegration in the Arab League marks a critical failure. Call it, the triumph of immunity.

Understanding why this has happened means looking at two factors agitating the region: the first is the presence of millions of Syrian refugees in neighboring countries, Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.

How will millions be expected to go back to live in the same system that drove them away?

In Turkey, which is not a member of the League, part of the population wants the refugees gone as the country is going through tough times, high inflation and the aftermath of the devastating Feb. 6 earthquake. Even the opposition candidate in the current presidential race, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, has turned it into a campaign argument. In Lebanon, a country that is also experiencing an economic and social descent into hell, the presence of 2 million Syrians has become similarly very political.

When it rejoined the Arab League, Damascus pledged to create the conditions for the return of refugees, but without a political solution or promise of justice. How will millions of people be expected to go back to live in the same system that drove them away?

A Syrian mother and her baby wait at the Turkish border to return home after the devastating earthquake.

Celestino Arce/ZUMA

Fool's bargain

The second subject is drugs. Syria has become the top producer and exporter of Captagon, a newly popular addictive amphetamine wreaking havoc in the Middle East and beyond. Saudi Arabia and Jordan are particularly affected, and are putting pressure on Damascus to control trafficking.

There again, Syria pledged, at a cost, to act against Captagon trafficking. The problem is that it has become a major source of income for the country, but even more so for the government: investigations point to the direction of Assad’s own brother, Maher, chief of the 4th Syrian Armored Division.

There may well be a fool’s bargain in this reintegration, and at least some tension ahead. For Syrians, notably those forced into exile, it's a bitter pill to swallow to see the survival of the regime that pushed so many to leave.

It is also a dilemma for the West, which continues to be pushed to the sidelines by a Middle East in flux — and neither has the means to exert influence after a tragedy they all could not prevent. Today is a victory for Assad alone.

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Society

How Brazil's Evangelical Surge Threatens Survival Of Native Afro-Brazilian Faith

Followers of the Afro-Brazilian Umbanda religion in four traditional communities in the country’s northeast are resisting pressure to convert to evangelical Christianity.

image of Abel José, an Umbanda priest

Abel José, an Umbanda priest

Agencia Publica
Géssica Amorim

Among a host of images of saints and Afro-Brazilian divinities known as orixás, Abel José, 42, an Umbanda priest, lights some candles, picks up his protective beads and adjusts the straw hat that sits atop his head. He is preparing to treat four people from neighboring villages who have come to his house in search of spiritual help and treatment for health ailments.

The meeting takes place discreetly, in a small room that has been built in the back of the garage of his house. Abel lives in the quilombo of Sítio Bredos, home to 135 families. The community, located in the municipality of Betânia of Brazil’s northeastern state of Pernambuco, is one of the municipality’s four remaining communities that have been certified as quilombos, the word used to refer to communities formed in the colonial era by enslaved Africans and/or their descendents.

In these villages there are almost no residents who still follow traditional Afro-Brazilian religions. Abel, Seu Joaquim Firmo and Dona Maura Maria da Silva are the sole remaining followers of Umbanda in the communities in which they live. A wave of evangelical missionary activity has taken hold of Betânia’s quilombos ever since the first evangelical church belonging to the Assembleia de Deus group was built in the quilombo of Bredos around 20 years ago. Since then, other evangelical, pentecostal, and neo-pentecostal churches and congregations have established themselves in the area. Today there are now nine temples spread among the four communities, home to roughly 900 families.

The temples belong to the Assembleia de Deus, the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and the World Church of God's Power, the latter of which has over 6,000 temples spread across Brazil and was founded by the apostle and televangelist Valdemiro Santiago, who became infamous during the pandemic for trying to sell beans that he had blessed as a Covid-19 cure. Assembleia de Deus alone, who are the largest pentecostal denomination in the world, have built five churches in Betânia’s quilombos.


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