Say what you want about The Guardian’s biased coverage of Israel/Palestine, and its indulgent attitude toward antisemitism on the Left (and I’ve probably said most of it myself), but they have done some first-rate reporting on the Syrian uprising.
This piece on the Shabiha– the Assad regime’s murderous thugs implicated in the Houla massacre– is worth reading. It includes some interesting information about their ties to Syrian business interests:
As Syria retreated from Lebanon in 2005 and warmed to the west, it lumbered towards a dysfunctional kind of market economy. The result was to hand power to a new kind of businessman, usually Sunni, who managed to forge links with the Alawite-dominated clique that controls the tentacles of Syria’s security state.
As profit moved away from smuggling and towards more legitimate business interests, a small core of well-connected operators grabbed control of industries, equipment, franchises and car dealerships – one of the central complaints of ordinary Syrians as the uprising has gathered momentum in the last year.
It’s these same businessmen, many of them Sunni and not Alawite, who are now quietly passing money to the shabiha, mainly to protect their lucrative business privileges, but also to keep their political sponsors happy.
…..
Some blue-chip firms in the west, which have been doing business in Assad’s “modernising” Syria over the past decade, should also be getting nervous. In August last year one Damascus opposition activist presented a Guardian journalist with a list of the main business benefactors of the shabiha, put together on the basis of confidential conversations with Damascus businessmen. On it were men who had earned their money as exclusive agents, dealers or franchise holders of named blue-chip British, Japanese, German car companies. It is some of these profits that are being ploughed back into Syria’s unofficial, paramilitary killing machine.
I do notice that Mercedes-Benz still has a dealership in Damascus, as does BMW in Damascus and Aleppo.
