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Treated as an outcast for years, the Syrian dictator took his personal revenge by participating in the Jeddah summit. If the United States multiplies the warnings, certain European countries seem ready to reconnect with Damascus. In the name of what values?
To be welcomed as a “brother” with all the honors by some twenty heads of Arab states at the Jeddah summit this Friday certainly represents a dazzling personal revenge for Bashar al-Assad, treated as an outcast for years. His victory had been won for a while since he had remained in power, especially since he is the only one in this case among the other dictators of the four other Arab countries where revolutions broke out in 2011. We know the price of this survival: more than 500,000 dead, 7 million refugees, and almost as many displaced inside the country, Syria devastated, still partially occupied by the armies and militias of at least four different countries and crimes of on a scale and atrocity unprecedented in the 21st century. But it is necessary to overcome the indignation, the anger and the nausea of this return to grace, to put aside the moral and human obscenity which it represents to reflect on its significance but also to relativize its scope.
Riyadh’s international ambitions
First of all, rejoining the Arab League after having been excluded from it for a dozen years is essentially symbolic for the Syrian regime. Because the banishment of Syria by the intergovernmental organization had practically no impact on the tragic course of the events that took place