The Middle East war is causing gigantic demographic changes,
in a proportion than can be compared to the massive expulsion of ethnically
Germans from East Europe at the aftermath of World War Two or the formidable
population exchange between Indians and Pakistanis. Interestingly the latter
was not done on historic or linguistic lines, but were implemented on religious
lines, in the same vein that the main source of tension in the Middle East
today runs in the lanes of the Sunni-Shia confrontation. The religious variable
has shown much wider influence than what we thought during the Cold War years. The
large-scale population movements originated in the region have not been a
simple byproduct of war. Rather, they represent conscious strategies of ethnic
cleansing by each faction. Already last year, Fabrice Balanche, of The
Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote that “the Syrian conflict is a
sectarian war, and ethnic cleansing is an integral part of the strategy used by
various actors, even if they claim otherwise.” (http://www.businessinsider.com/these-maps-show-how-ethnic-cleansing-has-become-a-weapon-in-syrias-civil-war-2015-12).
Before the inner war in Syria began in 2011, the Sunni
Muslims make up about three quarters of the Syrian population, whilst the Shia
Muslims were only some 11-13%. This was a problem for the nepotistic Alawite
regime, and their Iranian and Russian allies. The war soon brought up the issue
of the destruction of the sheltering populations, and the depopulation and
ethnic cleansing of rebel-held areas was incremented. More than a million Sunni
Syrians have gone to Europe, and some four million are refugees in Jordan,
Turkey and Lebanon. On the other hand, hundreds of thousands of Shiites have
come to Syria from Iraq, Iran, and other countries. Another aspect, is the
redistribution by the Damascus regime of land and houses that belonged to Arab
Sunnis who relocated to other places to remaining Arab Sunnis, and so
increasing their dependence on the official authorities and arising conflict
with anyone who decides to return.
The ethnic cleansing is a rising phenomenon both in Syria
and Iraq. And if the main confrontation trench is the Sunni-Shia one,
Christians are disappearing in both countries. But the latter is not something
new. It is useful to recall that even after the Arab conquests of the Middle
East in the 7th century, the majority of the population in most cases was still
Christian. Yet the number of Christians steadily declined over the centuries
that followed. A century ago, Christians represented some 20 percent of the
population of the Middle East; today, that figure is estimated at less than 4
percent. It has been estimated that between one-half and two-thirds of
Middle Eastern Christians have either been killed or left the area over the
last century.
Of course nobody knows what is going to happen in the Middle
Eastern quicksands, but it seems safe to acknowledge that the region will not
return to its previous configurations. The Sykes-Picot designs seem to have
failed, but consensus on lines of solution seem scarce. The current battle in
Mosul, which is already causing thousands of refugees, is also dangerously
arising the mutual suspicions and tensions between the Sunni Turkey and the
Shia-dominated Iraq. The Turkish military are deploying heavy armor, including
tanks, to the border near Iraq, a step to which Iraq’s Prime Minister Haider
al-Abadi menaced with nothing less than stating in a televised news conference
that “the invasion of Iraq will lead to Turkey being dismantled”. In the
current dangerous Middle East everything is suspicion and tension in the best
case, war in the worst.
