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Syrian President Bashar al-Assad cast his vote Wednesday in the Duma, east of Damascus.Hassan Ammar / AP
Two decades after his father - Hafez al Assad, who ruled for 30 years - bequeathed him power, the President of Syria, Bashar al Assad, appeared at the polls on Wednesday to submit to a plebiscite for a fourth term. as head of state.
The presidential elections, without significant rivals and with the opposition in exile excluded, have been condemned as "not credible and illegitimate" by the United States and several European countries.
"The validity of these opinions is equal to zero," El Asad replied after casting his vote in the Duma - the last rebel stronghold in the Damascus area to fall into the hands of the Army after a long siege and which was the target of a chemical attack. to symbolize their military victory after more than 10 years of devastating civil war with international interference.
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"Syria is not what they want to sell (from abroad): one city against another, one (religious) group against another, in a civil war," Assad told reporters, quoted by Reuters, "and today we are demonstrating from Duma that there is only one Syrian people ”.
The rural region of eastern Ghouta, where Duma is located, was the granary of the capital before the war.
Today it is a scene of destruction after being besieged and bombed until 2018, when the rebels capitulated on the brink of starvation.
The region continues to be under the control of the Army, which only allows the entry of non-residents with a special permit.
International news agencies reported, through local reporters, the presence of queues of voters at voting centers in the capital. Some groups were driven in buses, after officials and students received a recommendation to go to the polls called by the
mukhabarat,
the internal intelligence service. The Syrian government has not granted accreditation to Western media to cover the information about the elections. There has also been no presence of UN observers in the polling stations.
In the previous Syrian presidential elections in 2014, Assad won with 89% of the vote while losing the war. Now two shadowy candidates, former Deputy Minister Abdullah Salum Abdullah and Mahmud Ahmed Marei, a member of the officially recognized internal opposition, are vying for his position. The Damascus government tries to show an appearance of normality with the voting, but it only controls two thirds of the Syrian territory, half of the population is uprooted from their homes and the conflict, which has claimed close to half a million lives, has rolled back the economy several decades and thrown 80% of Syrians below the poverty line.
The heads of diplomacy of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Germany signed a joint statement on Tuesday in which they warned that the Syrian presidential elections cannot be considered "fair or free." The declaration recalls that UN Security Council resolution 2254 prescribes that the elections must be called and supervised by the United Nations and allow the participation of all citizens, including the more than five million refugees and exiles, a fourth part of the country's population. After consolidating its military presence on the ground - backed by Russia and Iran - the Damascus regime has turned its back on the UN-sponsored negotiations in Geneva to seek a political solution to the conflict.
The elections do not seem to be very relevant for the Syrian population, burdened by food shortages, the devaluation of the pound by 100% against the dollar or the shortage of fuel in a country with oil deposits (now in the hands of the Kurdish militias allied to the United States). The Damascus regime attributes misery to international sanctions, beginning with those of Washington, without admitting that it is precisely its blockade of the process of dialogue and reconciliation with the opposition that causes international economic punishment.
The United Nations mediator for Syria, Geir Pedersen, already confirmed at the beginning of the year that the Government of Damascus had paralyzed the process of negotiations with representatives of the opposition and civil society to agree on a new constitutional text, as a previous step to the convening of free elections supervised by the international community.
The Russian-driven alternative to the Geneva talks - the so-called Astana dialogue forum, with Turkish and Iranian participation in the capital of Kazakhstan - is also in a state of induced coma.
Boycott in areas not controlled by the regime
The vote in Syria has been subjected to conditions of impossible fulfillment. More than five million refugees and exiles have to present “a document to leave the country legally”, and most of the 6.7 million displaced from their homes by the war are not assigned an electoral college. The three million Syrians surrounded in the province of Idlib (northwest), the last stronghold of the insurgents, and the more than two million Kurds will also be excluded from the polls.
A decade after the popular uprising that emerged in the framework of the Arab Spring and with the war still stalled due to the pandemic, the Army has consolidated its dominance over so-called useful Syria, the most fertile and populated central area of the country. Kurdish militias control the northeastern arc and Turkey occupies wide border strips in the north. The boycott of the polls has been more than obvious in these territories, according to information from international news agencies, which also reported protests in the province of Deraa, in the south of the Arab country, where a revolt began 10 years ago. peaceful that led to endless warfare.
