Playing Politics With Religion - NYTimes.com
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/opinion/global/playing-politics-with-religion.html?_r=1
Par #OUSAMA_MAKDISI
The fact that Bashar al-Assad is an Alawite and that many of the leading military forces are controlled by Alawite officers is an obviously salient factor in exacerbating sectarian tensions in Syria. But the regime is not Alawite in any religious sense. Like the ostensibly “Sunni” regime of Saddam Hussein that long brutalized Iraq, it is essentially despotic.
(...)
The main characteristic of these regimes has not been sectarianism; they manipulate any division among their people to secure and keep power. By contrast, the dynasties of Saudi Arabia and Qatar reject religious pluralism as a matter of state ideology. Both countries have encouraged an extraordinary outpouring of sectarian incitement against the Shiites of the Arab world in a bid to retain absolute power and to undermine what they regard as their most formidable regional foe: Shiite Iran. Tehran has close ties to Damascus and is patron to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
But the intervention by Saudi Arabia and Qatar against the Assad regime is not necessarily for sectarian reasons. Rather, both monarchies have secular interests, namely preserving the region’s pro-Western petroleum order, which provides great benefits to the Saud and Thani regimes. To the extent that they are involved in a major struggle against Iran, they do so in explicit coordination with the United States.
Thus the sectarian dimension cannot and must not be isolated from the far more obvious and salient secular geopolitical one. It is politics that pushes sectarianism, that provides it with the enabling context, and that now encourages and legitimates the devastating violence across sectarian lines that is ravaging Syria and Iraq and Lebanon.
#instrumentalisation_du_religieux ressorts du #sectarisme #moyen_orient #géopolitique