Our Arab peoples are closely following the aggressive war launched by Russia against Ukraine.
Our attention is particularly drawn to the difficult situation of our students and communities living in the region. We call on the authorities of our countries to intervene at all levels to ensure the safety of our citizens and facilitate the return of those who wish to return to their homeland.
It comes as no surprise that authoritarian regimes fail to issue a clear condemnation of the blatant violation of international legitimacy. However, the Arab Council reminds our Arab peoples that the Russian regime and its leader, Vladimir Putin, who is violating the sovereignty of an independent state, is the same regime that supported the butcher of Damascus to remain in power. It is the same regime whose airstrikes ravaged Syria’s largest cities. It is the same brutal air bombardment by Russian forces that forced hundreds of thousands of our people in Syria to flee beyond the borders of a country that is now a Russian-Iranian protectorate, no longer an independent Arab state.
Before and after this violent intervention by President Putin’s regime, we saw him using more cunning methods to thwart the will of our people in Libya, making him, and still making him, the arch-enemy of the Arab Spring. He has gone to extreme and brutal measures to oppose it.
Putin’s regime is today the fiercest enemy of democracy, not only in Ukraine but also in every Arab country. Not to mention his ongoing coordination with Israel to undermine all aspects of Arab national security and the rights of the Palestinian people.
While it is the right of all Arabs to condemn the Russian aggression against our nation, it is also our duty to sympathize with the Ukrainian people in their heroic struggle against Putin’s bullying and to support their right to national sovereignty and peaceful living.
This moral and political stance that we are called upon to take should not distract us from holding the West accountable for the ongoing tragedies. Their silence about the Russian regime’s crimes in Syria and Libya, through its mercenaries, has contributed to Putin’s unchecked rampage.
Regardless of our reservations about the Ukrainian regime and the populism behind it, and despite our many legitimate criticisms of Western policies, we must never forget that what is happening in Ukraine is a struggle between emerging democracy and old tyranny, between the ambitions of a people and the delusions of grandeur of an individual, between a model of a state based on law and institutions and a model of a state based on the strongman — this renewed illusion that has led all the nations that surrendered to it to the horrors of destruction and war. It is a struggle between an international system built on the power of legitimacy and a system built on the legitimacy of force.
Full solidarity with our peoples yearning for freedom, and full solidarity with the heroic Ukrainian people in their battle for their freedom and for the freedom of all peoples.
On behalf of the Arab Council
President: Mohamed Moncef Marzouki
