Burhan Ghalioun

Burhan Ghalioun برهان غليون
President of Syrian National Council
Incumbent
Assumed office 29 August 2011
Personal details
Born	Template:August 29 Homs, Syria
Alma mater	Sorbonne University
Profession	Doctorate in political sociology

Dr. Burhan Ghalioun (Arabic: برهان غليون) (born 1945, Syria), is a Syrian-French political scientist and a professor of political sociology at the Université de Paris III Sorbonne University in Paris., and the chairman of the Syrian opposition Transitional National Council. He was named chairman on August 29.

Borhan Ghalion is the director of the Centre d'études de l'Orient contemporain and professor of Arabic civilisation at the Sorbonne-Nouvelle-Paris-III university. He is the author of numerous books, dealing which sociological and political issues of the Islamic world, mostly written in Arabic, several of which have been translated into French.

Several Syrian opposition groups see the Paris-based intellectual Burhan Ghalioun as a consensus figure capable of heading a unified opposition coalition or council. Accordingly, Dr. Ghalioun has been named a member of the Syrian Nation Council (SNC), a political body originally formed in 2005 but was revived in 2011 to represent Syria by Syrian opposition during the 2011 Syrian uprising. But there is little consensus over Ghalioun’s straddling of local and foreign platforms of dissent.

Many Syrians first heard of internationally renowned intellectual Burhan Ghalion back in the late 1970s when his treatise A Manifesto for Democracy was published as a pamphlet. The Manifesto argued that state power in the Arab world had become the enemy of society. It called for states to implement reforms that restored full democratic political participation to their peoples. Ghalioun, who is director of the Centre d'Etudes sur l'Orient Contemporain (CEOC) in Paris and a professor of political sociology at the Université de Paris III (Sorbonne Nouvelle), made these statements when then President Hafez Assad was consolidating his hold on power and faced formidable opposition at home, and with Syria engaged in a conflict in Lebanon.

The book established Ghalioun’s reputation as a critical and engaged thinker. In his book, he drew on the European Enlightenment as an inspiration for a new Arab renaissance. Although he shunned party politics during the 1980s and concentrated on intellectual pursuits, his political outlook was broadly opposed to the Syrian regime and highly supportive of the Palestinian cause.

With political activity in Syria severely constrained after the 1982 Hama massacre, Ghalioun devoted most of his public time to two organizations. For several years, he headed the Syrian Cultural and Social Forum, effectively an association of anti-regime Syrian expatriates. He was also one of the founders and active members of the Arab Organization for Human Rights established in 1983.

Ghalioun always viewed democracy as a panacea for the Arab world, terming it a “historical necessity.” The Arab regimes emerging from Arab nationalist movements failed to build modern states or successful economies and turned their states into “personalized” power structures. He argued that in Syria and other countries, the opposition could be most effective by uniting around the demand for democracy and rejecting all pretexts cited by regimes to postpone political or economic reform.

Along with other Syrian advocates of change, Ghalioun was an active participant in the Damascus Spring — the brief political opening that followed Bashar Assad’s assumption of power in 2000. He visited Syria frequently during that period. But after the banning of emergent political forums, he returned to his role as writer and commentator and remained a prominent human rights advocate.

In 2005, he became more politically active during the Damascus Declaration and became increasingly associated with the political opposition. But he opposed calls to make common cause with the West in pressuring the Syrian regime. He continued to travel to Syria despite regular harassment by Syrian security agencies.

File:Hama Al-Assy Square 2011-07-22.jpg

Protest in Hama, a city in northwestern Syria (22 July 2011). .

In the course of his political activity, Ghalioun avoided association with any particular group – whether communist, Nasserist, or Islamist.

When the wave of popular protests began in Syria on March 15 of this year, Ghalioun quickly voiced his support. He made a number of media appearances and was heavily engaged, along with other Europe-based dissidents, in efforts to unite exiled Syrian opposition groups.

Ghalioun expressed his views about the tasks facing the Syrian protest movement and the question of dialogue with the regime in June. “The regime is not interested in or willing to meet the requirements of a meaningful dialogue,” Ghalioun wrote. The opposition cannot join dialogue with “officials who contributed to or ordered the killing of defenseless children, women, and young people.” He went on to say that such dialogue would be fruitless unless their clear objective was “to dismantle the regime of repression, oppression, and tyranny and replace it with a democratic order in which the people alone have the final say and the government is fully empowered and answerable to elected representatives of the people.”

Ghalioun believes that “dialogue should not mean a deal with the regime. It must not be about broadening the circle of participation” to members of the regime; rather “it must be about a timetable for a transition to democracy by peaceful means, in the hope of avoiding more human casualties and material losses, and creating the necessary conditions for new institutions to be built and function properly.” To Ghalioun, the regime’s current leaders “lost their legitimacy” when they unleashed bloody violence against peaceful protesters.

Ghalioun believes that given the regime’s persistent repressive policies and its “refusal to reach an understanding with its people,” Syrians have only two alternatives. They can either unite and cooperate to bring about “a pluralist, civil, democratic order in which all Syrian citizens are equal,” or else there will be “a certain slide into violence, anarchy, and destruction.

On December 2, 2011 Ghalioun said that if his regime takes over Syria it would end the military relationship to Iran and cut off arms supplies to Hezbollah and Hamas.

Personal Media

Ghalioun has his own weblog and Twitter account.