Archive for the ‘Syria’ Category
Selmiyyeh?
pic by Rex Features
This piece was published at Foreign Policy.
“Selmiyyeh, selmiyyeh” — “peaceful, peaceful” — was one of the Tunisian revolution’s most contagious slogans. It was chanted in Egypt, where in some remarkable cases protesters defused state violence simply by telling policemen to calm down and not be scared. In both countries, largely nonviolent demonstrations and strikes succeeded in splitting the military high command from the ruling family and its cronies, and civil war was avoided. In both countries, state institutions proved themselves stronger than the regimes that had hijacked them. Although protesters unashamedly fought back (with rocks, not guns) when attacked, the success of their largely peaceful mass movements seemed an Arab vindication of Gandhian nonviolent resistance strategies. But then came the much more difficult uprisings in Bahrain, Libya, and Syria.
Even after at least 1,300 deaths and more than 10,000 detentions, according to human rights groups, “selmiyyeh” still resounds on Syrian streets. It’s obvious why protest organizers want to keep it that way. Controlling the big guns and fielding the best-trained fighters, the regime would emerge victorious from any pitched battle. Oppositional violence, moreover, would alienate those constituencies the uprising is working so hard to win over: the upper-middle class, religious minorities, the stability-firsters. It would push the uprising off the moral high ground and thereby relieve international pressure against the regime. It would also serve regime propaganda, which against all evidence portrays the unarmed protesters as highly organized groups of armed infiltrators and Salafi terrorists.
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On the Radio
I was on BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight the other night to comment on the situation in Syria.
Then Jeb Sharp of the BBC interviewed me for PRI’s The World.
Civil War
'reform operation' by Ali Ferzat
Will Syria experience a civil war? There’s already a civil war of narratives, pitching the regime’s version against everyone else’s, and a social civil war, in which Syrians find themselves shocked by the responses of their friends and relatives, and find new friends and unexpected allies, realigning their perspectives and values as they do so. Many Syrians are still so scared of the unknown, and so deep in the slave mentality, that they wish to believe what the old authority tells them.
But decreasingly so. Most people have a time limit on their gullibility, or their self-deception. The lies of state TV and the ridiculous ad-Dunya channel, though they come as thick as summer flies, cannot cover the dazzlingly obvious – that the regime is torturing children to death, shooting women and old men, and randomly arresting, beating and humiliating the innocent. That Syria’s tanks and helicopter gunships should be liberating the Golan, not slaughtering Syrians. That the protestors are patriots seeking their basic rights. (I gave up having the argument about Salafis and foreign infiltrators weeks ago on the basis that anyone who wants to believe the regime version will believe it regardless of facts and logic.)
There are still diehards who point to Syria’s social and cultural ills as a reason for sticking with the regime. Give it a chance, they say. Let it reform, as it will undoubtedly do. The alternative is sectarian civil war.
Regime Versus Alawis
Amid debate with Joshua Landis in the comments section of the previous post, I wrote this:
Another point about sectarianism. Remember the fight bewtween Alawis and Ismailis some years ago in Masyaf (was it Masyaf?). There was a good piece about it on Syria Comment. Somebody at the time (perhaps Joshua) pointed out that the fight wouldn’t have reached the proportions it did if there had been respected civil society figures who could have knocked the young men’s heads together. But there weren’t any such figures, because any natural authority figure was perceived as a threat by the regime and had been removed. Masyaf is a microcosm of Syria.
Then a visitor called AK posted the following comment, which is very worth reading.
Syrians lived together even before the arrival of Al Assad family to power. Mind you, majority of Alawii are poorer now than forty years ago. You just need to visit any Alawii village (including Kurdaha) to establish that yourself..
Syria Comment
Protest in Zabadani: "My Sect is Freedom."
The Syria Comment website is an indispensable source for news and views on Syria. Unfortunately, it now requires a health warning.
In a recent article Joshua Landis writes that the protestors “failed to provoke a confessional split in the army as happened in Lebanon. Sunni soldiers have not split from Alawis, despite all the talk about “shabbihas,” which is code for Alawis.”
This, as so often in recent weeks, is an example of Syria Comment taking leave of reality in order to slander the uprising. I’ve been following activist websites and facebook pages, and talking to Syrians of a range of backgrounds. I haven’t come across anyone who aimed to achieve a ‘confessional split’ in the army. Of course, the protestors wanted a split in the army, between patriots and the dogs of the state. They wanted Syrian soldiers to refuse to fire on unarmed Syrian people, and it seems in Dara’a they got what they wished for. Nobody wanted a confessional split.
Blundering and Adapting
cancelling the state of emergency, by Ali Farzat
Like all Syrians pure or hyphenated I’ve been regarding my father’s country over the last weeks with the utmost horror. The Damascus suburb where I got married is currently sealed off by tanks, its dovecots occupied by snipers. When I lived and worked there, Syria felt like a land of promise. Did it have to come to this?
On the one hand, Hafez al-Asad, father of the present president of Syria, was a ruthless dictator who put down a violent uprising (in the 1980s) by slaughtering 20,000 people in the city of Hama. On the other, his regime brought stability after two decades of non-stop coups, provided services to urban and rural areas alike, educated a middle class to staff the public sector, and based its legitimacy, often with good reason, on a nationalist foreign policy.
The regime liberalised somewhat in the latter years of Hafez’s reign, once the Islamist opposition had been neutralised. Syria remained a dictatorship, dissidents were still jailed, but it was no longer a country of fear. When Bashaar took over from his father eleven years ago Syrians hoped for accelerated reform within continued stability. And the regime did make a good start at liberalising the economy, but reneged on early promises of political reform. The model was China, not Gorbachev’s Russia, but growth levels were never Chinese. The result was the enrichment of a new bourgeoisie simultaneous with the undercutting of safety nets for the poor majority.
Talbeeseh for Um Shurshouh
Syrian revolutionary chants are as distinctive, creative, as powerful and sometimes as comical as their Egyptian equivalents. One of my favourites parodies Qaddafi’s threat to hunt down the Libyan opposition ‘alley by alley, house by house’:
zanga zanga dar dar alley by alley, house by house
bidna rasak ya bashaar we want your head, O Bashaar
In the film below, residents of Um Shurshouh in besieged Homs enjoy a talbeeseh, or bridegroom’s wedding party. The neighbourhood itself is the bridegroom. The leader calls out a verse, and the crowd repeats it.
Traditional calls of welcome to those arriving at the party:
Heroes and Traitors
Despite the mass arrests, the beatings and torture, the besieged towns and suburbs, the blocked-off mosques, and the killings of up to a thousand people, Syrian heroes today demonstrated in Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, Hama, Idlib, Qamishleh, Amouda, Latakia and elsewhere.
The film below was made in Dera’a last month. It is very distubing to watch, but also very inspiring. I love the courage and compassion and the solidarity of those wonderful people who work against bullets and fear to rescue one fallen. That’s the best of syria, and there’s a great deal of it. I challenge anyone to watch the film and then claim that the Syrian regime still enjoys any legitimacy at all. “Khawana!” scream these brave men at their persecutors. “Traitors!”
More videos smuggled through the media blackout can be seen at Sham News.
Salhiyeh
Upmarket central Damascus, Corncob square and the shopping precinct below. ‘Salafi terrorists’ singing the Syrian national anthem. The mukhabarat playing various roles.
صدمة لم يتلوها أي رعب
مع حلول يوم الجمعة الماضي أعلن النظام السوري الحرب الفعلية على شعبه وقتل على الأقل مئة متظاهراً في ذلك اليوم. وخلال هذا الأسبوع وقعت مناطق سورية عدة تحت وطأة الحصار. الدبابات السورية التي لم تقرب صوب الجولان المحتلة منذ عام 1973 نشطت الآن وتحركت لتدخل درعا عروس الجنوب, فأغلقت الطرق والشوارع فيها وقطعت المياه والكهرباء والاتصالات. ثمة تقارير عن نقص في الغذاء في درعا وهيمنة الذعر العام, وجثث ملقاة في الشوارع تتعفن على مهلها. وفي ضاحية “دوما” ينتشر القناصون ويطلقون الناس على المشاة, أما بانياس الساحلية فتحاصرها الدبابات, بينما أصبحت”مضايا” وهي بلدة جبلية على الحدود اللبنانية, بلدة محتلة. لا بد أن النظام يتمنى أن يوقف تهريب الأسلحة عبر الحدود أو أنه يتمنى لو يوقف نزوح السوريين وهربهم عبر منافذ التهريب, فلقد عبر الآلاف من سوريا إلى لبنان خلال الأيام الأخيرة ولقد اعتُقِل خمسمئة شخصاً على الأقل وأُودِعوا غرف التعذيب السورية.
Some Shock, No Awe
picture by Ali Farzat
By last Friday, if it hadn’t already done so, the Syrian regime effectively declared war on its own people, killing at least a hundred protestors. Throughout this week parts of Syria have fallen under outright siege. The tanks and infantry which haven’t peeped across the occupied Golan since 1973 entered the southern city of Dara’a, cutting roads, telephone and internet, water and electricity. Reports from the city speak of food shortages, generalised terror, and corpses stinking in the streets. Snipers are firing at pedestrians in the Damascus suburb of Douma. Tanks surround the coastal city of Banyas. Madaya, a mountain town on the Lebanese border, is also occupied. The regime may wish to stop weapons being smuggled across the border, or it may wish to stop Syrians fleeing via the smuggling routes. Thousands have crossed to Lebanon in recent days, and at least five hundred have been rounded into the regime’s torture chambers.
The violence has been massive, but also tactically applied. The sudden escalation is intended to shock the population into obedience. Yet live ammunition has not been used everywhere. Security forces have tried not to kill protesting Kurds in the north east, fearing that would trigger a genuine armed insurrection. Demonstrations in central Damascus have been dispersed with batons and tear gas rather than live fire. The regime doesn’t want to kill the sons of important businessmen, not yet at least.
Easter Blood
On Friday the saviour died for our sins
That we might live.
Dumuzi, on the blood river’s brink
Takes the plunge.
Israa Yunis, seven years old, takes the plunge
And the little boys of Dara’a whose skulls they smashed
The brave men of Jableh, the warm women of Bayda
The intellectuals, the street kids, the people of truth
Walk into the waves.
الجمعة العظيمة
بالأمس القريب رفع الرئيس بشار الأسد قانون الطوارىء, وحلّ محاكم أمن الدولة سيئة السمعة وسمح بالتظاهر السلمي. ولكن بعد صدور المرسوم الرئاسي تقدم أحد المحامين في الحسكة بطلب إذن لتظاهرة سلمية فاعتقلته قوات الأمن.
واليوم , يوم “الجمعة العظيمة” قامت مظاهرة ضخمة, سلمية وعزلاء في كل المناطق السورية. لجأ الجيش والشرطة والميليشيات إلى استخدام الذخيرة الحية والعصي الكهربائية والغاز المسيل للدموع ضد المتظاهرين. قٌتِل على الأقل 88 ابناً وابنة من أبناء السوريين, ومنعت قوى النظام بعض المصابين من تلقّي المساعدة الطبية اللازمة, بينما تمّ اعتقال مصابين آخرين من فوق أسرّتهم في المشفى. يمكن رؤية هذا
Four Points on Syria
picture by Ali Farzat
1. Obama Should Shut Up
Obama’s claim that the Syrian regime is receiving Iranian assistance to repress protests is a statement which could inflame sectarian hatred inside Syria, as Obama’s Zionist advisors know very well. (This because Iran is Shia, a target of Saudi-Wahhabi propaganda, and the Syrian dictator is an Alawi, whereas the majority of Syrians are Sunnis). Obama gave no evidence to support his claim. The regime may be using Iranian bullets and tear gas. The Egyptian, Tunisian, and Libyan regimes have recently used American bullets and tear gas against their respective peoples. And America has offered its full support to the Saudi occupation of Bahrain and the Khalifa reign of terror there, which includes midnight arrests, extrajudicial executions, the destruction of Shia mosques, and assaults on hospitals and medical staff. The United States continues to assist the same dictatorships it has assisted for decades, and to function as the lifeline of the Zionist apartheid state. Obama’s statement could be a message to the Asad regime: if you distance Iran and the resistance, we will help you survive this crisis. But the Asad regime knows its only popularity arises from its support of resistance. Alternatively, Obama may have decided that Bashaar will fall, and the message is to the Syrian people, to encourage sectarian hatred amongst them and make it more difficult for them to build a stable, inclusive nation after the Asads capable of confronting the Zionist project.
Qunfuz 