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Stop the crocodile tears. We didn’t care about Syria

By Dan Hodges World Last updated:  January 23rd, 2014

1219 Comments Comment on this article

A Syrian woman cries holding her injured son in a taxi as they arrive at a hospital in northern city of Aleppo

A Syrian woman cries holding her injured son in a taxi as they arrive at a hospital in northern city of Aleppo. (Photo: AFP/Getty)

Can we please stop the crocodile tears over Syria? If there’s one thing more nauseating than the Assad torture factories, it’s the synthetic outrage and faux horror that has greeted their discovery.

Last year the world had an opportunity to send a signal to the Assad regime. Actually, the world had the opportunity to send a signal to itself.

Faced with evidence the Syrian government had been using chemical weapons on its own citizens – effectively choking its own children to death in their beds – we had the chance to take a stand. Not a chance to halt the slaughter overnight, or topple the Assad regime. But to put down a marker that said “You are on notice. We will not simply walk by on the other side. Remember, though the mills of justice grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small.”

But we chose not to send that signal, or put down any markers. Instead we thought it would be best if we just put our heads down, and scurried on past.

Of course, it didn’t happen quite like that. We had a debate first. A very thorough debate.

During that debate a number of very sophisticated arguments and questions were put forward by those opposed to military intervention. “If we do go in, what would our exit strategy be?” people asked. And as we now know, as they were doing so, somewhere in the bowels of one of Assad’s human meat-processing plants another victim was having a coil of steel wire slipped around their throat.

“What will the targets be?” was another perceptive question. And as it was asked, the steel wire was being pulled taught.

“We need more time. We need more proof” the wise men and women who stood square against the rush to war argued. And as the words left their lips another of Assad’s victims closed their eyes for the final time.

More on Syria

• Assad’s torture camps expose Ban Ki-moon’s naivety
• Syria’s horrors are unimaginable – and beyond our control
• Turkey’s response to the Syrian refugee crisis has been heroic

We have no way of knowing what impact, if any, targeted military intervention would have had on Assad’s thinking. It could have cowed him. It could have made him lash out.

But we know for certain what message our failure to act sent. It told him “They don’t care”. They don’t care if you gas your children. They don’t care if you oppress your people. And they certainly don’t care if you snatch some of your opponents off the streets, throw them in some putrid dungeon and “disappear them”.

And Assad is right. We didn’t care. Oh, we professed to care. “There will be those who believe Thursday’s vote in the House of Commons means that Britain cannot make a difference to the innocent civilians of Syria who are suffering such a humanitarian catastrophe,” wrote Ed Miliband the day after he voted down the government’s plans for a military strike. “I don’t agree.” And everybody nodded sagely in agreement. “Oh yes, there’s lots we can still do,” we told ourselves.

But the truth is there wasn’t. And it didn’t really bother us. We preferred to do nothing. We preferred to protect “our boys”. We preferred to protect the Middle East from further Western “adventurism”. Wwe preferred to protect our consciences from another Iraq.

Fine. But please, let’s not now pile hypocrisy on top of our grotesque abdication of responsibility. No more hand-wringing. No further calls for “something to be done”. Nothing is going to be done. Because we don’t actually want it to be done. Yes, we want the horrors of Syria to disappear. We want Assad to disappear. But we want someone else to make them disappear for us, so we can go back to congratulating ourselves about how we stood tall for peace.

Yesterday I saw some people calling for Assad to be tried for war crimes. I also saw John Kerry again insisting Assad steps down and leaves Syria. I may be wrong about this, but it seems unlikely Assad is going to be going anywhere unless he has some pretty solid guarantees about immunity from future prosecution.

In the meantime he’s already in possession of some other important guarantees. Such as if he doesn’t voluntarily deliver himself up to justice, we’re not going to go in and get him. If he doesn’t voluntarily leave Syria, we’re not going to go in and make him. When his henchmen slip a wire cable around the throat of another victim we’ll say how terrible it is. And then we’ll stand back and let them pull the noose tight.

We had the chance to take a stand against Assad last year. His chemical weapons. His torture chambers. We turned our back on it. So please, no more crocodile tears. The steel noose will be in use again tonight. Let’s not demean ourselves further by pretending that really matters to us.

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Osama Alomar, Syrian writer

lydia-davis-alomar-intro.jpgThe following introduction is from “Fullblood Arabian,” a collection of stories by Osama Alomar, translated by C. J. Collins, which will be released by New Directions later this week.Osama Alomar, a young Syrian writer who has been living here in the United States for the past five years, belongs at once to several different important literary traditions. Most immediately evident are two: that of the writer driven into exile from his own country and culture; and that of the writer of very short stories.The plight of a writer who has an established reputation in his own country, and none at all here in his adopted country is a plight shared, of course, with immigrants of other professions, including, for instance, the Puerto Rican lawyer who leaves a thriving practice in his native country to manage a grocery store in Massachusetts; or the Jewish scholar or physician who flees Nazi Germany to work in a textile factory in New York. It involves a profoundly disturbing change of identity in his new world, and often in his own eyes. His identity in his new community is, in a sense, a necessary disguise; and he faces the challenge of holding his two identities in balance, adjusting himself to the new, keeping the old alive. Alomar left a culture in which his prize-winning fiction and poetry had been published in four collections to date, appeared regularly in literary journals, was shared out loud with appreciative others in convivial living-room gatherings. By contrast, his writing is known here only to a few. How fortunate, then, that with this first collection of stories in English he will begin to find an audience both in the U.S. and in the larger Anglophone culture.

The other tradition to which Alomar most obviously belongs—in this case by choice—is that of the very short story. But this tradition is complicated, for within this genre, we have different traditions and different types. While Alomar is working within his own particular cultural heritage, he is of course also sharing in a wider international legacy of the very short story or prose poem, the more contemporary part of which spans more than a century at least: from the prose poems of Baudelaire in the mid-nineteenth century, to those of Francis Ponge and other French poets of the twentieth; the lyrical and nostalgic real-life stories of the early twentieth-century Viennese Peter Altenberg and the quirky numbered “handbook” instructions of the Bohemian / Czech Dadaist and pacifist Walter Serner; the Austrian Thomas Bernhard’s grim and syntactically complex paragraph-long stories in The Voice Imitator; the self-denigrating, anti-climactic, quarrelsome tales of the Soviet Daniil Kharms; the lyrical autobiographical sequence of the Spanish Luis Cernuda; and the pointed philosophical narratives of the contemporary Dutch writer A. L. Snijders (whose term, zkv or zeer korte verhaal—very short story— means exactly the same thing as Alomar’s al-qisa al-qasira jiddan); to mention only a few.

And then, there are the literary traditions in which the very short story shares, and Alomar’s work with it, including moral tales, fairy tales, works of magical realism, coming-of-age novels, and so forth ad infinitum. I read, for instance, Alomar’s “Conversation of the Breezes” and I hear, suddenly, an echo of the voice of the swallow in Oscar Wilde’s very moving late nineteenth-century tale, “The Happy Prince.” I read his “Sea Journey,” in which a weary office worker dreams of delirious adventures in the waves and wakes to find he is late for work, and I am reminded not only of Kafka but also of the great early twentieth-century Dutch writer Nescio, both of whom so vividly evoke the man of imagination stuck within the rigid entrenched bureaucracy of the madly irksome office routine. Again I think of Nescio’s classic, Amsterdam Stories, with its interrelated stories of three pals growing up together, and also of a long early section of the multi-volume My Struggle, by the contemporary Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard, when I read Alomar’s “Dividing Line,” one of the rare longer stories in the book and a succinct and crystalline tale of adolescent exuberance, heedlessness, rebellion, and epiphany. And—to return to the short form—Alomar’s insidious and powerful tale, “The Hammer and the Nail,” deploying personification with such utter ease and inevitability, reminds me of the terrifying absurdist domestic fables of the contemporary American poet Russell Edson, while the eccentricity and anguish underlying the occasional simple friendly tale reminds me of the weird and powerful work of the Brazilian Clarice Lispector, one of whose main forms was also the short story.

Although my frame of reference may be international, it is not particularly Syrian, which is of course my own loss. I have turned to Alomar’s translator, C. J. Collins, to learn what, in Alomar’s Syrian or Arabic heritage, have been the sources of his inspiration, particularly in the short form, and he has given me some interesting insights into the history of the form in the Middle East, both recent and older: there was an explosion of this form of writing in Syria in the 1990s; it became popular in magazines and newspapers as an expression of frustration at Syria’s bureaucracy and corruption and lack of freedom of expression. In an economically depressed time, too, there was a demand for the densest, briefest, most compressed of stories—a longer literary work was in fact a luxury—and these were shared and circulated freely and spontaneously, like personal anecdotes.

One of the best-known contemporary practitioners of the Arabic-language short story is the Syrian Zakaria Tamer, now in his eighties—many of his story collections have been translated into English and are available here. Going back another fifty years, there is the Lebanese literary and political rebel Khalil Gibran, with his formally innovative spiritual stories or prose poems, hugely popular in the American counter-culture of the sixties and an important influence on Alomar (Gibran himself being profoundly influenced by the earlier cosmopolitan Syrian prose poet Francis Marrash, who died in 1873). But the very short form has its roots in various Arabic literary traditions that go back to the Middle Ages and before, one important example being the mammoth story compilation One Thousand and One Nights (whose multi-cultural origins lie in the tenth century or arguably even earlier) and fable traditions like the Panchatantra, a third-century Indian set of linked animal tales imported into Arabic in the eighth century as the Kalila wa Dimna.

The personification of animal characters in the Kalila wa Dimna, for instance, finds its direct descendent in the naturalness and conviction with which Alomar personifies many of his protagonists, whether they be natural elements—the ocean, a lake, fire and water, breezes, clouds—or everyday objects such as a wistful and ambitious drop of oil, that cruel hammer and that gullible nail, a proud bag of garbage—or, yet again, abstractions such as freedom and time, allowing us to move easily into the alternate reality created in so many of these stories, whose forms range from moral fable to political fable to political allegory, to myth, to realistic moral tale, even to undisguised political statement, as in the title story “Fullblood Arabian” with its crushing final sentence.

The range of forms within this collection is matched by the versatility with which Alomar shifts tone, subject matter, and even structure from one story to the next. While some of the tales are explicitly angry or bitter, others are ironically detached, and still others make their point with a piece of sly wit, one of these being “The Pride of the Garbage,” in which a bag loaded with garbage, in its vainglory, is satisfied only if it is placed on the very top of the heap of bags bound for the dump. Formally, some stories proceed straight to the final shock or stunning image, as in “The Drop,” with its beautiful closing opposition of earth and sky. In others, the focus shifts smoothly, subtly, and naturally throughout the story, so that, to our surprise, the subject turns out to be something quite other than what we expected.

Such is the case in “Expired Eyes,” where the firm grounding of the plot in a realistic situation (a man enters his apartment after a day at work) allows us to accept its fantastical, perhaps futuristic ending (the man goes to his doctor to acquire a set of new eyes): here, realism is skillfully deployed, along with a reverberating emotional truth, in the service of fantasy. In Alomar’s stories, however, fantasy never devolves into mere whimsy. His magical imaginative creations are, every one, inspired by his deeply felt philosophical, moral, and political convictions, giving these tales a heartfelt urgency.

“Tongue Tie,” one of the simplest, neatest, and hardest-hitting, in its humorous restraint, ably illustrates this and can be quoted in full, being also one of the briefest:

Before leaving for work I tied my tongue into a great tie. My colleagues congratulated me on my elegance. They praised me to our boss, who expressed admiration and ordered all employees to follow my example!

* * *
Four stories by gtranslated from the Arabic by C. J. Collins with the author:

FULLBLOOD ARABIANTHE FIRST, wistfully: “If only I were a fullblood Arabian horse!”

THE SECOND, disdainfully: “Would you wish to be an animal when God in his mercy has created you as a human who belongs to a great and ancient nation proud of its glorious history?”

THE FIRST: “Man, don’t you know that the value of a fullbood Arabian horse in this world is far greater than the value of a fullblood Arabian human?”
THE PRIDE OF GARBAGEWhen the owner of the house picked up the bag of garbage and headed out to the street to throw it in the dumpster, the bag was overwhelmed with the fear that she would be put side by side with her companions. But when the man placed her on top of all the others, she became intoxicated with her greatness and looked down at them with disdain.
A DROPA drop of dried blood on the ground looked at the setting sun with an expression full of sadness. “Why do people look at that giant drop with happiness while they look at me with fear?” she asked in a weak voice. “We share the same roots!”

A reply came to her from somewhere unknown: “Because you are fixed to the surface of the earth and she is fixed to the sky.”
EXPIRED EYESClimbing up the steps to his home one night after working late, he staggered back and forth from exhaustion, carrying paper bags filled with fruits and vegetables. After entering the apartment and putting down the bags, he opened the door to his bedroom and was shocked to see his wife making love with insane ardor to a friend of their son’s. She glanced up at him, deliberately flashing him looks of malicious gloating. He rubbed his eyes hard and opened them to see her humbly performing her prayers. He rubbed his eyes again, this time with furious intensity, and opened them to see her dancing completely naked in front of the window that faced the house of their young neighbor. He closed his eyes in horror, rubbing them with two hands like tornadoes. When he opened them again, his wife was there, inviting him to share breakfast in bed, her eyes brimming with love and tenderness.

He knew then that the allotted time of his eyes had expired. He visited the most famous eye doctor in the country to have two new ones implanted—specially ordered fresh from the factory. And from that day on, he saw his wife exactly as he desired.

Lydia Davis received this year’s Man Booker International Prize. Her next collection of stories, “Can’t and Won’t” will be published next year.

C. J. Collins is a student of Arabic and a librarian currently based in Grafton, New York.

Osama Alomar was born in Damascus, Syria, in 1968, and is now living in Chicago. He is the author of three collections of short stories and a volume of poetry in Arabic, and performs as a musician. His short stories have been published by Noon, Conjunctions.com, The Coffin Factory, Electric Literature, and The Literary Review.

Photograph: Christopher Anderson/Magnum

 

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As If…

November 30, 2013 § Leave a Comment

the people of Kafranbel understand the game far better than most professional analysts

the people of Kafranbel understand the game far better than most professional analysts

In an article for the National, the wonderful Amal Hanano writes against the illusion that perpetuating the Assad regime can lead to anything other than continuing and expanding war.

In Ambiguities of Domination, political science professor Lisa Wedeen examined the Syrian regime’s rule of domination under then-president Hafez Al Assad.

She noted a dual role for Syrians: both propping up the regime’s propaganda and at the same time subverting its power via the symbols and rhetoric of everyday life and popular culture. This seminal work, published in 1999, a year before Al Assad junior took power, explained to outsiders the inner mechanisms of an authoritative regime. Its relevance is significant today under the shadow of Hafez’s son Bashar and with the fate of a blood-soaked Syria, now in ruins.

In a particularly powerful chapter entitled Acting As If, Wedeen writes: “Power manifests itself in the regime’s ability to impose its fictions upon the world.” The complicity of the people within this imposition enforces the regime’s power of domination. In other words, the regime’s power is mainly constructed by the people’s enacted participation in that very construction.

According to Wedeen: “The politics of acting ‘as if’ carries important political consequences: it enforces obedience, induces complicity, identifies and ferrets out some disobedient citizens …”

Indeed, one of the fundamental ways the Syrian people functioned in the police state was by “acting as if”. Acting as if nothing was going on as Hama was pummeled in 1982. Acting as if they loved the leader even though they were terrified of him.

The tragedy of Bashar Al Assad’s rule is that his father’s construct of complicity has, over the past 32 months, bled far beyond Syria’s borders to encompass the entire region and international community.

As world leaders discuss the merits of the Syrian opposition attending Geneva 2 peace talks without preconditions, they flip the narrative of the revolution. A narrative in which Mr Al Assad is upgraded from a brutal dictator that deserves no more than a cell at The Hague to a potential “partner” in the transitional peace process.

The latest demeaning analysis offered to Syrians is to act “as if” Mr Al Assad maintaining power would end the brutal war that was unleashed by Mr Al Assad himself. Governments act as if dragging the Syrian opposition to the negotiation table without any preconditions will result in a political solution to a raging war. World leaders act as if Mr Al Assad’s cooperation in dismantling his chemical weapon stockpiles is reducing the amount of bloodshed, even as the cluster bombs and scud missiles continue to fall onto civilian populations.

 

Kafranbel amplifies Amal Hanano's words

Kafranbel amplifies Amal Hanano’s words

As the slated 2014 Syrian presidential election approaches, “Syrians will have their voices heard at the ballot box” is the current refrain of Assad loyalists. As if presidential elections can even be a possibility in a country where over seven million people are displaced. And Mr Al Assad himself acts as if his nomination is not even problematic, to say the least.

For what purpose is all of this acting “as if”? To save Syria from the very regime that created this catastrophe in the first place?

The act of “acting as if”, like the fable about the emperor and his non-existent clothes, twists lies into elaborate truths to the point where even well-intentioned people, including Syrians themselves, are left to wonder: “Should Assad stay?”

Faisal Al Yafai, writing in these pages, approaches the “unthinkable question” of Mr Al Assad remaining in power to save Syria, arguing “all of that could be worthwhile if it ends the conflict”. True, but the most important word in that sentence is “if”.

While Al Yafai rightly points out that no one has any good ideas to end the protracted bloody war, the idea of Mr Al Assad staying in power may just be the worst one.

Most Syrians are worn out by the gruelling violence that has taken a toll on all aspects of life. Most Syrians want peace and stability. If faced with a sincere choice – Mr Al Assad remaining in power in exchange for a ceasefire, the release of all political prisoners, opening humanitarian and medical aid corridors into Syria, and beginning the long process of refugee return – most Syrians would swallow the bitter pill and choose Mr Al Assad. This choice is the result of being left alone to fight two enemies armed by foreign forces with virtually no support. It is a choice of despair.

It is also an unfairly framed choice for one simple reason: Mr Al Assad will never uphold his end of the bargain. Syrian history, old and new, is a reminder of how the Assad regime deals with the people’s dissent. Both father and son have displayed their relentless tactics of retribution. (See Hama, 1982. Or Syria, 2011-2013.)

Making a judgement call based on the grim Syrian present – well over 100,000 dead, thousands in torture cells, millions of displaced and refugees, foreign fighters and extremists battling for foreign ideologies and agendas, mass destruction of cities, towns and villages, an out-of-touch political opposition that is corrupt and impotent, and millions of exhausted Syrians who just want it all to end now – is simply a convenient and careless cop-out.

It’s easy to look at this list of tragedies and claim that saving what’s left of Syria should be the only priority and argue that preconditions to the negotiations will only ensure more stalemate and bloodshed.

Merely glancing at the present is not only naive, it’s immoral. History tells a different story. Stories of mass murder and destruction 31 years ago in Hama, stories of thousands of torture and rape cases, stories of boys whose fingernails where ripped out because they wrote “freedom” on their school walls, stories of enforced policies of “Assad or we scorch the country”, and more recently “Kneel or starve”. Those stories document the despicable and undeniable truth of this regime.

We live in dark times when tyrants are hailed as saviours and martyrs are called terrorists.

History repeats itself – as Hama did before Daraa, and Hafez before Bashar. History also bears witness to the simple fact that sooner or later, every tyrant’s rule ends. In fact, tyrants have fallen over the centuries of our collective civilisation, on this very land called Syria.

Perhaps we will not be able to rejoice soon (or not even for decades) that the Assad regime is finally finished. That will not change one fact: asking for him or his regime to stay will not save lives. Instead, this decision will take more Syrian lives. Thousands more lives.

Deceptive options and skewed choices can be framed as powerful persuasions, as the “last hope” and the “moral choice”. These “solutions for the Syrian conflict” mock the Syrian people’s heavy sacrifices, bloody history, and desire for a peaceful future of freedom and dignity.

If the world has now decided to act “as if”, this complicit world should know that the Syrian people ended that charade 30 months ago. That was their unambiguous choice.

Beyond the dead, tortured, and displaced people; beyond the destroyed cities and scorched landscapes; beyond all what we have lost; does the world really expect Syrians to go back to acting “as if”? As if they loved the illegitimate leader in Damascus? As if the tyrant’s clothes were not soaked with the people’s blood? As if the lies had become the truth? As if history had never unfolded in the terrible ways it did?

As if nothing had happened at all?

Amal Hanano is the pseudonym of a Syrian-American writer

On Twitter: @AmalHanano

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Open Letter to a Condescending U.S. Peace Activist

We are going through hell and our friends inside Syria are being torn limb from limb. You come in after three years of it and tell us what our uprising is and isn’t and what it should be and shouldn’t. We all started out together in it, hopeful, finding each other, Syrians, talking to each other again after years of monstrous silence twisted by so many layers of fear, generations of fear handed down by the trauma of families with absent members in prison. Young people began hearing their own voices for the first time, shouting “freedom.” “It was the first time I ever heard my own voice,” young women, young men, street protesters, have told me over and over. Working-class urban neighborhoods and farming- and middle-class rural villagers across the country came out for clearly stated goals of human rights and democratic freedoms and no more being ruled by police state, and it had nothing to do with Islamists but that was before you bothered to notice. Some 920 different locales were protesting nonviolently on a weekly basis by summer 2011, with at least 4 million of Syria’s 23 million people having protested at the height of 2011. Even this first reality, you won’t acknowledge.

Stunning arrogant brutality is how this police state met this uprising. Insane brutality and duplicity. House-to-house raids, tank and machine gun fire, ground troops, snipers, home burnings, the capture and torture of children, the siege of Daraa—all this before the uprising began to arm. The pressure for self-defense was intense. Come live in it for a day. I don’t think you’ve ever been stopped cold by the tears and the anguish in the individual self-defense argument from a real Syrian human being demanding, “if a regime militia is raiding my home, about to kill my children, how dare you tell me not to lift arms to try to save them.” I am stopped cold by it, every day.

My only answer is: “look, I’m really sorry, but look at the facts; after the revolution lifted arms, your children are dead and so is the whole neighborhood. Arms are not working; self-defense is not defending; it is making you a more legible target for the lethal regime. It defended that home for two hours or two weeks, but in the end the entire neighborhood was flattened by the regime, because the regime is hugely more armed. Nor will outside military intervention save you. You can only win if you band together in slow, organized, nonviolent resistance.”

I say this and I staunchly advocate nonviolence over the din of shelling, but my voice breaks saying it to someone whose children are cowering tonight because the home is shaking because the town is being shelled and his parents are already dead. Some far-sighted Syrians got that having the (secular) FSA only drew heavier regime fire. Most Syrians did not get it—gasp, they live in a pro-violence culture like most of the world—and felt the only answer to the inequity in arms only means all their problems would be solved by heavier arms for the (secular) FSA which they see as defending them. I know they’re only harming themselves in believing this romance of armed liberation, but I know it from their pain, and I can only tell them with my voice shaking because I am at a privileged distance from them, and because I haven’t been able to help them in any other way stronger than they see the (secular) FSA helping them, and then the armed Islamists—who did not come in until 2012, able to wedge in because of the regime devastation wreaked on nonviolent uprising Syrians whose screams went unheard by you, able to ride in on the false promise of armed liberation and humanitarian aid not provided by others.

And you hear their cry for arms, and you brand them intransigent militants, and demand why they won’t go to Geneva. I demand that too, but I do it from inside a Syrian anguish, at far higher damage to myself than it costs you. You then turn around and cast aspersions on me and Syrians with similar stands, not even allowing us our embattled path, because of our “associations;” we wake up damned if we do advocate nonviolence, and damned if we don’t.

Our “associations?” We are Syrians. We all started out together. Hopeful. Three years ago, we did not know how things would unfold. We began working together and creating histories and relationships. And now that different paths have been trod in this revolution, you come in and tell us we are not allowed to be associates, to be related to other Syrian people in this revolution who’ve taken other paths? There are people on the pro-FSA side who I think have done no end of damage to this revolution, but for whom I’d give my life as much as for people in civilian resistance. Yeah, those are my associations.

You breeze in and say, in effect, “how dare these Syrians fall for the romance of armed liberation. They offend my anti-imperialist stance as a progressive American. Every leftist revolution has fallen for that romance and every other revolution too, but how despicable and primitive of these Syrians to fall for it.” You demand we apologize for “associating” with each other. You demand we devote our energies to proving we are nonviolent and meet your standards, like a man demanding a feminist prove she is not a man-hater and has never associated with militant separatist feminists. This, while we get derision from fellow Syrians every day for insisting that this brutal regime can be stopped by nonviolence, hisses from starving freezing impoverished people facing its gun barrels in their faces every day, before whose trauma we tremble. Insulated from realities on Syrian ground, you point to one of us and say, in effect, “How dare any of you Syrian activists abroad be tempted, even for a moment, to see an iota of use in bombing assad’s military airports that are bombing your people?” In the din of this shriek of pain that we hear unceasingly, to the edge of our insanity, from Syrians in Syria, how dare we as Syrian peace activists abroad ever register the temptation to sympathize with the primal desire that someone, anyone just come and bomb the fuck out of this monster killing people we know daily. How dare I have a friend like that.

Instead of offering one bit of solidarity, you come in to tell us who we are and who we should be and are suspicious of us if we are not packaged into discrete separate compartments for you. We’re not up to your standards. We are Syrians and yes, we associate with each other, nonviolent proponents and Coalition and FSA-proponents and hard-drinking Syrian atheists and Muslim Brotherhood and gay Syrians and Nusra sympathizers, all fighting the regime
together in our different ways; and some of us even have nephews in assad’s army just as much as nephews in Assad’s prisons and in the FSA, and regime loyalist aunts, and military officer dads about whom we are terrified they could be killed and horrified they could be torturing someone.

Yes, simultaneously. Because that is what it is to be Syrian today. Yes we are all cousins, all in-laws, all related, all family, and we all will have to live with each other for years to come in this Syria boat that is a life and a home and a country for Syrians even if it is an equation on a piece of paper for you, and we in this Revolution hate and love each other and fight with each other all while struggling against a brutal regime for a future Syria that has some ounce of justice, some human dignity and freedom in it, and for us there is green and good in Syrians worth struggling for still, and who on earth are you to drain one drop of our precious few remaining energies.

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source : Syrian activist Mohja Kahf to American leftists

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Syrian Tears in Istanbul

Syrian Tears in Istanbul

On my way back from   applyinginformation but also the fact that the building was full of Syrians, a babble   of various Syrian dialects grumbling at the 200 Turkish Lira fee, a small   price it may seem for security but still a hefty sum nevertheless for most,   handing over my privileged claret passport cost another 175 TL on top of that,   I also grumbled in various dialects but mostly cockney, the air of   despondency followed me into a shopping mall just down the road, sitting   beside a water fountain performing to orchestral commands beyond my   comprehension, I logged onto Starbucks fading wifi signal while some tourists   from the far east snapped away at the aquatic display.
A more depressing globalized environment would be hard to imagine I thought   as I surveyed my surroundings, once again it’s the Syrians that grab my   attention, this time a young women pushing a child in a buggy, she looks   upset and as though she’s about to burst into tears, she’s followed by a   couple of young lads, aged about seven and eight they all sit down on the   step of the plaza and no sooner sitting she does burst into tears, the boys   are kicking their heals, soon they are joined by who clearly must be her   husband and another son, they are well dressed, not wealthy but typical   Syrian middle class, families like this I would see everyday shopping along   sharia Hamra, her tears could be nothing more serious that the usual marital   trauma brought on by a visit to overpriced shopping mall but I can’t help   feeling it’s another sad Syrian story, he paces around the plaza trying to   call on his phone, he seems agitated and looks as though he is just trying to   do something, anything, he knows it’s his job to solve the situation and he   is making the calls, the look in his eyes show a lack of confidence, the   women is sobbing non-stop and I just want him to go and comfort her, I want to   go and talk with them but I don’t, over the last almost three years I have   witnessed the tears of Syrians sobbing countless times, on occasion I have   tried to console but what you can you say or do, futile reassurance that   everything is going to be okay, they really do seem like a nice family, they   seem lost and out of their depth, I have listened to the conversations before   on what to do for the best, to leave Syria or stay, to go where and do what,   how much money do we have and how long will it last, what country accepts a   Syrian passport, who will give me a job, what about the car and the house,   what about the rest of the family, the decisions to leave are not easy, she   sits there alone tears running down her face, like the nation she has left   behind, alone and broken.

johnwreford

Freelance editorial photographer that has spent the last ten years living in the Syrian capital Damascus. Currently in Istanbul Turkey.

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Al-Bayda: Anatomy of a War Crime

An excellent report from Channel 4 on the al-Bayda massacre, one of hundreds of massacres in Assad’s Russian-backed genocide.

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The shared struggle for Syrian freedom

September 11, 20131:30PM ET

Commentary: A Syrian-American argues that the U.S. should take sides against the Assad regime
 
 note: The author has decided to write under a pen name, to protect associates in Syria from possible reprisals.

To Americans following the news on Syria:

This is not how we Syrians wanted to introduce ourselves to you. We did not want you to meet us via a television screen split between Secretary of State John Kerry speaking about America’s newfound duty to stop Bashar al-Assad from using chemical weapons on his own people and the piles of dead children who were gassed on Aug. 21, 2013. We did not want you to feel the need possibly to embrace a proposal from Russian President Vladimir Putin — a dubious plan to recover Syria’s chemical weapons from an active war zone without a strong enforcement mechanism to ensure compliance— to find a political settlement that would avoid an unpopular military strike.

We would have rather you met us 30 months ago, when this turmoil began, on March 15, 2011. That day Syrians decided that they would no longer accept oppression in silence and that they were willing to die to live with freedom and dignity. And die they have — more than 100,000 and counting. To their chants for reform and cries against tyranny, the Syrian regime responded with bullets and cluster bombs. And for more than two years the world watched and said nothing.

As an American, I want to remind you that we have been here before, at this very crossroads in the struggle for freedom and justice. Though we did not live that history ourselves, still we feel its ripple effects on our lives every single day. Although our democracy is flawed, would you dare ask if the freedom won from the American Revolution, the Civil War or the civil rights movement was worth it? Such a question would offend the memory of the countless Americans who gave their lives for those causes.

As a Syrian I want to tell you that we have been here before. Syria has thousands of years of history, with its share of violent wars as well as the flowering of religions, cultures and ethnicities. In recent years, we suffered the consequences of the Iraq War seeping through our borders. We are entangled in the unending regional conflict between Palestine and Israel. But in the last two years, we have also witnessed the citizens of neighboring Arab countries rise up against their tyrannical governments.

As a citizen of the world, I want to tell you that we have been here before. We have witnessed chemical weapons attacks, ethnic cleansing, torture and genocide. We also have watched peoples overcome unimaginable losses and survive mass violence and destruction.

You may be able to live with your inaction, but will you be able to forget what you have seen?

What is happening in Syria is not new. It is one of humanity’s oldest stories: a people fighting to free itself from a brutal regime that is willing to massacre foes and innocents alike to stay in power. For the past two and a half years, Syrians have asked the international community for support. No answers have come save excuses: The opposition is too fragmented; extremists have made the conflict too messy; there is no good to be gained from intervening in a protracted sectarian war; there are too many other more important problems at home to get involved in yet another Middle Eastern conflict. These excuses have prolonged Syria’s agony and bought Assad and his allies many months to kill tens of thousands of innocent people.

In the spring of 2011, Syria’s revolutionaries believed that it was time to join the millions of people across the region chanting, “Freedom!” for the first time, without fear. Aren’t all revolutionaries naive optimists? How could it not be silly to think that thousands of people could dismantle a brutal regime with hopeful chants? To take up small arms against tanks and warships? To try to remake society while Scud missiles and mortars rain down? To face the horror of toxic gas attacks like the one that killed more than 1,400 people last month? They are paying a heavy price for their ideals.

The Obama administration sold military intervention in Syria as a moral and humanitarian choice. We were told that the strikes would be “limited” and will “degrade” Assad’s ability to launch another chemical weapons attack. And now that plan appears to be stalled. But Syrians are not naive. Like you, we have grown jaded since 2011. The staggering numbers — including 2 million refugees, 6 million internally displaced and the loss of a third of all Syrian homes by last spring — will harden any idealist. Syrians know that intervention, if it ever comes, is not about a moral choice. It is about America’s credibility, a president’s legacy and maintaining authority in the global power struggle.

It would be very easy for America to avoid being involved in Syria. It is easy to ask, “Remember Iraq? Remember Afghanistan?” It is easy to say, “It’s too messy, too far away, too complicated.” But you will never be able to say that you did not know what was going on, that you did not see the devastation with your own eyes. This revolution has been thoroughly documented. The videos of the suffering will never be erased, the images of corpses will never disappear, and the bloodstains will never wash away from the clothes of those who looked the other way, toward the wrong side of history. You may be able to live with your inaction, but will you be able to forget what you have seen?

You have been here before, faced with difficult choices. But you should not forget that at one time, other nations made these same choices for you — back when you were a colony of naive, idealistic revolutionaries who believed you could build a new world with sheer determination and calls for freedom.

Now Syrians stand at a similar crossroads. What does Syria mean to you? Whether you have watched Syrians die for the past two and a half years or have just been introduced to the horrors of parents wrapping their children in white shrouds, you must ask yourself where you stand. Would you deny to Syrians the same freedoms you have claimed for yourselves? Or do you see Syrians participating in the same struggle — one that we all share together?

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Syria: A Mystifying Lack of US Preparedness

 

By Fred Hof
President Obama speaks on the situation in Syria from the White House Rose Garden. (Photo: White House)

The decision of President Barack Obama to seek congressional approval for US military strikes in Syria is constitutionally sound, but strategically appalling. By not making it clear from the outset of the crisis that he would seek the approval of the Senate and House for a military response to the Assad regime’s chemical atrocity, the president’s jarring change of direction now runs the risk of thoroughly undermining whatever remains of allied confidence in his leadership. By not calling on Congress to return to Washington immediately the president conveys a sense of nonchalance that his newly discovered soaring rhetoric cannot disguise. Having taken a risk that is as profound as it is gratuitous, the administration would do well now to focus on that which it has avoided totally to date: creating and implementing an objectives-based strategy that would, among other things, employ sustained military strikes to destroy or significantly degrade the ability of Bashar al-Assad’s regime to commit mass murder in Syria.

The events of the past ten days suggest that there was no administration forethought to the possibility of a major chemical incident in Syria; there was no plan in place to respond to a major chemical attack by a regime that had already demonstrated its deep and abiding contempt for the president and his red lines. The results of this mystifying lack of preparedness have been abysmal. Secretary of State John Kerry responded quickly with a very convincing replica of presidential leadership, making a strong case for the inadmissibility of the regime’s action and the crying need for a strong American and Western response.

Over the next few days Kerry’s clarity was blurred repeatedly by statements emanating from the White House and Pentagon. What effect this uncertain trumpet may have had on the shocking, disgraceful, yet understandable vote in Britain’s parliament is not known, but the spectacle of the secretary of state making the case while other senior officials temporized and agonized is not one to which historians will assign high grades in the annals of presidential leadership.

Indeed, presidential uncertainty and talk of a loud but meaningless “shot across the bow” of the Assad regime no doubt leads some to believe that his call for a vote in Congress is less a bow to American constitutionality than a further attempt to kick the can down the road. This is why the president should have been prepared from the outset to make clear his desire to seek congressional approval. There is not a thing wrong with his official desire to act constitutionally, or his political desire to have a broad array of domestic accomplices. Yet the conclusion that he is motivated by skepticism and even disbelief in the endeavor itself, even if it is a patently unfair finding, is impossible to dismiss out of hand given his behavior over the past ten days and his approach to Syria over the past two years. It is a conclusion that, if permitted to grow roots, can have a corrosive effect on American credibility around the world. It is a conclusion whose dismissal is not facilitated by the president’s decision not to call the Congress into special session immediately.

What then is to be done? Before he heads off to the G20 summit in Russia next week, President Obama needs to be armed with a Syria strategy based on clear objectives. The mantra-like repetition of the phrase “there is no military solution to the war in Syria” is neither an objective nor a strategy. Indeed, according to the Assad regime, Russia, and Iran, it is not even a fact. President Obama may well wish to give his Russian counterpart one final opportunity to bring decency and statesmanship to bear in the Syrian context: “Vladimir, either you persuade your client to declare and enforce a unilateral ceasefire, call for and cooperate with UN observers, implement Kofi Annan’s six point plan, and send a team to Geneva next month prepared to facilitate real political transition, or I—with the approval of Congress—will ruin his whole day.” Even if Russia were willing to work to such an end, the chances of regime compliance would not be great. Yet an administration still dedicated to the one-sided, wishful proposition that this war cannot end with a military result would do well to run to ground, once and for all, the diplomatic possibilities.

The objective of sustained military strikes should be to destroy or seriously degrade the ability of the regime to bring to bear massed fires, chemical or conventional, on Syrian population centers. This would mean concentrating—for several days, if necessary—on artillery, aircraft (along with airfields), and missiles. Ideally the administration would have had a plan to execute within seventy-two hours of the August 21 outrage, one that would have put the regime out of the business of mass murder. Yet, everything that has happened since August 21 suggests that Assad’s action was a big surprise; that there was no executable plan in place. This is a failure that can be sorted out over time by congressional inquiries. Now, the challenge for the Pentagon is constantly to update targeting while the regime tries to move and hide assets.

Putting the regime out of the long-distance, mass murder business is important, not only for the Syrian victims of the Assad regime, but for Syria’s neighbors—among them American allies and friends. The fears of some in the administration that hitting too hard could cause the regime to fall, causing instability from which jihadists might benefit, are simply beyond belief. Leave aside the self-fulfilling consequences of having failed to support mainstream, Syrian nationalist armed opposition elements. Leave aside the failure to follow-up in operationally relevant ways after having recognized the Syrian National Coalition as the legitimate representatives of the Syrian people in December 2012.

When has the Assad regime been a force for stability in Syria since March 2011? When it mowed down peaceful protesters? When it authorized door-to-door massacres? When it stampeded two-million refugees across international boundaries? When it employed sarin gas against women and children? When it denied humanitarian access to parts of Syria beyond its control? When it placed itself in the hands of Iran and Iran’s Lebanese militia? This is a regime worth preserving because there is something worse? Has support for the mainstream Supreme Military Council massively increased in the past week? Is this administration, at long last, prepared to substitute action for analysis?

President Obama’s reluctance to engage in Syria has been understandable. Perhaps he now understands that disengagement also has consequences, many of them unintended. The worst of these unintended consequences has been the toll exacted of his credibility and that of the United States. From here on out, he has an opportunity to get things right: cripple the murder machine, support the mainstream opposition effectively, and facilitate the departure from Syria of a merciless, morality-free crime family. There will be no “do-overs.” Yet there is an opportunity to secure the support of Congress, persuade friends and allies that we mean business, and help Syrians save a country whose suffering is an affront to civilization.

Frederic C. Hof is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East.

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Intervention?

Qunfuz

Robin Yassin-Kassab

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If the US-led West wished to invade and occupy Syria, or to engineer regime change from afar, it would have taken advantage of the two-and-a-half-year chaos in Syria to intervene long before now.

When the US-led West invaded Iraq in 2003, Saddam Hussain was contained. He’d committed his genocides in the past, when he was an ally of the West against Iran, and in 1991, under Western military noses (as he slaughtered Shia rebels and their families en masse, the allied forces in Kuwait and southern Iraq gave him permission to use helicopter gunships, and watched). But in 2003 Saddam was contained and reasonably quiet. There was no popular revolution against him. The West invaded anyway, on the pretext of inexistent Weapons of Mass Destruction.

The Syrian regime’s ultra-violent repression of a peaceful protest movement spawned an armed resistance. The regime met the armed resistance with genocide and ethnic cleansing. Then a week ago the regime struck multiple targets in the Damascus suburbs with chemical weapons, perhaps killing as many Syrians in three hours as Palestinians were killed in Israel’s month-long rampage in Gaza (2008/9).

The conflict has been well and truly internationalised for a long while now. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey have provided limited and intermittent military supplies to various parts of the opposition (the US has prevented them from delivering heavy weapons). The international brigades of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham – an enemy both of the regime and the democratic opposition to the regime – has been empowered in pockets of northern Syria. The regime has received much more serious financial and military help from Russia and Iran, and has brought in Hizbullah and Iraqi sectarian militias to help it fight its battles. Hizbullah’s switch from defence against Zionism to repression of a revolutionary Arab people has propelled Lebanon back to the verge of civil war. Meanwhile, between a quarter and a third of Syrians are displaced, destabilising Turkey and Jordan as well as Lebanon.

A year to the day before the massive poison gas attacks, Obama set a supposed ‘red line’ on the regime’s use of chemical weapons. Whenever the regime has introduced a new weapon, it has done so quietly and steadily, until its use is normalised and forgotten internationally. So it was with artillery, helicopter gunships, aerial bombardment, scud missiles – first these were used rarely, then more frequently, then on a daily basis. And so it is with the gas. Obama’s chemical red line had already been repeatedly broken in a small way before last week’s atrocities. American inaction made Assad believe he could get away with a bigger show.

By this mass attack, Assad was not only trying to clear areas close to the capital in which rebels were deeply entrenched and advancing; he was also telling the military and popular opposition, “Look, I can do what I want. I can increase the pace of the ethnic cleansing and genocide, and still noone will intervene or allow you to become properly armed.”

So now Obama feels he must act, symbolically at least, to show the larger world as well as Assad that America’s word still means something, that it still makes claims to ensuring international order.

It goes without saying that all states – if we must compare them with people – are hypocrites, and America, as (still) the world’s most powerful state, much more than most. The white phosphorus and depleted uranium munitions it used in Iraq, for instance, can certainly be considered as weapons of mass destruction, though even their use cannot be compared to Assad’s sarin savagery. And late 20th Century America actively aided Saddam’s chemical programme. But simplistic ‘anti-imperialists’ (the sort who haven’t noticed Russia’s blatant imperialism in Syria) should reflect on the complexity of the situation. Should a tyrant be left unchecked to gas his people? If Israel were doing it to the Palestinians, would outside intervention (of course there would be none) to deter Israel be absolutely wrong? Was it right to leave the Bosnian Muslims to be slaughtered? (Many statist leftists would of course unhesitatingly answer yes to this question). Even with our hypocritical and frequently criminal ‘international community’, is there no validity in attempting to preserve the semi-taboo on the mass use of WMD?

I cannot say what will happen, or if it will happen, or what the ramifications will be. I expect, however, that any American-led attack will not dramatically change the balance on the ground. Obama wants to be seen to be acting, and to deter. He will be scared that Assad, Hizbullah or Iran will respond in such a way that he is pressured to expand the operation to end the regime. And he doesn’t want to do this. General Martin Dempsey has recently explained why – America can’t find any branch of the opposition ready to assume power and serve American interests.

One reason that the West doesn’t want to end the regime is that, in the north and east, the al-Qa’ida type militias (indirectly created by Assad’s traumatisation of the country, as well as by the political failures of loyalist traditionalist clerics) are growing in strength. Their strength flows from the fact that the West and the Arabs failed to arm the Free Army. The ineffective Syrian National Coalition must also bear some of the blame for not working harder to organise a national army from the start, before the jihadists had time to establish themselves. Western, Syrian and Arab timidity and Islamophobia have brought on the worst.

I expect the upcoming attack to be, in effect if not in image, tepid. It may not do any good at all. It may allow Assad to reap the ‘resistance’ propaganda victory without changing the calculus on the ground.

If there is any change to calculus on the ground, it will be because the Sauds are increasing military aid after the mass gas attacks. Apparently 40 tons-worth came in through Turkey this week. But will that be sustained? Never before now.

And again, the Sauds, like the Americans, like all states, are acting according to their interests. They back Sisi’s junta in Egypt as it rolls back the victories of the revolution there. In Syria, the Sauds are interested in weakening Iran and Hizbullah, obviously not in facilitating victory for either democrats or radical Islamists who reject Saudi kingship. Syrian fighters facing exile or genocide will take weapons from where they can, but they understand that in the medium and long term, they are on their own, as they have been for the last two and a half years.

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