Afra Jalabi
This essay is an attempt to present the perspectives of a range of Syrian civil society activists from varying backgrounds and give voice to their struggles with the question of what is the solution to the nightmare they are living through. Despite the bleak conditions they are confronting, these activists maintain the ethos that started the Syrian revolution and keep it going, and express views that could spare the country yet further destruction.
While visiting the liberated areas around the countryside of Idlib last January, we came across a crumbling wall with hideous graffiti on it, a remnant of those who were here just a few weeks ago. In uneven, scrawled letters it read: “Assad or we burn down the country!” Then, a few meters ahead stood the police station of the town, freshly painted. Atop its gate, in professional print, appeared the words: “The police and people together for the service of our country.”
I had to stop and look back at the crumbling wall and stare again at the writing of the newly cleaned-up building. It was evident that something fresh and new was aching to sprout in Syria, but against extremely difficult odds, while something dark and dated was receding but being maintained with great support and force.
We were a small group of friends from various Syrian backgrounds. Some came to bring aid and baby milk. Others, like me, wanted to witness the reality on the ground. We met with members of the newly formed local councils in the areas we visited. The local councils are new administrative bodies formed by the locals to run civic functions in liberated areas, and are different from the Local Coordination Committees in Syria (LCC). In one town, two of the elected members were women who came to the gathering held at the house of one of the local leaders of the Free Syrian Army during that cold January night. The women were forceful in voicing their frustrations—lack of bread, lack of educational materials. Not to mention the issues of safety and stress from trying to send their children to school amidst sporadic bombing and shelling.
These were the realities and these were the people trying to organize themselves and run their daily lives while on disconnected islands.
There were many inspiring stories of resilience and survival. The elderly woman, at whose house we stayed said, “Ya binti, heik ahssan.” Meaning, “My daughter, it’s better like this.” “We live in liberty and peace, or we die if we get shelled,” she said. “I prefer this existence than living in constant fear and stress while the tanks are pointing to my kitchen window.” At night she apologized for the bullet hole in the room where we were to sleep. Yet she and her family were the ones who lived with this. The morale of the adults was high, but the faces of the children seemed frozen: their vacant and mournful stares will forever haunt me.
The Syrian people have been doubly hijacked. First when Hafez al Assad, Bashar’s father, came to power through a coup d’état in 1970. Then Syrians, caught up in the hope and promise of the Arab Spring, attempted to free themselves from the reign of Bashar al Assad and began their revolution in March 2011, only to find themselves hijacked again by the interests of regional and international powers.
This is what frustrates many of Syria’s civic activists. They say their revolution has been taken away.
Mufid28 is from Daraya, a suburb of Damascus. He has been part of a small nonviolent group since his youth, long before the revolution began in Syria, and has been imprisoned more than once, along with his friends, for their civic activities: cleaning up the neighbourhood, anti-smoking campaigns, creating small libraries. He is an engineer who has a registered patent but discovered, despite his commitment to nonviolent struggle, that he was not willing to leave his community, even when the revolution armed.
He believes that people like him could still make an impact. Even though he is one of the founders of the local council, he is frustrated by the challenges surrounding the Syrian dream for democracy. Turning to armed struggle comes with its price, he says. For him, it is the nature of the beast. “When arms entered the Syrian revolution, and it was a result of the tyranny of the regime and its brutal way of dealing with it, in that moment the leadership of the revolution started leaving the hands of its makers and moving to external powers who supply and bring in arms.”
Mufid stresses the importance of holding steadfast to the initial demands of the people to secure a peaceful future in Syria. He is concerned about the escalation in the sectarian tone and actions of the allies of the regime, “especially after the audacious interference in Syria by Iran and Hizbullah.” He observes, “I don’t see any solution except in what we proposed from the first day of the revolution: A Syrian republic based on equality in citizenship, democratic rule of law, and respect for human rights and for religious and political pluralism.”
One of the activists we met while travelling inside was Nicola, a filmmaker from the Christian community in Damascus. He also worked in the theater and was active in the socialist movement before the revolution. Soft-spoken and contemplative, he always gave us astute observations as he was now living in the north and moving between the various liberated areas. He explained the rise of Islamism in the country as being more of a reaction to the constant provocations of the Assad regime and a way of reclaiming an identity under constant siege. Homam Hadad, a young Alawite journalist who left Syria a few months ago and is now working with Syrians in Europe and Turkey, has similar views to Nicola. “The more sectarian side is the regime with no competition, whereas the sectarianism in the revolution is a reaction to a large extent. . . . However, if this continues, sectarianism would deepen in the Syrian mind. But I still can’t blame the revolution for sectarianism.”
With millions on the streets making their demands, the Syrian regime pushed for a three-layered strategy. First, provoking people to take up arms, where the regime would have the upper hand. Second, orchestrating massive media and e-mail campaigns stressing the threat of Islamic radicalism—and also releasing radicals from prison and hunting down nonviolent and civil right activists. Third, stoking sectarian tensions, even creating them where they did not exist, which has pushed the conflict onto the regional level.
The regime succeeded with these three strategies while failing to achieve its primary goal—crushing the revolution. Yet, Syria is now a country in which the consequences of these three strategies are unfolding with a regime that is also losing control. Many of the civic activists believe the conflict became stalemated when the revolution turned to armed struggle, and think the increasingly Islamized image of the rebellion has served to bolster the regime’s propaganda.
Nicola, however, says that this is not just a Syrian crisis, but an international one, given the regional implications of this revolution. Many of the activists point to the failure of dated paradigms of securing strategic interests at the expense of what matters most—namely our very humanity. Eyad from Saraqib, a town near Aleppo, and part of a group of local artists who have been creating murals on the walls of Saraqib, was recently propelled several meters in the air when his workplace was bombed by a MIG26.
Eyad does not feel the solution is complicated. For him, the complexity lies in the international context. “The solution to our complicated context is extremely simple. But the international community is unanimously dealing with us on the basis of securing their own interests.”
Hadad also shared his frustrations of a revolution being hijacked. “I feel we have lost our national autonomy and so the stopping of bloodshed is no longer in our hands,” he says, “The solution would be by an international decision, unfortunately.”
“But,” he’s quick to add, “I still hope that Syrians will achieve victory through their own internal strength, despite all the odds.”
Rasha Qass Yousef is an Assyrian from the north who completed a B.A. in English Literature at the University of Damascus before the revolution. She is currently working in Turkey with an NGO. She also says there has to be political will at the international level to create a collective agreement for a solution that would impose a ceasefire and create a context that would lead to changing the presidential election laws, release all political prisons and set up internationally monitored elections. “But I still don’t know how to find a framework to enforce these things,” she admits. “For example, the ceasefire—how can we really make it happen by both sides?”
Nicola has thought about this in more detail and believes there can be Syrian solutions. “There is already contact and communication between units of the Syrian regime army and the Free Syrian Army (FSA), especially when it comes to local arrangements for a ceasefire and exchange of captives,” he explains. “This could be expanded into a larger circle to cover all of Syria if there is political coordination behind it.” He cites the earlier examples of the way many communities—both pro-revolution and pro-Assad—used to send representatives to each other to maintain peace and reconciliation in certain contact areas and how these practices were weakened when the revolution armed.
Emad Alabbar, based in France, is also originally from Daraya and is actively involved in writing and publishing in the Syrian nonviolent movement. His cousin, Giyath Matar, became a national icon and a symbol for the nonviolent movement when he died under torture in prison in September 2011. Despite his personal losses, Alabbar maintains that the solution lies in a peaceful transition.
Yet he also feels that Syrians have lost the momentum of their revolution, with so many regional powers getting involved. He thus recommends a more robust international intervention. “We have as Syrians to realize that accepting gradual solutions is much less costly than continuing this inferno at whose end we may no longer find any of our initial demands.” He suggests the formation of a political team that would turn the Syrian issue into a global one through awareness-raising media campaigns that would involve global civil society. “This would create global pressure,” he says. “These organizations can remind the international community of their ‘responsibility to protect.’”
Alabbar says there should be serious international pressure now, considering that many powers are already involved. Alabbar realizes the implications of such a proposal. “The international community has to intervene to impose a political settlement,” he says, “and the Syrians have to realize the consequent compromises might be quiet unfair, but we also have to realize that the alternative is much worse.”
Aside from the many international plans and projects for a post-Assad transition designed by Syrians, including The Day After Project29 in which I participate, there is considerable evidence on the ground in Syria of strong civic ideas among ordinary Syrians. However, they will need the right political environment and assistance to continue the work already started. This is why a political solution to the crisis should ensure the continuity of these grassroots and organic formations. Doing so will allow a transitional peace plan to be more effective.
Hadad, who has been working with activists on the Turkish borderlands, says that they are becoming increasingly critical of armed resistance. “What stands out,” he says, “is that the civil democratic movement is continuing and critical, rational voices are gaining strength and clarity among the youth. They have gained experience on the ground, which the official opposition [abroad] lacks because of their distance from the realities here.”
Alabbar believes that Syrians today would accept the comprise of an imposed political settlement, however painful it may be, especially if Syrians realize such a solution would allow them to accomplish their initial goals more than the path of armed struggle has done or would do if continued. “They will realize also,” he explains, “that the revolution does not stop at a specific point and it is not merely to bring down the regime.”
Nicola, on the other hand, has specific suggestions to create a Syrian-based solution with some minimal support from the international community. He says that finding a third party within Syria to negotiate between the Syrian regime and the revolutionaries would help navigate the Syrians beyond the current stalemate. “An entity like the National Coordinating Committee,” he explains, “even though they are not much liked by the revolutionaries, have their own guys on the ground and are constantly making statements about their willingness to negotiate with the regime.” This would “keep the solution inclusively Syrian and on Syrian terms.”
“I have friends who are willing to risk their lives to engage in such solutions and negotiations if it would stop the bloodshed,” he adds. He also suggests that if there is some measure of safety and immunity given to such an entity by the international community, this undertaking would place real pressure on the regime.
We know what would happen if there were a minimal level of safety from regime shelling and brutality. It is the hushed option. If Syrians had a minimal measure of security they would be on the streets again demanding a peaceful regime change. For over six months Syrians did just that. They remained nonviolent despite the brutal and inhuman provocations of the regime.
Mirna is a computer engineer from the Southern city of Daraa. She explains how activists get frustrated when Syria is compared to Iraq. “They say Iraq was an egg that was crushed, but Syria is a chick trying to break its shell from within and is in need of protection.” For the activists, she says, revolution and invasion are two different realities with different implications.
Syrians are anxiously anticipating a new dawn, but many factors and powers are stretching the dark night of their suffering. If all the options that could save Syria are ignored and the country is abandoned to the chaos of sectarian provocations, regional tensions, and international interests, Syria will be yet another mirror of the failure of the international order.
The cover of the February 23, 2013 edition of The Economist bore the headline “Syria: The Death of a Country.” A more apt headline would have been “The Betrayal of a Country.”