On 6/5/20, Carl Jarvis <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In my youth, I dreamed of being a rich world traveler. One place that
fascinated me was Syria. Especially Damascus. I thought I would like
to attend university there. But unfortunately it took money in order
to realize such a dream, and that was in short supply at the time.
And today I have no desire to see first hand the ravages of years of
war.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/5/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
My question about this article is the author's unquestioning belief that
Assad gassed his people in 2013 and the implication that Obama was wrong
not
to intervene in the conflict even more than he already had been doing.
Miriam
Syria from Eden to Ruin: The World may forget, but the Catastrophe hasn’t
Gone Away
BERT DE VRIES
06/05/2020
From Eden to Ruin
( Christian Courier) – While living in Jordan, my wife Sally and I fell
in
love with Syria and its people through many visits stretched over four
decades. Our last adventure in 2006 was to Aleppo, when we stayed in a
converted khan in the middle of its souq (market), which sold traditional
hand-crafted goods, inlaid wood, beaten copper, loom-woven silks and
braided
gold. We saw Syria through the eyes of besotted tourists and barely
noticed
the unrest roiling under the surface.
We can’t help but wonder: “Where are they now?” Bert met these three boys
in
Aleppo in 2006. Photo credit: Bert de Vries.
Today that Aleppo souq and entire cities are reduced to rubble,
barrel-bombed by Bashar al-Assad’s air force targeting rebel troops
entrenched in residential neighborhoods. Half of Syria’s population of 23
million has fled from home, eight million inside Syria and four million
into
surrounding countries. Since 2011, over 400,000 people have died, many
after
torture in government prisons. When we ask our refugee neighbors in
Jordan
why they are not returning, they tell us that life back home is more
miserable than stateless life as a refugee.
A birds-eye-view of Syria’s Orontes Valley agriculture, west of Hama.
This
photo was taken pre-civil-war in 2006, just before the drought of
2007-2011.
Photo credit: Bert de Vries.
The end of religious pluralism
On the eve of the civil war in 2011, Syria was a multi-religious state,
with
a Sunni Islamic majority (74 percent), Shi’ite splinter groups (13
percent),
Eastern Christians (10 percent) and Druze (three percent). During Ottoman
Turkish rule, tolerant co-existence was formalized by making the
religious
leaders the legal representatives of their communities. The result was
peaceful co-existence, especially in traditional cities like Aleppo,
where
citizens of various religious affiliations worked elbow-to-elbow in its
market economy. However, when post-World-War-I French colonial rule
installed Western democracy, the minority rights were suddenly subject to
majority fiat. By 2011, after decades of independence, Syria had not
solved
the problem of inequality resulting from political modernization.
Baath socialism and Assad autocracy
An alternative to religious pluralism was pan-Arab nationalism, which
underlay the secular Baath socialist party formed in the 1940s.
Membership
gave the religious minorities a new platform for protection from the
Sunni
majority. By 1970 the Baath used its parliamentary majority to abolish
all
other parties, and Syria became a one-party totalitarian state in which
citizens’ votes are meaningless. The demonstrations of 2011 included
pleas
to restore popular democracy.
Hafez al-Assad, who used cronyism and force to claw his way to the top,
ruled Syria as its Baathist dictator from 1970 until his death in 2000
using
universal surveillance, jail, torture, targeted killing and mass murder.
Fearful submission infused the population like an incurable viral
infection.
Ironically, through Baath membership and despot cronyism, the Alawite
minority, in consort with Christian and some Sunni colleagues, now ruled
over the Sunni majority.
After Hafez’s death in June 2000, the Minister of Defense gathered the
top
military advisors to propose the extra-constitutional succession of
Bashar,
his son. Sam Dagher reports that the Minister had soldiers stationed
outside
the meeting room poised to kill any dissenters. No one left (Assad or We
Burn the Country, 97). On the eve of that succession, Sally and I visited
Damascus, which was plastered with Hafez and Bashar posters proclaiming
“Father’s” ascent into heaven and the inception of “son’s” enlightened
rule.
Though Syrians hoped for relief from oppression, by 2006 all they got was
crony-owned internet services and continued suppression, hidden behind a
façade of progressive chic. The son’s rule proved to be a mere mutation
of
the father’s deadly virus.
The Arab Spring
By 2011 urban residents lived in mismanaged and overcrowded tenements,
rural
villages were devastated by a prolonged drought, and all lived in fear of
Bashar’s spies, jailing and torture (Sabouni and Daoudy). The Arab Spring
reached Syria, beginning with popular demonstrations in Dera’a. But the
Assads met the cries for liberty with a cacophony of gunshots fired into
unarmed crowds. In the ensuing civil war this murderous reassertion of
despotism at all costs remained clear, while frenzied violence and
factional
fragmentation obscured the insurgents’ initial clarity of purpose.
Syria’s
Arab Spring is over, even as the civil war continues nine years later, in
2020.
A stage for global politics
As these internal forces worked their destruction, Syria also became a
theater for longstanding foreign power rivalries: France, the U.S.A.,
Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq (ISIS), Lebanon (Hezbollah),
Jordan
and Israel. All these entered the fray, in ways reflecting their earlier
histories of intervention. Because space does not allow full enumeration,
I
mention here the interventions of the two superpowers.
Cowed by the still raw trauma of Libya, the Obama administration reneged
on
its threat of punitive action after Bashar Assad’s heinous 2013
poison-gas
massacre of 1,400 Syrians (Coll and Power). America’s backing away opened
the way for the Russian air force to swoop in and save the Syrian army
from
almost certain defeat. Instead, joint Syrian-Russian intense bombing
burned
Syria to give Assad the “victory” (Dagher), with the near annihilation of
Idlib Province earlier this year barely noticed as COVID-19 loomed.
Finally,
President Trump’s impetuous order for American withdrawal from northern
Syria in October 2019 was not only a shameful betrayal of its Kurdish
partners in the defeat of ISIS, but also an abandonment of internal
refugees
now exposed to the vengeful wrath of Assad’s soldiers (Morgelson). After
that, Trump blocked entry into the U.S. to all refugees from Syria under
the
pretext of COVID-19.
To be sure, surrounding countries, especially Jordan, have hosted
hundreds
of thousands of refugees, and western countries, especially Canada,
Germany
and Norway, have sheltered many generously. For more on Norway, see
Naguib’s
testimony to compassionate generosity (see sidebar). Nevertheless, the
net
effect of outside interventions has been the amplification of conflict:
piling on of weapons, the total ruin of cities, vast increases in death
and
displacement, the blocking of non-violent resolution, the support of
despotism over human rights, and agony without end for the people of
Syria
(Khalifa, Death is Hard Work.)
As Syria goes. . .
In July of 2018 the doors of our house in Umm al-Jimal, Jordan rattled
constantly from the percussion of bombs falling on villages just across
the
border. On July 8, the black smoke from burning houses darkened our skies
and produced a blood-red sunset. That sight has become my icon of the
misery
inflicted on the people of Syria. As refugees escaping carnage continue
to
crowd into open fields and mud-floored tents, now they are painfully
exposed
to a new invader: COVID-19. Syria is the only country not reporting virus
statistics to the W.H.O. to cover up, as Jordanians tell me, that its
spread
is rampant.
Living among the refugees at Umm al-Jimal has familiarized us with Syria
and
Syrians in profound ways; our awareness has penetrated far below the
touristic veneer of earlier trips into the country. It has taught us more
intimately that Syrians are fellow humans with lovely families,
struggling
heroically to raise their children in a Mad-Max world, homes reduced to
rubble, living in tents mired in mud, clutching famished newborns,
freezing
to death, hoping for a better future but stuck in the status of refugee
in
a
COVID-riven world. Meanwhile, the Assads and their cronies worked
investment
scams to take possession of 70 percent of the country’s wealth and are
now
fighting over the spoils amongst themselves like dogs over roadkill
(Dagher
and al-Yafi).
The case of Syria presents a model for seeing where any of us anywhere
could
end up, especially as we see the infection of autocratic rule and
sycophant
opportunism spread across the globe and at our doorstep. We are not
immune.
Therefore, I entitled this essay “As Syria Goes . . . ”
In my teaching of Islamic civilization, the deep tradition of tolerant
religious communal pluralism was always a high-water mark. There were
breakdowns, but always followed by a restoration. I pray that this could
also be the way back for the people of Syria.
