“This is where the revolution happens first,” say Leila Al-Shami and
Robin Yassin-Kassab in their book, Burning
Country (Pluto Press 2016), “before the guns and the political
calculations, before even the demonstrations—in individual hearts, in the form
of new thoughts and newly unfettered words.”
The tragedy of the so-called “civil war” in Syria has become so
unspeakably monumental and monstrous that, for the public at large worldwide,
it has distilled into merely a set of grim statistics, a current titleholder
for World’s Worst Conflict, the source of the bulk of Europe’s migration crisis,
but unimaginable and, sadder still, unthinkable for the majority in terms of
the horror taking place there on a daily basis. It is a country where the
superpower-imposed family of dictators who have ruled for over four decades
had, until 2011, stilled all opposition and autocratically governed generations
brought up resigned to living mute.
According to Al-Shami and Yassin-Kassab, “Syria was once known as a
‘kingdom of silence’. In 2011 it burst into speech—not in one voice but in
millions. On an immense surge of long-suppressed energy, a non-violent protest
movement crossed sectarian and ethnic boundaries and spread to every part of
the country. Nobody could control it—no party, leader or ideological programme,
and least of all the repressive apparatus of state, which applied gunfire, mass
detention, sexual assault and torture, even of children...”
After four years of grinding, non-stop war—in which regional conflicts
have muddied the playing field, Islamist terrorism has taken advantage of the
chaos to expand and dig in, superpowers have helped stall peace and poured
gasoline on the flames, and the Syrian regime has employed horrific devices of
war banned by every humanitarian convention in the world to murder, maim and
starve its own people, including innocent civilians from infants to the elderly—the
story of how it all began has been rendered largely anecdotal. But no matter
how Eastern and Western powers might eventually strong-arm a wedge between the
belligerents and seek to cobble together a “solution” to their own advantage
and in their own image, the authentic story of the Syrian war isn’t the
conflict itself but the peaceful revolution that unintentionally lit the fuse.
The true story is the quest (the demand) for democracy that—perhaps unwittingly—exposed
the Syrian regime for what it had always been and under which the country’s
citizens had for so long suffered in silence: a ruthless, inexpressibly evil
autocracy, a vile dictatorship in the guise of a “constitutional presidency”, a
puppet of the Russian Bear, tolerated and lavished with wealth as long as it
continued to form part of Moscow’s strategic plans for the Middle East, a
golden pawn in the latent but still unresolved Cold War between the top
superpowers and their regional warlord proxies.
Nor was that genuine democratic revolution a mere idealistic expression
of desire. It was, indeed, a practical movement with a mutual thought process
and path forward beneath its surface protests. “Revolutionary Syrians,” say the
authors of Burning Country “often
describe their first protest as an ecstatic event, as a kind of rebirth. The
regime’s savage response was a baptism of horror after which there was no going
back.”
They tell about how “where the state collapsed or was beaten back,
people set up local councils, aid distribution networks, radio stations and
newspapers, expressing communal solidarity in the most creative and practical
ways.” And they add, “For a few brief moments the people changed everything.”
So what happened? Quoth Burning
Country: “Nobody supported the revolutionaries.” That trend toward
democracy and legitimate self-determination was, the authors remind us,
“abandoned by the ill-named ‘international community’, (and) usually ignored or
misrepresented in the media...”
The authors provide, among many other things, one of the most succinct
and highly comprehensible descriptions that I’ve ever read regarding how
Western meddling has submersed the Middle East in sectarian, religious and
tribal strife for most of the past century. They provide an explanation of a
series of Anglo-French agreements that, following World War I, divvied up the
former Ottoman Empire’s erstwhile possessions with total disregard for the
wishes, political geography or traditions of the peoples living in the
territories involved. A summary of that description is contained in a clearly
thought-out sentence to which I entirely subscribe: “To some extent the origins
of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Lebanese civil wars and the current chronic
instability in Iraq and Syria can be traced to this early twentieth century
bout of imperialist map-making and sectarian engineering.”
But Burning Country isn’t the
story of Syria’s descent into oblivion. Rather, it is the unheard and unheeded story
of those who haven’t abandoned the dream and cause of a free, pluralistic and
democratic Syria of the future: free from the cruel repression of externally
empowered dictators and free from the conditioning influences and political
engineering of major world powers.
Syria today constitutes, whether recognized or not, the symbol of those
who struggle everywhere, and against all odds, for the right to their own forms
of democratic governance and true self-determination—i.e., not the
determination to be with or against Russia or the West, but to be free to
establish their own relationships with the world and to decide their own course
to a brighter future. Until the Western powers are willing to heartily and
disinterestedly support this as a sacred right and to defend it against tyranny
and imperialist designs, the principles of democracy and self-determination
that they purport to advocate will be little more than sweet stories they tell
their children at night to ward off the kind of nightmares Syrian children are
living in the flesh every day.
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