Syrian refugees reach out to us

1 million refugees in Lebanon 

You see them on the sidewalks in the busy Hamra district of Beirut, Syrian women dressed in black head coverings and robes. While the dress is traditional in Syria, it looks like mourning wear to the Western eye. They are mourning for their country. They are begging for our help.

According to Lebanese officials, registered refugees now make up 27 percent of their country’s population.

Some refugee women sit on the sidewalks with a child on their lap or near to hand. Visitors like us, new to the shock of street begging in Beirut, are a likely target. Most of us can’t follow the Arabic of their appeal, but we understand the meaning of their outstretched hands. We give something, but no one can possibly give enough.

In Beirut earlier this month to visit our daughter, we also saw another perspective on the relentless violence in Syria that has driven so much of the civilian population across its borders to Lebanon and other neighbors, this one authored by the Syrians themselves. A series of short documentary films made by the Syrian filmmakers’ collective Abounaddara were being screened at a local festival. Two days later we heard the group’s spokesman Charif Kiwan speak at the American University of Beirut in a program that included screening more films.

Abounaddara won a prize earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival for a short film (“Of God and Dogs”) in which a fighter explores his guilt over following orders to execute a man he believed innocent. Its five minutes of international media fame followed, with stories in Time and on CNN.

Even before the uprising against the dictatorial Assad regime began three years ago, Abounaddara began making short documentary films focused on the experiences of ordinary people (posting weekly offerings on vimeo.com) to counter the negative portrayal of their country in world media. The films now reflect the reality of “the emergency,” but not in conventional ways. Speaking at the university, Kiwan said the group chose to avoid showing violence on screen because the flood of images of the carnage and death in their country was desensitizing viewers. Instead, their films allow Syrians to speak about living in impossible times — an artistic choice arguably more effective in exposing the costs of war than lingering over the body count.

In the films we saw we heard a boy speak with the childish excitement of somebody who has a big story to tell about the search for a child missing after a recent bombing. They looked on top of a building, our young informant tells us, and they found the boy’s head. So they buried his head.

In another, a rebel fighter recounts his decision to “turn in my rifle” and leave the Free Syrian Army, the largest secular rebel group, after his commander failed to protect civilians from the fighting. Now, he says, “I do nothing.” He’s Everyman faced with impossible choices.

In a film titled “The Islamic State for Dummies” a spokesman at a podium refers to the “hypothetical” possibility of creating an “Islamic state” against an off-screen guffaw.

A woman in conservative dress tells the camera that when she went to a government office to seek her son, “They only let me see his feet — only his feet!” We watch as she sobs.

A man seen in shadows recurs obsessively to the central point of his confession: “And then I cut his throat.” He enlisted in the rebellion for good reasons, he tells the camera. “But that didn’t give me the right to cut his throat.” He says, “I don’t know why I did it.”

The films remind us that no one joins a protest calling for the end of a dictatorial regime in the expectation of starting a disastrous three-year war.

And no one chooses to leave their own country and become a refugee in a neighboring land, living on handouts and uncertain international aid, if it didn’t appear to be the best chance of survival.

What stayed with me the longest from Charif Kiwan’s remarks at the American University of Beirut was his response to a question about how the filmmakers chose to witness the “war” in his country. In reply — struggling for the words in English — Kiwan said he would “dispute” the use of the word “war” to describe what’s happening in Syria.

“We think of it as the revolution,” he said.

It was a revolution, against a corrupt, dynastic police state in power since 1963. Now the term du jour is civil war. When the uprising began, no one expected Assad to stay in power to stay in power long, but the autocratic regimes that believe governments have the right to kill protestors (Russia, China, Iran) kept pouring in aid and munitions, while the Western democracies decided the cost of engagement was too high and turned their eyes away.

Now the world relies on a small, weak country like Lebanon to absorb a million refugees.

Now women beg on the sidewalk while their children stalk tourists; little boys sell plastic roses and older ones try to shine your shoes.

Charity won’t do. The only real good the international community can do for the Syrian refugees is to make it safe for them to go home. That’s our job and we simply haven’t done it.