Don’t Judge Syria
I visited Syria many years before the current uprising began and even back then, what I saw was very different to the militant, threatening place I’d been led to expect. Sure, there were issues: I saw my first secret policeman within an hour of arriving in the country, a Browning pistol tucked into the back of his trousers, and there were plenty of signs of totalitarianism around for those who looked. But to me, an outsider, Syria was a startlingly benign place.
And as for the country’s reputation as a pariah — conservative, hardline, anti-Western?
All I can say is that I came across no hostility, certainly not on the personal level. Moderate isn’t the right word: it’s a word that many people now use to describe Middle Easterners (the Muslims in particular) as if to say, “Oh, those aren’t the really bad ones”. So I wouldn’t describe the Syria I saw as moderate. Normal is a better word. Friendly and hospitable are two other good ones to use. Welcoming — probably more so than any other country I had visited by that stage (and there had been a few).
The point I’m trying to make is that even back then, the conventional media image was astonishingly wide of the mark. Syria was not fundamentally different. The state and its apparatus, perhaps. But the people? I couldn’t say for sure, but everything I saw and heard told me no. Syrian people were people, plain and simple. Just like anywhere else. Humans, with human thoughts, human emotions, human outlooks, in a way much of the reporting I’d heard by that stage made it extremely hard to comprehend.
When I returned from my trip, I couldn’t help but think the mainstream media were to blame for my misguided expectations of the country. Now, having seen the trail of reporting swing from one sweeping statement to another as the uprising has progressed, I can’t help but think that this distortion has become much worse. It seems that there is only space for one narrative at a time when it comes to Syria, and it’s generally not one of the humanity of Syrians.
So, with the international attention focused on Syria’s chemical weapons program and the rising influence of extremist Salafi Islamist groups among the opposition forces, perhaps now is a good time as any to try to reaquaint ourselves with the complex realities of the uprising.
Let’s take it from the start of the Arab Spring.
In the beginning, there was no war. Syria was one of the few countries that didn’t seem to be affected by the revolts that were sweeping despotic oafs like Mubarak and Qadaffi from power elsewhere. The popular dissafection hadn’t spread to Damascus.
Commentators pointed to the way Bashar Al-Assad lived. He was a modest man, they said. Lived in a normal house, drove a normal car, unlike some of the grandiose buffoons elsewhere in the Middle East. The people respected that; he didn’t need protection. That’s why Syria was missing out on the Arab Spring — Syrians didn’t want it. Of course, this largely ignored the 30,000 people who had been killed (slaughtered is the way you’d put it if you were writing a newspaper) during the era of Hafez Al-Assad, Bashar’s father. That’s not a small number. The emotions from such an event do not simply evaporate. Hence, I suppose, why there were secret police everywhere, posters of Bashar gazing powerfully into every office and home, taps on the shoulder here and there to keep people in line, dissappearances where necessary.
There was normality when there should have been chaos, but the state was standing on the lid of a simmering pot and it had been for some time.
Then someone was abducted and tortured to death for showing disloyalty to Bashar — not uncommon in Syria, only this time it was a young boy. People got agitated. Peaceful protests were shot down. Extraordinary courage ended in bloodshed. There was no compromise, no offers of increased freedom — not genuine ones anyway.
The lid was rattling, the regime was starting to stamp, and all of a sudden the media was reporting that Bashar was a brutal dictator, a tyrant, a menace to the Syrian people. A popular uprising was taking the country by storm, but even this ignored the fact that some people were still quite happy with the way things were. Some people just accepted it and wanted to carry on living. Many people really did like Bashar. These were not hardline Alawites, necessarily; they were just people.
And on the other side, the Muslim Brotherhood was starting to see its opportunity to get a Sunni regime in power, just like they’d tried to do in Homs under Hafez, leading to the 30,000 deaths all those years ago. There was a popular protest, but of course with this there were also a few interested parties, parties who had been waiting for an opportunity just like this for many years.
So an uprising can be popular and unwanted, secular and Islamic, an opportunity for democrats and right wingers at the same time; does this make it illegitimate? I would argue no. Fragmented, perhaps. Complex, certainly. Illegitimate, no.
By the time a small band of fighters called the Free Syrian Army started to form, the narrative started to switch again. Cries of “allahu akbar” accompanied grainy footage of explosions and Muslim men with Kalashnikovs. See also: Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya if you’re Russian.
A pavlovian reaction followed.
What had once been popular freedom fighters were now starting to look a little too much like insurgents. The paralells, misleading though they may have been at the time, were convincing enough to the Western subconcious. It paved the way for what happened when the Islamists arrived.
Meanwhile, expecting outside help, the rebels kept fighting, kept pushing at the impossible. Their supplies dwindled, their numbers were decimated by lack of training and a level of immaturity in fighters who were anything but hardened killers before the uprising put a weapon in their hands, and they suffered. Even after intervening in Libya, the West stood by, learning the wrong lesson too late in some people’s eyes.
If there was a time to get involved, even just monetarily, this was it.
The Russians, meanwhile, filled the coutry with arms to put down the rebellion in an apparent attempt to prove how against intervening in the affairs of other states they were. The help the rebels needed never materialised. Yet still they held back for a long time from opening the floodgates to the hoards of real, hardline international Islamist brigades — people whose hatred was born in the streets of Bagdad, Benghazi or wherever, who had been craving the opportunity to smash the secularist Assad into the dust.
Threatened with a crushing defeat, however, slowly the standards were relaxed. Saudi Arabia was happy to give the money nobody else seemed to. This chess move was eventually countered by Iran, which started to activate its Lebanese proxy Hizbullah in favour of Assad, but initially the successes started to come. Islamists entered the mix, keeping a low profile at first. Well funded and relatively experienced, they apparently punched above their weight. Some Syrians joined their ranks, people who had not been particularly religious previously. Why? I’d guess that war changes people in ways that are hard to understand for people who haven’t been involved in one.
Now the commentators, the experts, talked of the radicalisation of the uprising.
But what the narrative had started to skip over was the fact that it was not universal, nor was it something that occurred because many Syrians are Muslims and all Muslims secretly want to splinter into petty rivalries and return the world to Sharia law. At this stage, common criminality was probably just as widespread. Gangs. Groups trying to present themselves as liberators, who were instead using the morally-distorted security vacuum as an opportunity to smuggle goods, weapons, drugs, journalists, donkeys, anything.
And as for the rest of the more secular resistence?
They were painted as inept, fragmented, useless. An increasingly obsolete faction in Syria’s descent into hell, Iraq-style. Other people ceased to exist inside the country, becoming instead passive victims and refugees. But this too started to be dropped from the narrative because by this stage it was more exciting to present it as a brutal regime versus Al-Qaeda — two equally abhorrent entities beating themselves to death. Almost a win-win scenario, albeit a distasteful one to admit.
The message was stark: brutal he may be, but the alternative to Assad is worse.
Just as Bashar had been trying to paint it all along, miraculously, now, the media by and large backed him up.
Like many media paradigms, it was partly true — once the floodgates were opened, outsiders had poured in, joining the “cause” in the same way Europeans went to fight in the Spanish Civil War. The only difference was that the uniting element this time was not anti-fascism, but the highly successful web-enabled propaganda machine of global Islamism, the network that portrayed every situation as poor, outnumbered Muslims struggling against infidel oppressors (which the Alawites, being a sect of Shia Islam, apparently were). As soon as they arrived, these groups started doing things that would make even the regime look merciful. Christians, Druze, Kurds, Alawites, journalists and doctors — anybody who didn’t subscribe to an orthadox Salafi conception of Islam was a target.
Unwelcome, savage, image-obsessed and largely unhelpful, the existence of these new fighters has, by some accounts, actually strengthened the core of the more secular resistence. Of course the boundaries are blurred and every group has its bad apples. But the narrative had started to ignore the component of the rebel force that still had liberation of the Syrian people as its main aim. Why? Because of course terrorists are more sensational. Al-Qaeda stands out on a page. Their story carries more weight.
True, hard times push people to vindictiveness, cruelty, vengence, but this does not mean everybody in Syria is vindictive, cruel or vengeful. Many talk of the presence of Al-Qaeda affiliates, which again is true, but the other reality is that there are still many people trying to overthrow Bashar Al-Assad to make Syria a good place to live where once it was not. Caught up in the mix are civilians who may or may not support any side but who are being decimated and displaced either way. It’s a messy, confused, intractable but ultimately human conflict, and all the pretty colours and flashing lights of the mainstream reporting shouldn’t persuade us otherwise.
Instead, what I am suggesting — what I believe is essential — is that we remember that many Syrians are just normal people. Not radical Islamists, not despots, not heart-eating psychopaths, but normal people. We need to reasses our ability to make sweeping judgements on these people, because in truth, few of us really know what is going on in Syria anymore.
(N.B. I’m no expert and I want this article to be as genuine as I can get it, so please get in touch if I’ve been misleading or incorrect in anything I have written — my twitter is @JamieAlexand3r).
