Letter from Damascus
Roads to Freedom
The view from inside the Syrian crackdown.
by Wendell Steavenson August 29, 2011
Protesters in Hama. The regime’s bloody assault on the city has dismayed the rest of the country. Photograph by Moises Saman.
I arrived in Damascus
on a Friday at the end of July, a few days before the start of Ramadan,
and five months into a grimly repetitive series of protests and
crackdowns in towns and cities across Syria. When I checked into my
hotel, I discovered that I was the only guest. I also found that I could
not connect to the Internet. “Friday, Saturday—Internet very bad,” the
desk manager explained. I learned later that the government steps up its
restriction of Internet service on the Islamic weekend, because that is
when most of the protests occur.
I walked through the Old
City—the Christian quarter and the Shia quarter, the Sufi mosques and
the souks of Sunni merchants, the labyrinthine passages and hidden
courtyards. It was quiet without the usual throng of browsing tourists.
In cafés, I was often the only customer. The Old City is, in some ways, a
microcosm of modern Syria, a secular state that comprises an array of
ethnic and religious groups. At the heart of the Old City is the
magnificent Umayyad Mosque, a part of which was built originally as a
Byzantine church. Sunni worshippers mingle with Shia pilgrims visiting
the shrine of the martyr Hussein, the Prophet’s grandson, and with
Christians visiting the tomb of John the Baptist.
Syria came
under the secular, socialist rule of the Baath Party in 1963. For the
past four decades, it has been controlled by the Assad family—first by
Hafez al-Assad, who took power in a coup, and, since his death, in 2000,
by his son, the current President, Bashar al-Assad. The Assads belong
to one of Syria’s most distinctive minority groups, the Alawites, who
are followers of a secretive dissident offshoot of Shiism, and
historically come from villages in the country’s mountainous west. The
Assad regime has kept minorities it favors protected within a majority
Sunni population by maintaining a rigidly authoritarian state. Syrians
are mindful of sectarian strife in neighboring Lebanon and Iraq—more
than a million Iraqi refugees have taken shelter in Syria since
2003—and, for many of them, lack of freedom has been offset by the
consolations of stability and security, in a region without much of
either.
In a café a couple of days after I arrived, I saw an old
friend, Karim, a prominent civil-rights activist. (I have changed his
name.) He came in from the street and said, “I think I was followed.”
Then he slumped into a sofa, pressing his fists against his forehead. He
held them there for more than a minute without speaking. He had a few
more gray hairs than when I had last seen him.
“Do you want to get some lunch?” I asked.
“I have not eaten,” he said, “but I am not hungry.”
For
years, Karim has been trying to carve out a space for activism in
whatever way he can. I first met him a few years ago, the day after he
had been detained by the regime’s security services and interrogated for
five hours. He spoke so quietly that I could barely hear him; the
puckish smile I later came to know flashed only once toward the end of
our meeting. Ever since I’ve known him, he has been under an
intermittent travel ban, like nearly all Syrian activists.
We
went to a restaurant nearby and ordered soup. It was the day before
Ramadan, and there was news that tanks had begun an assault on the city
of Hama, which has a history of opposition to the regime. The city had
seen violence earlier in the summer, but, after scores of people
attending a Friday protest were killed, the security forces had been
pulled out. During the following weeks, a million people filled the
streets, declaring Hama liberated. The American and French ambassadors
visited, and reported that the crowds were a model of peaceful protest.
The new crackdown clearly marked a serious escalation by the
authorities. Everyone invoked the notorious Hama massacre of 1982, when
Hafez al-Assad ordered the suppression of a Muslim Brotherhood uprising;
tens of thousands of people were killed, and entire neighborhoods
razed. Karim told me that there had been plans to convene a conference
of activists from all over Syria the following week. Now it seemed
almost impossible.
When Bashar came to
power, eleven years ago, many Syrians hoped that he would usher in a
period of reform. He was an accidental leader, having become his
father’s heir only after the death of his elder brother, in a car crash.
Bashar trained as an ophthalmologist, and spent two years studying in
London, where he met his wife, Asma al-Akhras, a British-born woman from
a Syrian family. Initially, Bashar hinted at a program of gradual
reform, and a so-called Damascus Spring flourished briefly in the salons
and living rooms of activists. But a series of high-profile arrests
soon snuffed out the movement.
By early this year, when the
regimes fell in Tunis and Cairo, a decade of promises to Syrians had
come to nothing. In March, a group of teen-agers in the southern city of
Deraa were arrested and tortured for producing anti-regime graffiti.
Large protests followed. The regime cut off electricity and water and
sent in tanks and rooftop snipers. When people in other cities took to
the streets in support of the protests, Bashar tried again to present
himself as a reformer. He addressed a number of old grievances: he
repealed an emergency law, in place since 1962; some Kurds, denied
citizenship for decades, were given Syrian national identity cards; a
ban forbidding teachers to wear the niqab, a full face covering, was
lifted.
In late June, intellectuals and activists had managed to
organize a conference in Damascus, hoping to provide a road map for
transition. The regime countered with its own Consultation Conference,
and later announced that a new law, allowing independent political
parties, would be enacted within months. At the same time, it rejected
the activists’ demand that security operations against protesters be
stopped. State television continued to insist that the protesters were
armed gangs, and protests continued to be met with violence. The tally
of civilian dead, according to human-rights groups, reached two
thousand, and many thousands more were arrested; the Syrian government,
meanwhile, says that several hundred military and security personnel
have been killed.
Karim described an impasse. He did not think that
protesters would be able to defeat the regime’s security services in a
direct confrontation. But the regime was trapped, too. It could not
really enact reform, because any crack in the system would bring down
the whole edifice.
“Today, we are stuck in the neck of the
bottle,” Karim said. “There’s so much violence, and less and less hope
that things can calm down and lead to a peaceful situation.”
In
central Damascus, all seemed calm. The traffic flowed and jammed as
usual; markets were open; stalls on street corners were selling Ramadan
treats—fruit juice and crisp deep-fried pancakes drizzled with grape
syrup to break the fast. But in the surrounding neighborhoods and
suburbs protesters gathered near mosques after the evening prayers: in
conversations in cafés, I heard reports of two killed in Maidan, of five
arrested in a café in Jaramana, of checkpoints on the roads around
Douma.
Meanwhile, the Syrian economy was in serious trouble.
Roadblocks across the country were impeding commerce. International
sanctions had increased since the start of the year, and businessmen
complained that they could no longer transfer money in and out of the
country or change Syrian pounds into hard currency inside Syria. My
hotel told me that I would have to pay in cash, because it could no
longer process credit-card payments. In the upscale clothing stores near
where Karim and I had had lunch, every window carried a sign
advertising half-price sales.
People avoided Internet cafés,
because, I was warned, owners could monitor your activities and read
your passwords. Friends described a netherworld of proxies, firewalls,
pseudonyms, and multiple e-mail addresses. Skype was safe, but often
seemed blocked; Facebook risky and only intermittently accessible. I
never managed to connect to Twitter, and people recommended Tor
anti-surveillance software and Gmail chat. But a reporter who had been
operating in hiding told me that the authorities couldn’t shut down
every avenue: “It’s been five months now, and we’re still able to work
and get things out.”
In a café, I met two Kurdish students who had
been helping to organize protests in Damascus since the beginning. (For
their safety, I have changed their names.) Mohammed, a philosophy
student, was kind and friendly, but I noticed that as he spoke he
wrestled his knuckles together and twisted a piece of foil from a
cigarette packet into a tighter and tighter cone. His friend Khalid, who
studies literature, told me that he was particularly interested in the
moral issues he encountered in Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.” He
also liked Coldplay, and found wisdom in the band’s lyrics. He quoted a
line: “Just because I’m losing doesn’t mean I’m lost.” As part of the
regime’s recent concessions to Kurds, he had obtained Syrian
citizenship. He grinned and showed me his new I.D. card with mock pride.
But, he said, “what’s the point of having nationality if tomorrow I can
be killed, because I still don’t have any freedom?”
Mohammed
and Khalid explained that protests usually occur around mosques because
that is the only place where people can gather. (League soccer matches,
for example, have been “indefinitely postponed.”) They lamented that
Damascus is a city of many squares and roundabouts, with no central
square, like Tahrir, in Cairo. Protesters use coded text messages to
call people together: “Are you having a party today? Are you guys
getting together tonight?” They described the tacit support of onlookers
and residents who were too fearful to join in themselves, and Mohammed
said, “Most of the demonstrations, there are not more than twenty-five
or thirty at the beginning, and then more people come and share with
us.”
Khalid looked at Mohammed and laughed. “Many times, Mohammed
starts it by himself!” He mimed uneasy crowd members looking at each
other, fearful of chanting. “He shouts ‘Hurriya! Hurriya!—Freedom! Freedom!’ and it begins.” Mohammed smiled modestly, as if to say that someone has to do it.
One evening at dusk, as I took a taxi back to my hotel, the streets were deserted. Everyone had gone home for iftar,
the evening meal that breaks the daily fast of Ramadan. As I drove
through Marjeh Square, with its grand French-colonial façades and large
central fountain, I noticed ten or twelve men, wearing tracksuits,
T-shirts, and sneakers, loitering around a van. One had a Kalashnikov
slung across his back. In a grassy area near the fountain, some venders
sat cross-legged, their wares spread on blankets. Protesters told me
that these venders had only recently begun appearing and were in fact
security thugs, poised to break up any crowd that might form. On another
corner of the square, I saw a single soldier in an olive-green uniform
dangling a rifle by its trigger guard.
Once I knew what to look
for, I realized that almost every square in Damascus was occupied in
this manner. I drove around one afternoon with a Christian woman, an
activist wearing a bracelet that read, “Proud to Be Syrian.” She pointed
out the place where she had tried to go to the funeral of a martyr and
had been stopped at a security checkpoint. “And over there is the
detention center where they held a friend of mine,” she said, indicating
a nondescript cul-de-sac off a tree-lined street. “It’s underground.”
We circled Abbaseen Stadium, on the edge of a square where protesters
have frequently tried to gather. She lives near the stadium and told me
that security thugs often mustered there. The day before, she said, the
stadium had been so full of thugs “you couldn’t see the grass.” I peered
through the entrances and saw clothes hanging on railings, as if people
were camping inside. Three Army trucks were parked outside. Knots of
skinny toughs in undershirts stood around. One stood on top of the
stadium watching the traffic go by, idly knocking a concrete wall with a
long stick.
A few Damascenes still manage to protest in areas
that they think may be less secured. The demonstrations are so fleeting
that they are nicknamed “flying protests.” Activists have tried to
confound the authorities by singing the national anthem or throwing
roses into the fountain in Marjeh Square. They have tied messages of
defiance to balloons, and tucked them inside packages of dates given out
at mosques, and taped them to Ping-Pong balls thrown into the street
from high buildings. In one ingenious scheme, they wrote “freedom” on
banknotes, but then banks refused to take notes with any markings on
them. One day during my visit, dozens of people simply wore white and
walked around a block in an upscale neighborhood. Several were arrested.
There
are more than a dozen branches of the Syrian security services, and no
one really knows who’s in charge. I met a tremulous young man—I’ll call
him Wael—who was detained at a protest in Damascus in March by Air Force
Security, which has a particularly harsh reputation. He was kept
blindfolded, with his head bent between his knees. His interrogators
wanted the names of his friends involved in the current protests. When
he stonewalled, with a recitation of innocuous facts, they took him into
a basement room and stripped him naked. “I was thinking of my father at
that time and how I was supposed to be strong and to make him proud of
me and to not scream,” Wael told me. His father was a Communist and had
been imprisoned in the nineteen-sixties. When Wael continued to
stonewall, his interrogators stretched him out on a metal table with his
hands cuffed behind his back, so that they were squashed painfully
under his weight. They told him to keep his legs elevated. It was
impossible to hold them up for more than ten minutes or so, and when he
lowered them they administered electric shocks to his feet. “I tried to
imagine that their faces were sad when they were doing this,” he said.
“I couldn’t imagine any human would do this to another.” At the same
time, he said, he bore them no grudge: they were simple men and only
following orders.
“I think I passed out for one or two days at
some point,” he went on. “I dreamed crazy things. I dreamed the regime
had fallen—that the President had come to the prison and tried to sort
things out, and I tripped him up as he passed in the corridor.” Wael was
held for six days in the corridor of an Air Force Security
interrogation center and another six days in solitary confinement. Then
he was transferred to a cell, five metres square, which held seven other
prisoners. “This was the most pleasant time,” he said, as he recalled
the solace of human contact. “It was a tiny place, and we slept like
sardines.”
Eventually, he was released. The security officer who drove him home was friendly, and said, “Sorry if we were bad to you.”
“I
told him to drop me two hundred metres from my house,” Wael told me. “I
didn’t want them to see where I lived. Of course, this was stupid,
because they already know. Maybe I just wanted to compose myself before I
saw my mother.” He added, “Worrying about her was my biggest pain, my
biggest fear, when I was in prison, until I learned not to think about
her.”
Day by day, the news from Hama
became more dreadful, and the mood in Damascus grew increasingly
oppressive. I was introduced to a man who had escaped from Hama, a few
days after the crackdown began, by driving through a checkpoint that was
briefly unguarded. During our talk, he tried to smile politely, but he
was clearly still very shaken. I offered him a glass of water, but he
said that he was fasting.
Many of Hama’s old people, women, and
children had already been sent away to villages nearby, he said. The day
before Ramadan, he was awakened between four and five in the morning by
the noise of tanks. The Army had surrounded the city and was starting
to occupy police stations and squares. From his apartment he could see
the tanks attacking his neighborhood. “They tried to get in several
times, but the people prevented them.”
“How?” I asked
“They
had gas cannisters,” he explained, the kind used for cooking stoves. The
protesters rolled them over oil-soaked roads so that they landed under
the tanks, and then lit the oil on the ground, like a fuse, to make the
cannisters explode like bombs. They also threw Molotov cocktails and
burned barricades. The Army, he said with pride, had to retreat three or
four times in the first two days.
Throughout our conversation,
the man seemed to be quietly stunned. Twice, I put my hand on his arm
and told him that he could stop if he wanted. He shook his head. Two of
his friends had been killed; his parents were still in the city.
Cell-phone networks had been turned off for days, and only a very few
reports were getting out, thanks to a handful of activists with
satellite phones.
He watched events unfold from his window,
unable to go onto his balcony because of snipers. During a lull in the
shooting, he went to a neighborhood known as the Old Aleppo Road, where
he saw barricades made of uprooted bus-stop signs, lampposts, burned
cars, and even fire trucks and a huge excavator. He said that one legacy
of the 1982 massacre was that not many people in Hama owned guns. A few
people had pistols or guns for hunting, but, in the absence of serious
munitions, he said, “they have taken the example from Misrata against
Qaddafi, when they were not heavily armed. They created a shield of
neighborhoods.” He explained that the poorer neighborhoods were the most
activist and also the hardest for tanks to penetrate, because of the
narrow lanes. “The Army is still not in these neighborhoods,” he told me
with satisfaction, but a few days later state television showed video
footage of empty, ruined streets, suggesting that the city had finally
been subjugated.
Late one evening, I went with a friend to see a
well-known artist named Youssef Abdelke. We met him in his studio, and
he ushered us into a tranquil, whitewashed courtyard paved with
geometric tiles. He keeps pigeons, and they flapped and cooed, and
little bells on their feet rang as they walked. There was an orange tree
in one corner of the courtyard and a bowl of apricots on a table. On
another table was a new work, a grotesque plaster bust of Bashar with a
sharp curved nose and small, recessed eyes, cartoonishly close together
and daubed with ochre. In the studio, Abdelke showed me another recent
work—a large charcoal drawing of a man lying straight and stiff on the
ground with his eyes open and a bullet hole in his forehead leaking
blood. He said that this was a tribute to the martyrs of Deraa.
Abdelke’s
prominence made him less afraid than most people I talked to. He said
that I could quote him openly and describe his art work. He is a veteran
of the opposition to Bashar’s father, and was arrested as a member of a
left-wing opposition party in the nineteen-eighties. He subsequently
spent twenty-four years in exile in Paris, after the Syrian government
refused to renew his passport, and returned to live in Damascus only in
2008.
He had been at a protest in the neighborhood of Maidan earlier in the day.
“How
did you get in?” my friend asked. The roads around the Hassan Mosque,
where most of the Maidan protests have taken place, are often blocked.
“A
friend told me about a back alleyway,” he said, and explained that the
protests have recently moved to an adjacent area of mazelike lanes. He
had gone there with a female friend, and he recounted an afternoon of
confrontation and tear gas amid a crowd of about two thousand
protesters. He said, “She kept saying on the way, ‘I am afraid, I am
afraid.’ Then when she got there she became like a tiger!’ ” The
protesters split into groups and were able to march along the lanes
protesting for a full half hour—“It was almost a dream come true!”
Abdelke
also discussed the particular nature of Damascus within the political
landscape of the country. A significant number of the city’s residents
were still effectively pro-regime—“either because they have their
benefit from it or because they are afraid.” He said, “For forty years,
the regime has manipulated this concept of fear in the minorities. Its
main proposition is based on: ‘It’s either us or chaos. If we go down,
there will be extremists. Islamists will come, and there will be
massacres of minorities.’ ”
I met several Syrians like those he
described—people who deplored the violence of the regime but still hoped
that, given more time, Bashar could institute meaningful reform. Some
were from Syria’s minority groups and were worried about the examples of
sectarian violence in Lebanon and Iraq; others, having benefitted from a
spate of economic growth in recent years and conscious of Syria’s
history of stability, worried about the uncertain political melee that
has followed the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia.
A
Sunni I talked to who works in the medical industry pointed out that,
when he first started working in a state hospital, in the
nineteen-eighties, his salary was fifty dollars a month. Recent economic
liberalization enabled him to make a few thousand a month now in the
private sector. “These kinds of opportunities were not present in Syria
ten years ago,” he said. He thought Bashar was “trying to change, but he
deserves a little time.” The opposition, he felt, was not strategic or
organized. “I do not see the future from the protesters’ side,” he said.
“They haven’t made any plan. Why not give the government some time to
make a better decision? Why rush?”
In the Christian quarter of
the Old City, shopkeepers displayed posters of Bashar in two favorite
guises: the military strongman in combat fatigues, and the relaxed
father, playing with his children and smiling at his wife. A Catholic
priest told me that most of his congregation was pro-regime, which he
attributed to the regime’s effectiveness in “trying to manipulate us as a
minority.” The Christian activist who drove me around the city told me
that opinion in her family was divided and fluctuating. “My parents
change their minds every day,” she said. “They are really afraid of the
Muslims. Yesterday, my mother said to me, ‘What if you have to cover
yourself?’ I told her, ‘If I have to wear the hijab to get rid of this
regime, I will!’ ”
The Alawites, who are perceived to have
benefitted most from the Assad regime, and who make up much of the
security services, feel that they have the most to fear. I talked to one
young Alawite protester who described a recent visit to her family in
Tartus, a port city on the edge of the mountainous Alawite region. She
had always believed that her family was open to other sects, and she was
shocked by their behavior. They told her, “If you leave the pen, you
should be killed.” Her brother threw a glass at her, which shattered and
cut her feet. She knew that he was among those who went out on Fridays
and beat people gathering at mosques.
“I tried to talk to him in a
logical way,” she recalled. “But he had no answers and became angrier
and angrier with me. I started to tell him that the protests were about
reform, that it was people who were asking for their rights—the families
of those hurt and killed asking for their justice. I said, ‘How can you
live in a country where you cannot express yourself?’ He replied, ‘I am
ready to live humiliated so long as the President and the government
are from my sect.’ ” She said that he believed that the protests were
orchestrated by the Sunni majority and that, if the regime fell, all the
Alawites would be killed.
Youssef Abdelke’s long experience of the regime
gave him some perspective on such fears. He pointed out that Sunnis
ruled Syria from 1946, when the country became independent, until the
Baath Party coup, in 1963. During that time, he said, “there were no
massacres or extremism or injustices against the rights of minorities.”
He was hopeful that the ideal of democratic freedom could make common
cause among different sects and religions. He had gone to Hama during
the huge demonstrations earlier in the summer, and he mentioned, as an
example, an Alawite he had seen addressing a predominantly Sunni crowd.
The man had been warmly applauded.
In Abdelke’s quiet courtyard,
my friend’s cell phone trilled. She read a message from the state news
agency announcing that terrorists had committed atrocities in Deir
ez-Zour, a restive city in the east, and that images were going to be
broadcast shortly. She looked up.
“They are going to invade Deir
ez-Zour tomorrow,” she said. “That’s what they did in Hama. They showed
footage of people supposedly being shot by terrorist groups, and then
they went in.” She was right. Tanks rolled into Deir ez-Zour the next
day.
Everyone I talked to agreed that
the Syrian security forces could not be defeated, but violent repression
clearly had not deterred the protesters. I asked various people: What
is the regime thinking? Several tried, flailing a little, to explain the
current predicament by first defining the regime.
Louay Hussein, a
prominent writer and activist, told me, “For the last eleven years, we
have had this question: Who is ruling the country, and how are they
ruling it?” During the eighties, Hussein was imprisoned for seven years,
and he is one of the signatories of the Damascus Declaration of 2005,
in which two hundred and seventy-four people from various religious and
political backgrounds called on the regime to begin a period of
peaceful, gradual reform. Like Abdelke, he waved away my concerns about
using his name. He had been arrested in his home in the first days of
protests, and the authorities knew very well who he was and what he
thought of them.
“Whenever someone asks me, ‘What do you think
the regime is thinking?,’ I say, ‘They don’t think,’ ” he said. “They
don’t have a mind. They do something and then, depending on the result,
they decide whether to continue or to withdraw. They are reacting, they
don’t have a strategy.”
Western diplomats told me something
similar. They had heard that reformist figures in the regime were no
longer even getting in to see the President; but nobody in Syria seemed
to have any solid idea who was in control. “We can’t really talk about a
government,” one diplomat said bluntly. “There is no Syrian government.
There is a loose confederation of mini-kingdoms.” Furthermore, power is
still overwhelmingly in the hands of one family. Bashar’s brother Maher
is the head of the Army’s élite Republican Guard; his cousin Rami
Makhlouf owns the largest mobile-phone network and myriad other
businesses, which reach into almost every sector of the economy. “They
think they will own Syria forever,” one activist said of the Assads,
“and whatever they grant the people of Syria comes as a gift from the
Assad family.” I asked three Western diplomats, separately, whether the
best analogy might be the Sopranos sitting around their dining-room
table. Each of them replied, “Exactly!”
Louay
Hussein told me, “Of course, all Syrians are afraid, because they don’t
have answers—they are afraid of the unknown. We don’t know what the
regime will do or if it will fall or when it will be over. All Syrians,
including the protesters, are afraid of tomorrow.” Some of the people I
talked to who had been arrested or beaten were now afraid to protest.
Others remained defiant. I talked to a doctor and a nurse belonging to
an underground network of medical professionals who treat injured
protesters unable to risk going to hospitals. The nurse told me about a
twenty-one-year-old with two bullets in his shoulder whom she had tended
to a few weeks before. “Luckily, his lung was not punctured,” she said.
In the surrounding streets, she could hear security forces going from
house to house looking for people. She and a doctor had removed the two
bullets from the man before they realized that he also had a bullet in
his leg from a month earlier. As the nurse bandaged his shoulder, the
protester asked, “Can I go next Friday? Can I still protest?”
Many
Syrians who had been wavering were dismayed at the regime’s brutal
strategies. Adonis, the country’s most famous poet and an Alawite, who
had previously been conciliatory toward the regime, urged Bashar to step
down. One lunchtime, I drank whiskey with an acquaintance who had hoped
that Bashar would be given the opportunity to reform. Now he saw
friends on Facebook shifting their positions. “The ones in the middle
who were supporting Bashar but not the regime, and asking for security
to pull out, are now completely against him,” he said. “I did not expect
they would shift their opinions like this. Alawites, Christians,
Sunnis—all of them.” It was announced that the Defense Minister had been
replaced. No one had any idea what fractures in the regime this change
signified. “We are waiting,” Louay Hussein told me. “Everything is in
the regime’s hands now.”
International pressure has continued to
escalate. First Qatar, then Italy, then Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and
Bahrain recalled their ambassadors. Talks at the U.N. Security Council
failed to produce a resolution about the regime’s atrocities, owing to
objections from the Russians and the Chinese, and the council offered
instead only a weak statement of condemnation. Turkey, which previously
enjoyed a close relationship with the Assad regime, has become
increasingly critical of its actions against the population. The Turkish
Foreign Minister went to Damascus in what was seen as a final warning
to try and persuade Bashar to halt the violence. Finally, last week,
President Obama announced categorically, “The time has come for
President Assad to step aside,” and the leaders of Britain, Germany, and
France issued a joint statement along the same lines. Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton called for countries to stop buying Syrian oil and
gas, a move that could put serious pressure on the regime’s finances.
Syrian activists took heart in the increasing
clamor of both Arab and Western condemnation, but also worried about the
possibility of direct foreign intervention. The day before Obama made
his statement, Bashar told the U.N. Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, that
the military and police operations had come to an end. Nobody believed
him, and activists reported that protesters were still being shot in
demonstrations across the country. Whether all the diplomacy will have
any effect on a regime that is already isolated and clearly determined
to stamp out dissent remains to be seen.
As
I prepared to leave Syria, London erupted in riots, and Syrian state
TV, eager to show that other countries had problems, gleefully carried
footage of burning buildings and gangs of looters. Activist friends of
mine laughed at the irony of the British government suddenly considering
measures that were all too familiar to them, such as using rubber
bullets and shutting down social networks.
I met Karim again for
lunch, and we discussed the mental corrosion that everyone was
feeling—the inability to concentrate, to remember the past, or to think
about the future. Louay Hussein had told me that he thought only of the
day-to-day: “So they did not arrest me yesterday—it doesn’t mean they
won’t arrest me today.” Karim leaned across the table so that he would
be out of earshot of the other diners. He said that he was more afraid
than he had ever been. But he’d also had a new realization.
“It’s
amazing, freedom,” he said. “It’s like a different kind of awareness.
When you start seeing it in people’s hearts, it looks like the new grass
of spring, the very tips of the new spring grass—so fresh and tender
and intimate and sad.”
“Why is it sad?” I asked.
He looked down. “Because it experienced so much death before it could start to grow.” ♦
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/29/110829fa_fact_steavenson#ixzz1jKxJkK3c
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/29/110829fa_fact_steavenson#ixzz1jKxCJnDl