by Kim Ghattas
In one of the videos, a Syrian soldier stood in a field with two gun-toting colleagues on either side, dozens of others behind him. Some of them held up Syrian revolution flags—the black, white, and green flag with three red stars that fluttered in Syria between its independence from France in 1946 and 1963, when the Baath Party seized power in a coup. Under a gray March sky, villagers and children looked on. The soldier gave his name and announced his defection from the Syrian national army. On camera, he read his new oath of allegiance as a member of the Free Syrian Army.
“I promise to defend villagers from the assault of the government forces,” he said. “Long live Assad’s Syria.” He paused a moment, then burst out laughing, his hands to his head, his body tilting backward in the laugh. Everybody laughed. “Long Live Assad’s Syria” was seared on every Syrian’s brain, branded like cattle from infancy. Every Syrian belonged to the Assad family; the country belonged to the Assads. The motto was tagged on walls, printed in schoolbooks, repeated like a mantra for generations. It was hard to get rid of. Just like Assad himself.
For years, Lebanon had suffered from the Machiavellian politics of the Assad family. Several dozen prominent politicians had been assassinated over the course of three decades. Syrian soldiers had invaded, occupied, looted, and raped in Lebanon with the outside world often paying scant attention. In 1972, Hafez al-Assad declared that Lebanon and Syria were one country, and he pursued that goal of unity assiduously and ruthlessly from the first time he sent troops into Lebanon in 1975, until he completed his control with the invasion of 1990 that had marked me so much. In the process, across Lebanon, people were humiliated, detained, or beaten up by Syrian troops or intelligence officers, many languished in Syrian jails for years, and some had never resurfaced. Damascus did also have staunch allies in Lebanon who either benefited from that alliance or espoused the same worldview—resistance to Israel and the imperial West. Syria was now being torn apart, and while many Lebanese had often wished the worst for their occupiers, this was heartbreaking. I looked at the images coming out of Syria and I thought of Lebanon. There were many differences between us. Syria was poorer and more rural than Lebanon, and its cities still bore the mark of the Soviet influence, but in many ways we were similar, not one country, but cousins, people of the Levant. The fact that Syria was stuck somewhere in the 1980s because of dictatorship only reinforced the feeling that, when I looked at the conflict unfolding in Syria, I was seeing Lebanon from the 1980s.
The idea that Bashar al-Assad was a reformer was buried in the rubble of cities like Homs and Daraa, which had so far borne the brunt of the military assault. Assad after all had never rebelled against his father, Hafez, never broken ranks; he was truly his father’s son, along with his brother Maher. Just like Saif Gaddafi, who had deceived so many with his talk about change, appearing to lead the way toward reform, or Gamal Mubarak, who ended up being partly responsible for the downfall of his father in his desperate desire to keep power in the hands of the family. Syrians who had hoped that Bashar was their country’s savior were disappointed and angry. Smart, educated, Westernized liberals started to break ranks, bitter about how they too had been used to show the outside world that there was potential for openness and democracy in Syria. But many Syrians still believed that Assad was their best protection against the kind of chaos that had engulfed Iraq, next door, after the fall of Saddam. Christians and Alawites feared retribution if the Sunnis came to power.
In Washington, in opinion pieces in newspapers around the world, people kept saying that this was not 1982; the younger Assad would not be able to kill with impunity the way his father had done at the time in the northern town of Hama when he put down an Islamist rebellion. Some twenty thousand people were massacred then, their bodies bulldozed into the ground with whole buildings that had been brought down on top of people’s heads. Today, there was television, Twitter, Facebook—the world would act in the face of such atrocities, just as it had in Libya to prevent the massacre that Gaddafi had threatened to carry out in Benghazi. But Bashar al-Assad knew this was the twenty-first century, and though he kept the international media mostly out of his country, he also did not appear on television to threaten that he would hunt down his people like rats in alleyways, the way Gaddafi had done. His forces were reportedly instructed to keep the daily death toll just below outrageous.
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Every day brought another call for intervention, the same kind of “loose talk” that had infuriated Robert Gates during the Libya uprising. But Syria was not Libya, and the cost of intervention was just too high for a president in an election year. Libya had lasted well beyond the “few weeks” that the Obama administration had insisted it would take to end the violent repression by Gaddafi of his people. Syrian armed forces were better armed and trained, with air defenses and jets bought from Russia. Syria also had the region’s largest stockpile of chemical and biological weapons. Who knew how long an intervention would last or what it would lead to?
As the weeks went by, on trips with the secretary, over drinks in Washington, officials would ask me, “What do you think of the situation in Syria?” I had no particular wisdom or specific information, but in the search for a path forward in the face of such a cunning dictator, all ideas were welcome.
I told them, from experience, about Assad’s expertise in sowing chaos, holding on to power, and outwitting everybody. I warned about a slow descent into civil war. Assad would burn the country before he handed it over to anyone else.
“But what good does that do anyone? That’s just sandbox logic!” exclaimed one incredulous official. Perhaps, but it was Assad’s logic, the kind that often escaped some American officials. They remained as result-driven as ever, often getting tangled up in their good intentions and unable to understand other governments’ absolute indifference to their own people’s welfare. But this administration seemed to be demonstrating an understanding that foreign interventions meant playing in someone else’s stadium by someone else’s rules and always remaining a stranger. Those advocating for action said Obama had swung to the other extreme of the Bush administration—so eager not to put a U.S. stamp on popular revolutions that he was overthinking the situation into paralysis.
America had interests to safeguard too, and in my life away from Lebanon I was becoming attuned to the thinking driving officials in D.C. I raised the prospect of months of protests, a simmering war, months of fighting.
“You don’t want that, not in an election year. It’s messy,” I said. Our conversation was on background, so I couldn’t identify the speaker by name.
“I’m not sure it has an impact on us. Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s terrible that people are dying, and I wish we could find a way to stop it, but if it continues to simmer like this, contained within Syria, it doesn’t have a direct impact on our national security.”
I had lived through war, I had felt abandoned by the world, I had clamored for help, and yet here I was sitting in Washington able to see why, from this official’s perspective, America’s national security was not affected by events in Syria, for now, and why intervention was still worse than nonintervention.
What had happened to me? Had I become insensitive to people’s suffering? Forgotten my own past? Become too in tune with American political discourse? I hoped it was just my new appreciation of the complex role of a superpower and the shortcomings of other countries as well as my own. I also understood there were often deep connections between separate problems that constrained America’s actions. How it handled Syria would influence its policy toward Iran, for example, which was much more of a strategic interest for America. This was the stuff of diplomacy for a superpower. Russia and China had their own considerations, their own interests to protect, when they vetoed resolutions on Syria at the UN. Comparisons are never straightforward but America vetoed plenty of resolutions at the UN that condemned Israeli military operations against the Palestinians or Lebanon. Everyone stood up for their buddies.
* * *
In Washington, every day my in-box filled up with e-mails in Arabic sent from somewhere in Syria, a basement, a safe house, someone’s kitchen or living room. The Local Coordination Committees in Syria were grass-roots activists who initially facilitated contact between protestors across Syria to help coordinate the movement. They also acted increasingly like local government in areas that had fallen to the rebels. Slowly, their e-mails started filling with more news of protestors being shot. Their missives, in basic English or Arabic, continued to punctuate my days in Washington. I woke up, made coffee.
Subject: Breaking from Homs.
Homs: 75 unidentified corpses were found in the refrigerator of the National Hospital after the FSA captured it. Local Coordination Committees of Syria.
Lunch break.
Subject: Syria 9PM.
Hama: Atshan. Violent shelling with tanks targeting the village leading the damage of several houses and displacement of several residents. Damascus suburbs: Hasya: Martyrs and wounded were reported after the regime’s army, backed with tanks, raided the town amid heavy and random gunfire.
Afternoon coffee. More death.
There were long lists of links to online videos documenting the shelling, the dying, and the wounded. I had spent the first months of the Syrian revolution watching them avidly, all day long. By the summer, they became too violent, and I began to have vivid nightmares about the war in Lebanon again. My feelings of fear and helplessness, carefully tucked away and forgotten after four years in Washington, returned. So I took the selfish and rather cowardly decision to stop watching the videos and shield myself from the pain. But I didn’t have the courage to ask the LCCSyria e-mail senders to take me off their listserv.
Usually by the end of the day, all I wanted to do was cry. The e-mails just kept coming, throughout the night. When I woke up, there would be another five, ten, sometimes twenty of them in my in-box, staring at me from my BlackBerry screen, a long litany of death, violence, and fear. I had no right to cry: I was living in the United States, far from the chaos. My family in Beirut was safe.
But my friends in Damascus were not. I was in touch with some of them and feared for their lives and their futures. And I was reliving the civil war in Lebanon, wondering why it was happening all over again right next door. Soon, the rebels themselves would be involved in atrocious acts of violence, torturing soldiers they caught, hanging informers. The lines between who was right and wrong, good or bad, blurred occasionally, just like they had in Lebanon over fifteen years of fighting. But in Syria there was still one ruthless president mowing down his people.
The e-mails from Syria were a silent version of the news flashes on Lebanese radio during the civil war that interrupted regular programming to tell us where shelling had erupted or which road crossings had snipers on them. A burst of music with a punchy beat would sound on the radio, followed by a phone ring, bringing dread to our hearts.
“News flash from our newsroom,” a woman’s velvety voice would then announce. Whenever my family was in the car, we kept the radio on to make sure we knew if we were driving into danger. At home, the moment we heard explosions, we turned on the radio to find out what was going on. We could tell from the sound that the shells were making whether they were incoming or outgoing, close or far, but the radio announcers would tell us who was fighting who, whether it was a minor eruption or something serious. All of the tidbits of information fed into our decision-making process—stay put or head down to the shelter? I’ve often wondered how the people who sat in those radio studios gathered the detailed information that kept so many of us alive for years. Not only were there no Internet, e-mail, or cell phones at the time, but landlines barely worked.
The Syrian e-mail authors showed the same ingenuity and determination. They even used some of the same language to describe the shelling: “intense” for sustained bombardment; “indiscriminate” for shelling not directed at a specific target but just aiming to destroy as much as possible in as wide an area as possible. Or both “intense” and “random.”
I thought I had finally left fear behind when I had moved to the United States in 2008 for my BBC job. I had only spent holidays in the United States till then, a few weeks here and there over the course of fifteen years. Yet the feeling of familiarity and comfort was instantaneous after I arrived. I felt free of fear, the kind of fear that makes hundreds of thousands of people around the world seek a way out of the repression of their country, whether it’s a new life abroad or a second passport that guarantees a way out to safety.
As I watched the images of children on the backs of pickup trucks fleeing their villages in Syria, I remembered the escape out of our neighborhood, under the cover of darkness during a lull in the shelling, my mother driving our old Mercedes, me in the backseat under a blanket, shivering from fever. My body reacted to every flare-up in the fighting with its own internal battles. This one happened early on February 4, 1984, when I was only seven, but snippets of the action are seared in my memory. Over the years, I’ve expanded the image by adding details from conversations with my family. After days of fighting, the Lebanese army had lost control of West Beirut, and Muslim militias had taken control of the territory. The president had the backing of the international community, and they weighed in, in their effort to shore up what they saw as the legitimate state and the national army. The marines had left Beirut after the 1983 truck bombing but were still off the coast of Lebanon. The USS New Jersey battleship fired three hundred shells onto the stronghold of the militias, south of Beirut and the hills southeast of the capital. But the president was a Christian, so “when the shells started falling on the Shiites, they assumed the American ‘referee’ had taken sides,” wrote former secretary of state Colin Powell in his memoir, My American Journey.
The feeling that America was at war with Muslims was partly born and solidified in Lebanon.
My family was stuck in the middle, wondering why we were being attacked by the Americans. Every front line seemed to cross our neighborhood. We were right on the edge between East and West Beirut, in a no-man’s-land; our building stood on the western side, but our front door opened on to the East. We were at the southern end of Beirut, beyond us the southern suburbs, stronghold of the nascent Hezbollah, and farther along other Muslim militias.
My father and eldest sister had stayed behind to look after the house and check on my father’s office on the western side of town. A Lebanese army soldier at a checkpoint told my mother she was crazy to be on the road, but she insisted we had to leave. I was sick and had to be taken to a quieter environment. There was always someplace in the country where there was no fighting. The challenge was getting there. The soldier told my mom to turn off the headlights and drive slowly so as not to attract the attention of snipers. The city was in the dark. Streetlights were an exotic feature. We crossed the big intersection that I would later peer down while driving to the presidential palace with Clinton during that trip in the spring of 2009.
My mother drove as silently as possible, into the dark, holding on to the steering wheel, the windows cracked open so we could hear any movement outside. As long as we made it through the intersection, past the snipers, we would be fine. We were almost there when my mother started to make out an obstacle in front of her, a strange dark shape in the middle of the road, with spots of white. She turned on her headlights just in time t
o avert a crash: the biggest danger we faced at that moment was a stray cow taking a rest in the middle of the road.
With every week that passed, Syria looked to me more and more like the violent, fractured Lebanon I had grown up in. We didn’t have one dictator facing down his people but a plethora of militias sowing fear. We had the same regional configuration of countries getting involved—Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United States, and Russia. China was not a factor back in the day, Lebanon didn’t share a border with Turkey, and the Turks had not been a regional player at the time. But this felt like a replay of the bigger power game that opposed East and West in Lebanon: the United States with its friends Saudi Arabia and Israel pitted against Russia and its camp, including Iran and Hezbollah. Except that Syria was no longer one of the players and the persecutor of others, but its own victim. In Syria, more and more protestors were holding placards saying the world had abandoned them. As I had felt during the war in Lebanon, the Syrian people had no patience to understand what sort of geopolitical stars had to align before the violence stopped.
Just as in Lebanon, the national army was breaking up, militias were taking over, great powers were meeting in an effort to find a way forward that suited them all, but there was no obvious path. The diplomatic to-ing and fro-ing that took place at every turning point in Lebanon had looked to us like some nefarious plot was being discussed at our expense. Every time American officials visited Lebanon, or Russian emissaries visited Syria, or Russians and Americans met, we asked ourselves whether they would strike a deal—in our favor or at our expense. Now, sitting in Washington, in Tunis, or at the UN, watching from up close, I could see that it wasn’t an evil conspiracy in which a country’s people were cheap collateral damage; it was more benign—relentless work trying to bridge the gaps between two different worldviews with no clear path forward as long as all the players stuck stubbornly to their position and their interests. But that didn’t make the pain any easier to bear.