Fear and Hope in Damascus

The protestors marched from Hasan Mosque in the Midan district calling for freedom. As they passed through a Christian neighborhood, they changed their cry to “The mosque and church, one hand!” attempting to calm fears of a sectarian agenda. After the protestors arrived at the local police station, security forces attacked, assaulting demonstrators with batons, firing into the air and shooting tear gas canisters into the crowd. Majd, blinded by the tear gas, was guided to safety by his friends.

“If you don’t have freedom and you don’t have dignity, it is better to die,” Majd told me.

Following that protest, the Syrian media reported that a crowd had gathered in Midan to celebrate the recent rainfall.

I had spent almost a year in Syria, working for an English daily newspaper that was established as a result of minor political reforms that had loosened controls on the media. I was content knowing that I was working for a publication that often pushes the boundaries of state censorship; even so, I quickly became both disgusted and amused by the half-truths, exaggerations, outright lies and empty nationalist slogans that the paper was required to publish on a daily basis.

The misinformation and pseudo journalism produced by the Syrian propaganda machine has only intensified since the onset of the revolution, claiming that peaceful protestors are armed gangs sent by foreign conspirators to sow chaos. A protest broken up with tear gas, bullets and electric batons turns into a celebration of rainfall.

Thanks to the internal censorship and expulsion of foreign journalists, it’s impossible to get a clear picture of events in Syria. It very well may be that some protestors have turned to violence to protect their communities from raids conducted by the military and government thugs. It may be true that sectarian elements have infiltrated the revolution.

It’s this ambiguity that has some Syrians fearful of the uprising, especially in the capital. In the early weeks of the revolution, many Damascus residents told me the reports of protests were a lie. As I watched protest footage on Aljazeera, a Syrian desperately tried to convince me that Aljazeera had altered the audio to put anti-government slogans in the mouths of pro-government demonstrators.

Much of this state of denial is due not so much to love of the regime but rather to fear of what might happen if the government fell in this religiously and ethnically diverse society. Syrians have seen the butchery that took place in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq, and the sectarian conflict that has flared on and off in Lebanon for decades. The cold comfort of a dictator is preferable to car bombs and beheadings.

 So acute is the fear of an Islamist takeover among some members of religious minorities (and some Sunni Muslims as well) that this rational concern often morphs into zealous adoration of the president. In a house which I shared for a time with a Christian family, the grandmother kept a framed picture of the presidential family on the night stand next to her bed — a spot that my own American grandmother of Syrian Christian origins would usually reserve for a picture of Jesus.

However, as the crimes of the Syrian government became increasingly apparent thanks to activists and citizen journalists such as Majd, Damascenes’ state of denial slowly began to crumble. But even as I left Damascus, fear of an unknown alternative was still strong and support for the government in some quarters unwavering.

Arriving in Cairo International Airport, I was greeted by banners above the passport control quoting Austrian president Heinz Fischer: “The Egyptian people are the greatest people in the world and deserve the Nobel Prize for peace.” A bus trip into the city was enough to understand what he had meant. In what had recently been one of the most politically repressed societies in the world, I now saw passengers on the metro debating politics and newspaper headlines criticizing politicians. During the July 8 “March of the Million” protest, an atmosphere of jubilation reigned in Tahrir Square even amid the angry calls for accelerated reform.

Actually seeing freedom at work in an Arab country gave me hope for Syria. In a café just off of Tahrir Square, I found further reason to believe in a bright future for the violence-wracked country. There, I sat down with Homam, 21, and Mulham, 22, both Syrian students studying in Cairo and activists in the pro-democracy movement among Syrians in Egypt.

“The killing of children in Dar’a, this is the first thing to push us to protest,” Mulham tells me. “We were also inspired by the success of the Egyptian Revolution. We saw Egypt before and after the revolution.”

The Syrian protest movement in Egypt organizes frequent demonstrations in front of the Syrian Embassy in Cairo, where they have been met with physical assault and threats, and in front of the Arab League Headquarters. They meet with Arab League officials, draw media attention to the cause of the Syrian revolution, and through the Facebook group “Syrian Freedom Youth – Egypt” post videos and messages and organize events.

Though they are far from Al-Assad’s militias and torture chambers, the dangers for activists like Homam and Mulham are very real, and they asked their last names not be used for fear of their safety. They claim that even in Egypt, some Syrian students working for the Syrian secret police report on their activities. “We know three or four students who are working for the secret police,” says Mulham. “During the March 27 protest, they videotaped students and attacked them […] I have friends [in Egypt] whose families in Syria have been threatened.”

Regime supporters and fence-sitters in Damascus always pointed out to me that the protests are concentrated in poor, rural areas where education levels are low, religiosity fervent and tribal culture strong. This, they say, proves the less-than-democratic agenda of the uprising, as if drought-stricken farmers who have suffered cruelly from an authoritarian regime’s neglect have no reason to believe in democracy. Majd, Homam, Mulham and countless others are living proof that this is a gross mischaracterization. They are among the many young, educated Syrians who are awakening to the reality that Arabs do not have to choose between a ruthless dictatorship and sectarian conflict.

The political uprising has turned into a social revolution, protesting the pseudo-secularism of the regime. At a July 14 demonstration near the Syrian Embassy, protestors explained they want to show Syrians that they don’t need a gun pointed at them to get along with people of other religions and ethnicities. “The regime was the first one to use sectarianism,” said a student. “When we protest, we call out that the Syrian people are one; that we are all the same.”

The last time an uprising attempted to overthrow the Syrian regime, it did not take the form of peaceful protests; it was a violent decade-long revolution led largely by Islamists, which the government put down in 1982 by massacring tens of thousands of civilians in the city of Hama.

This incident is in the back of every Syrian’s mind as they watch the current situation unfolding.

As if confirming government supporters’ fears, some activists involved in the current uprising, including Majd and Homam, are the descendants of the many thousands of Syrians who were accused, often wrongly, of belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood and expelled from Syria. But much has changed in a generation.

A new worldview shaped by events in the region has led to a generation of activists that spurn sectarianism and all the horrors it has brought to neighboring countries. They welcome Western cultural influence, but try to do so on their own terms: American rapper Eminem’s lyrics roll off Majd’s tongue as easily as verses from the Quran. Access to the internet, social media and education has led them to spurn the empty ideologies and the conspiracy theory mindset used by both secular and Islamist authoritarian regimes to control their people.

It has fallen upon such young dissidents, dedicated to democracy and human rights, to maintain the peaceful nature of the revolution amid massacres and armed provocation, to root out sectarianism amid the regime’s sectarian mind games, to battle propaganda with citizen journalism and, when the regime does fall, to guide Syria into a new era of democracy.

 “We will not return to Syria until the fall of the regime,” says Homam. “We would be arrested.”

As Majd once told me, “It’s now or never.”