Letter from Syria

In the conference room the conversation is, like the clothes, ‘business casual’. For my benefit, everyone has switched from Arabic to English. Despite the linguistic shift, my new colleagues converse as fluently as before. I have arrived in Eastern Turkey with an aid organisation to support the humanitarian response in north-west Syria. As we talk, head-scarved attendants deliver a stream of luminously green, pistachio-filled sweets, along with thick Arabic coffee in tiny cups, like an oil slick in a thimble. ‘Turkish coffee is good,’ I’m told, ‘but Syrian coffee is something else.’ It is always like this according to my Syrian colleagues who now live and work as refugees in Turkey, within touching distance of their former homes. The sweets in Turkey are excellent, but in Syria they are heavenly. The food here is good, but in Syria there is a greater culinary sophistication and more spices. There is a longstanding rivalry between the sister cities of Gaziantep in Turkey, where we are all now working, and Aleppo in Syria, which is only two hours’ drive away but now separated from us by a wall and a war. In Aleppo, I learn, the castle is bigger, and the covered bazaar is an infinite labyrinth of wonders. Syrians, I am informed, are better educated – even the pistachios are sweeter. I begin to feel sorry for the city of Gaziantep facing up to its more accomplished twin. My Syrian colleagues are in exile, unable to return to their country, which has been at war for a decade. More than five hundred thousand people have been killed, and there are five million refugees. More than half of the remaining population, some thirteen million people, survive only on humanitarian assistance. There is a rampant pandemic, chronic malnutrition, and hyper-inflation. My colleagues have a right to their pride and the aggrandisements of nostalgia. In reality, the twin cities’ roles are reversed. Compared with the pulverised rubble that remains of Aleppo, Gaziantep is now the echo of its twin’s historical sophistication. ‘Sumerians, Babylonians, Romans, Byzantines, Ottomans, Crusaders, the French – they’ve all been to Syria,’ observes an anthropologist I meet. ‘It is, after all, in the fertile crescent and like so much of what some like to call “Western Civilisation”, it originated in the East. It is hard,’ she continues, ‘not to be struck by a sense of local cosmopolitanism.’ Most of my colleagues are graduates of the Universities of Aleppo and Damascus, a town once so lush and vibrant that the Prophet Mohammad is said to have turned away when he arrived at its outskirts, saying he was not yet ready to enter Paradise. They are engineers, architects, geophysicists, computer scientists, linguists. They make oblique references to the Syrian government, using a shadowy moniker: ‘the regime’. As the conversation continues, I have a sense of being out of place. This could have been a meeting room in any slick organisation. I could imagine my Syrian colleagues planning the next major architectural project, designing a new piece of civic infrastructure, running businesses, managing government departments, or teaching ambitious students in busy schools. The atmosphere hums with competence and collaboration. And yet we are discussing tents. There are more than four million displaced people living in an enclave in Syria’s north-west, which is not, at least not yet, controlled by the regime. Two million of them have nowhere to live. ‘It is difficult to think of an analogue for north-west Syria,’ an aid official tells me during my initial briefings on arriving in Gaziantep, ‘but to my mind, it is the new Gaza.’ The full flush of the Arab Spring against the Middle East’s kleptocratic old guard had brought the Syrian revolution to the outskirts of Damascus. But Russian airpower and Iranian troops had pushed them back, combined with the Obama administration’s reluctance to be dragged into yet another military quagmire. The regime has slowly retaken the former opposition strongholds of Aleppo, Homs, Hama, and Idlib. In this it was supported by the indiscriminate brutality of a Russian air force schooled during the 1990s in the obliteration of rebellion in the Caucasus. Now those fearing regime retribution were living in a shrinking enclave, caught between the front lines and the Turkish border where a concrete wall, erected with European Union funds, had gone up several kilometres into Syrian territory. When Bashar al-Assad came to power in 2000, there was hope that he would prove different from his father, Hafez al-Assad, who seized power in a military coup in 1966 and from whom Bashar inherited the presidency. A London-trained ophthalmologist and founder of the Syrian Computer Society, Bashar al-Assad seemed less authoritarian and, in the early days of his rule, he was seen as a reformer. ‘Desert Rose’ effused French Vogue in an article about Assad’s London-born wife, Asma, an apparent symbol of the rapprochement between the regime and the West. ‘We wanted Assad to be the Gorbachev of Syria,’ said the former Turkish foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, ‘but he chose to be a Milošević.’ Turkey has been remarkably supportive of the Syrians who have streamed across its borders, fleeing for their lives. In part, there is a ‘duty to be generous’ that is especially marked in Muslim societies. Refugee Studies scholar Dawn Chatty regards this as an alternative to rights-based approaches to the provision of assistance. Refugees and asylum seekers have become pawns in the relationship between Turkey and the European Union and the wider geopolitics of the Mediterranean. ‘Turkish people are very kind,’ I am told by Syrian colleagues. Three and a half million Syrians now live in Turkey, where they have found work, set up businesses, and sent their children to local schools. Yet even in Turkey, Syrians lack permanent residence, and the official policy remains that they will one day be repatriated. There are also rumblings of discontent, especially among Turkish nationalists and secularists. ‘Too much Kurd, too much Souriye, too much Armenie,’ a local estate agent tells me, trying to dissuade me from looking for a flat in Gaziantep’s bustling downtown. Secular Turks, too, are beginning to question the impact of a longer-term Syrian presence. The Syrians’ level of religious observance aligns them more closely with Turkey’s conservative president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, than with those who see themselves as the heirs to Atatürk’s secular republic. ‘I don’t like the way they look at me for wearing jeans and not covering my hair,’ says a Turkish tourist I meet. For some, differences over alcohol consumption and women’s clothing are becoming an irritant. ‘We welcomed them at first,’ says the tourist, ‘but it’s been ten years now. It’s their conflict, not ours.’ In north-west Syria, people are not refugees for whom a network of international laws and institutions exists. In the language of aid, they are ‘internally displaced persons’ (IDPs). This distinction, while meaningless in humanitarian terms, matters when it comes to international assistance. States, even failed ones that are at war with themselves, have primary responsibility for the protection of their citizens. Despite Russian and Chinese misgivings, the scale of the humanitarian catastrophe inside Syria led the UN Security Council to authorise a cross-border resolution in 2014. This gave humanitarian organisations legal authority to deliver aid inside Syria, despite opposition from the Assad regime. The initial Security Council resolution, which has been renewed annually since, allowed for five authorised crossing points into Syria to deliver aid from Turkey, Iraq, and Jordan. Each successive year, however, the number of crossing points has been reduced – there is now just one. A further Security Council resolution is due in July this year, but it is far from clear whether this will go ahead. Russia, in particular, has begun to ‘signal its voting intent’, in the language of diplomatic euphemism, by bombing aid depots and hospitals in Syria’s north-west based on the accusation that the area is controlled by radical ISIS-affiliated terror groups. It is said that there have been around 40,000 foreign fighters in Syria, and radical groups are funded by Sunni regional powers Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Chechens with long experience of asymmetric war against Russia are the steeliest of the imported fighters. The defeat of ISIS in Iraq, however, has greatly weakened the hold of extremism in Syria. According to the International Crisis Group, which has conducted extensive research inside Syria’s borders, these once-radical groups are beginning to change to reflect more moderate local traditions. The decade-long war has hardened ideological lines. One reason for the lack of US support for the revolution was the assessment that it was a ‘fantasy’, as former president Obama put it; and that ‘an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists’ would be unable to take on the Syrian state and its Russian and Iranian backers. This position undermined the possibility of a broad-based and inclusive opposition movement as more ideological factions received funding and became more prominent in the fight against the regime. US ambivalence and a lack of support for the ‘farmers and pharmacists’ ensured more conservative elements, backed by funding from the Gulf states, would continue to oppose the regime militarily. As the conflict has dragged on, Russian air power has become the decisive factor in military success. Moderate elements, sensing the futility of a war against uncontested air power, have fled to neighbouring countries. This has left north-west Syria governed by a patchwork of ‘de facto local authorities’ that vary in ideological stance, access to funds, and effectiveness of local administration. One consequence of the conflict has been the gradual unravelling of Syria’s cosmopolitan social fabric as the various ethnic groups consolidate their hold on their respective territories for a sense of survival. Kurds have established a relatively stable enclave of their own in the north-east, controlling forty per cent of the country and all of its oil production. Sunni Arab opponents of the regime have fled to the north-west. Alawi, a Muslim minority group from whom the Al-Assad family and much of the ruling élite is drawn, have retreated to a mountain enclave near the Lebanese border, and many of Syria’s Christians have now migrated. Non-renewal of the UN Security Council resolution in July will further this process of disintegration and will cut off desperate people from the organisations and funding that keep them alive. Yet this aid has often been insufficient. For a long time, even the provision of tents was controversial – ‘it would only encourage people to stay’. In the legalistic world of aid, language is important. ‘Durable solutions’ are often sought in refugee contexts, but for ‘IDPs’ this would risk the perception of intervention in a sovereign state. ‘It’s like we’ve been responding to a different disaster each year in the same place for ten years and not learning or building on anything that’s been done before,’ one international donor tells me. While the numbers of dead and displaced in the Syrian conflict are as stark as the images of the country’s devastated cities, and while the politics of the conflict have taken on regional and even global dimensions, it is important to remember where the revolution began: with children who were arrested, tortured, and murdered by security forces in the city of Dera’a ten years ago for writing graffiti on a wall that read: ‘The regime must go’. This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. The author has chosen to remain anonymous.

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