Ten years after the Syrian revolution | Opinion

“It’s your turn, doctor,” children wrote on the wall of a school in Daraa, southern Syria, on March 6, 2011.. Under the impetus of the Arab Spring, which had swept away two dictators in the region, Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, it is now the turn of the Syrian Bashar al Assad, holder of an ophthalmologist diploma.

The children of Daraa were abducted and tortured by the security forces with the usual brutality that characterizes them, but this time they woke up the conscience of thousands of people who took to the streets on March 15 to peacefully claim their right to a life of dignity, as had happened months before in Tunisia and Egypt. Thus began and will continue the Syrian revolution: with the aspiration for freedom and dignity. Then came “the Syrian war” and later “the Syrian crisis”. But the first thing was the revolution, and that changed everything. We talk very little about grassroots organizations, techniques of non-violent resistance and civil disobedience: we talk very little about the Syrian people, their right to freedom, dignity and their most fundamental right to life.

The power of the demonstrations, which quickly became massive, has broken the distance between peoples, this distance created by totalitarian regimes, which undermines solidarity between peoples, isolates them and condemns them to absolute solitude. “Although we lived together, we were separated. Your neighbor was your neighbor, but if you said the wrong thing you could end up in jail, ”commented journalist Ramy Jarrah. This Syria of “walls with ears” was built by Hafez al Assad, Bashar’s father, after a coup in 1971 that kept him in power until his death in 2000. Its autocracy was solidified on the basis of a large network of corruption in alliance with a large network of secret services: the mukhabarat. They are not necessarily special agents; It can be a colleague from the university, a journalist, a neighbor whose mission is to report remarks or activities contrary to the regime or potentially “dangerous”. Thus, a network of mutual mistrust was built up to the point that everyone knew that in every classroom, family reunion, or workplace, there were mukhabarat ready to hand over to anyone at any time. Due to the discretion of the practice, no one trusted anyone, and the prisons were full of opponents and personal enemies of the mukhabarat, which also controlled most of the business activity in the country.

Hafez al Assad for years prepared his eldest son Basel to succeed him after his death, but he died in a car accident in 1994 and so, unexpectedly, the “doctor”, who was far from family affairs living in London, had to prepare for the post he occupied in 2000. The first years seem to give a little air to the Syrian society with the opening of telecommunications and Internet services. However, new strategies of censorship, political persecution and corruption were rapidly developed, thanks to modern technologies and related sectors of the economy.

When the riots began, Bashar had been in power for over a decade and, instead of stepping down like Ben Ali and Mubarak, starting a democratic transition and negotiating some sort of deal, he declared war on his own people. . “Assad or burn the country” has since been the slogan of forces loyal to the president throughout this decade of massacres, forced displacement, loss of the country’s historical heritage, the emergence and promotion of the radicalization of Islamist groups. and a long etc.

“The Syria you knew no longer exists”, this is how the book begins and ends The earth was starting to burn by the Argentinian writer of Syrian origin Cynthia Edul, who recounts her trip to the country of her ancestors in October 2010. The earth has burned down and Assad’s Syria is a country that no longer exists. Millions of Syrians in exile, in refugee camps and in regime prisons they still aspire to build a free and democratic Syria in this land ravaged by fire.

Carolina Bracco is a political scientist and doctor in Arab and Hebrew cultures. Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires.