Syria, Freedom, and Lessons In Hypocrisy

It is being reported that over 100,000 people in the Syrian town of Hama are mourning the loss of activists recently killed by government security forces. The town of Hama is no stranger to state brutality. The notoriously pro-Western Middle East historian Bernard Lewis wrote in his book The Crisis of Islam (2003)about the Syrian government's 1982 slaughter of it's citizens and the morally problematic role of the US government. He writes that the Syrian government cracked down on the town of Hama after an uprising initiated by the Muslim Brothers. The Syrian government:

Attacked the city with tanks, artillery, and bomber aircraft, and followed these with bulldozers to complete the work of destruction...The number killed was estimated, by Amnesty International, at somewhere between ten thousand and twenty five thousand...The massacre did not prevent the United States from subsequently courting Assad...Hafiz Al-Assad never became an American ally or, as others would put it, puppet, but it was certainly not for lack of trying on the part of American diplomacy (pp 108, 109)

Lewis also points out that this event got very little press compared to the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps a few months later by Israel's Lebanese Christian militia allies.

Syrians, not just from Hama, have faced the heavy hand of the authoritarian Bashar Assad,son and successor of the late dictator Hafiz Assad. Reported in HuffPost World :

A 13-year-old Syrian boy detained by government forces has been brutally killed, his wounds displayed in a shocking video. The boy, identified as Hamza al-Khateeb, was shot, burned, and had his penis cut off when his body was returned to his family.

Syrians, like Tunisians, Egyptians,Yemenis, Bahrainis, Libyans, and Palestinians (more to add), are fighting for their freedom from such barbarism. All these people deserve international solidarity (that does not necessarily mean military intervention).Humans cannot and should not endure such horrors. Freedom loving people are in awe of these incredible revolutions spreading, but I think it is important to examine the geopolitical forces at play. A brief look at how ordinary citizens are being used by these forces is needed.

Lebanon's Hezbollah helped Lebanon become free of Israeli military occupation, yet now they support Bashar Assad's oppression of his people because they get aid from Syria. Iran expresses rage at Bahrain's repression of the Shiites by the Sunni monarchy while it represses it's own people and supports dictatorship in Syria. The US has a large Navy fleet in Bahrain and watches, if not supports, the unarmed citizen protesters being slaughtered (along with medical professionals tending to the injured) by the Bahraini monarchy because it is an enemy of Iran. Yet, the US and NATO bomb Qaddafi's forces in Libya to "protect" armed civilians from Libyan government attacks. The US supports the unpopular dictator Saleh in Yemen because he claims to help repress al-Qaida. Turkey stands in solidarity with Palestinians while they treat Kurds in Turkey in a similar way Israelis treat Palestinians. Israel talks about suffering from Palestinian terrorism and brazenly oppresses Palestinians with ample military aid from the US government. I can go on and on. My point is that solidarity in support of freedom needs to mean freedom for everyone: not tied to the hypocrisy of cold narrow political ends masked in the name of humanitarianism.

Here is a video posted in honor of the Syrian Revolution.

Libya and the Ongoing Revolution and Libyans

Libya is in a life and death struggle between the pro and anti-Qaddafi forces within the country. According to the Hindustan Times of March 5, 2011:

Libya on Saturday plunged into a civil war with see-saw battles going on between Muammar Gaddafi loyalists and rebels for territorial gains, leaving 74 dead in one of the bloodiest day of fighting as the country’s opposition held its first conclave apparently to form a parallel government. The efforts to form a self-declared national-council comes as US and western countries as well as world bodies have virtually derecognised the Gaddafi regime and interpol has issued warrants against him and his family for genocide.

These battles have been ongoing and brutal. Many hope that the conflict will end soon and that the anti-Qaddafi forces will become victorious. I am posting in this blog an Al Jazeera "Inside Story" clip that focused on these developments and the possibility of the revolution's results. I also am posting excerpts from a crazed Qaddafi speech showing,in a small way, what kind of man has ruled Libya for over four decades.

This news is important to follow as the revolution wages within Libya, but I think it is also important to see Libyans beyond the face of Qaddafi. Libyans are giving their lives up for freedom. Some have resisted in the past with less popular support, but there has always been resistance. Libya, throughout the entirety of Qaddafi's rule has produced artists willing to take on Qaddafi's tyranny. On March 1, 2011 Jeffery Brown from "Art Beat" interviewed Libyan born poet Khaled Mattawa. Part of the interview addressed the role of poetry under the Qaddafi regime:

JEFFREY BROWN: I was going to ask you about the role of literature and poetry in a regime like that.

KHALED MATTAWA: Well, they basically put a generation of writers and poets who were in their 20s in the late '70s, they put them in jail. Whole generation of them who were in their 20s, they got out of jail in their late 30s. They tried to promote their own poets; they never got any measure of poets to work for them. The compromise they made with some writers was to guarantee them some degree of independence, to write about subjects that are far away from the current situation. Whether it is about the desert, or about relationships-- just stay away from realism in the real sense. Basically writers were imprisoned for most of the '80s. When they started getting out, they began to publish. The '90s in poetry is the generation of symbolic poetry. Clearly the poetry was unhappy, but it never got very specific. By the 2000s, people could write about the time when they were in prison, just dating the poem and the place of it, written in 1981 in such and such prison. Putting that as a tag in the bottom of poem was a revolutionary thing, because it had never happened to Libya before.

Here is a poem Mattawa wrote:

Ecclesiastes

The trick is that you're willing to help them.
The rule is to sound like you’re doing them a favor.

The rule is to create a commission system.
The trick is to get their number.

The trick is to make it personal:
No one in the world suffers like you.

The trick is that you’re providing a service.
The rule is to keep the conversation going.

The rule is their parents were foolish,
their children are greedy or insane.

The rule is to make them feel they've come too late.
The trick is that you're willing to make exceptions.

The rule is to assume their parents abused them.
The trick is to sound like the one teacher they loved.

And when they say "too much,"
give them a plan.

And when they say "anger" or "rage" or "love,"
say "give me an example."

The rule is everyone is a gypsy now.
Everyone is searching for his tribe.

The rule is you don't care if they ever find it.
The trick is that they feel they can.