After yesterday‘s demonstration I became the chance to get in a deeper conversation about the complexity of the situation in Syria with a young woman from Homs whose identity I will keep secret as a matter of protection especially for her family members still living inside the country.
She explained me her impressions of the growing resistance against the regime before she left Homs some months after the beginning of the uprising. It was exactly in that time when the people of Daraa where all started were complaining about the inactivity of the Homsees after the first massacres the regime had committed to suppress the spark of Arab Spring which had flown over the Tunisian, the Egyptian, the Yemeni and the Libyan borders.
Homs accused of not joining the revolution? I asked, searching in my memory the mentioned period. Admittedly, I was confused in that moment. The same Homs which is now the symbolic hotspot of the brutal regime crackdown and the truly amazing resistance combined with iron will and outstanding resilience?
It seems we tend to neglect some crucial facts in our own analysis of the ongoings and that is nearer regarded also kind of natural because of the amount of informations we are confronted with day by day. But she remembered me with her explanations of her own experiences that Homs began to participate the revolution not from the original start.
So why is this detail becoming important? Very simple: it were the Homsees accusing the Halabis not taking enough action in solidarity after the massive erection of security checkpoints in the city and the first heavy wave of random shelling in Inshaat, Bab Sbaa and Baba Amr. In the meantime the people of Aleppo are also organizing demonstrations and facing an increasing presence of army and security forces but it is not compatible with the huge rallies we all witnessed last year in Hama for example. The pessimists among us still take that as a main argument for Aleppo being different than the rest of Syria and I am not in the position to second or to disprove that but my inner voice says me that the freedom movement is more like a tide than an eruption and that it is only a matter of time when this tide is reaching Syria‘s second biggest city in a form it reached the other parts of the country.
She described me how they arranged in Homs in the beginning the first small demonstrations to overcome the implemented fear and to show solidarity with and compassion for their fellows doing the same in the other cities. It seemed that they slowly began to realize the dimensions of the uprising combined with the historic chance to start something like that.
This is one of the traps of our perception as bystanders: glorifying a revolution as eruptive.
Most of all in the case of Syria it is the previously mentioned tide floating through the people‘s minds. Compatible with a coat everyone is wearing because the regime wants them. Then hearing from fellows who pulled off their coats and being killed for that reason without warning. Or escaping the regime attacks living a new coatless life called freedom and spreading the news of their essential change. Sooner or later everyone feels confronted with the consideration to pull of their own coat - and the possible price they might pay for it. From that moment on the own consciousness becomes the chance to switch. This tide is a hundred times more effective for a real revolution than our imagination of a society pulling off their coats all together in one moment. Because it is is more an illusion or in the best case a unique event in human history.
The demystification of the revolutionary moment is a necessary step to withstand the classical arguments of being too idealistic, too much utopist or simply too naive. The understanding of the process per se requires to switch from the intuition to the intellect, from the belly to the brain, to discover the mechanism or revolutionary resistance and to act or to support it the successful way.
During our intensive talks we reached the general topic of systematical surveillance. She shared with me her experiences she made giving the example of a taxi driver more or less openly interrogating her during a ride through Homs. It might sound like a clichee but the taxi drivers are perfectly predestined to work as regime or secret service informants embedding objective questions in their smalltalk with the clients. I insisted that it could be possible to lead a rhetorical counterstrike by turning their own questions back to them but she explained me that many of them are trained not to let that happen telling about their own ,point of view‘ that the regime is not doing everything right, that they make some mistakes, that their decisions aren‘t the best or the wisest. But they would never use harsh words or clear comments characterizing them as true dissidents. Those informants - many of them in proforma positions but doing nothing than collecting informations about the citizens - might well become an evident challenge for the common society of a post-Assad Syria. As a comparison: the iron curtain which divided Germany into a Western and an Eastern part fell down in relation very quickly but managing the former GDR‘s Staatssicherheit secret service and its‘ network of ,inofficial employees‘ isn‘t finished after more than 22 years. Of course the East Germans have turned in the meantime from an informants‘ society to an informational society but there are still a lot of unanswered questions about the role some had played in the Honecker regime. And a maybe never to be defined percentage of them might coming through without getting ever discovered.
Finally we spoke about two dangerous attitudes which are responsible for the vicious circle of violence in general - hate and revenge. The reasons for the hate exposed mainly by the shabeeha in Syria seems hard if not impossible to explain. Collective punishment bears always any understandable explanation given the aspect of justice. The reason it has is to create a similar or the same hate among those being punished leading to revenge acts and feeding the beast of intended violence. Whoever wants to end that dirty game has to create the own ability of forgiveness. Not easy if the other side has murdered one half of the own family including the children but the only way to prevent creating the culprits of tomorrow.
The spark of each revolutionary moment is de facto the favored element of our own memory. And it is important to keep it reminded during the time the whole revolution needs to become successful. But as participants or as supporters of the desired paradigm shift we have to avoid the trap of glorification or we are risking to become pressed to the edge of those defending the old status quo to maintain the power of the unloved system. We want to overcome them? Then we need our abilities of rational perception to shatter the arguments of our counterparts and not to fail because of being too idealistic in our own words and deeds.
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