Writing these lines while I'm located at Hatay province in Southern Turkey. Of Antakya is spreading on the surface that kind of busy normality you expect in an average city. But a closer look and also listening carefully on the streets uncovers the tensions between Sunnis and Alawis.
This afternoon I sat on a bank at the Orontes reflecting that the river runs on its' way down here through Hama's waterwheels when I realized a group of young Alawi Syrians playing with their smartphones. Classical adolescent behavior I thought in that moment. When they jumped up to cross the street direction old city two Sunni women at the sidewalk turned their look off them until they vanished in the traffic. The women's facial expression was speaking a clear language.
It's not open hostility you find here, more a consensus of live-and-let-live. But those small signs you can register tells you a lot about the poisoned atmosphere the regime and his ruthless policy is completely responsible for. Even natives confirmed in talks I had that those tensions are no longer hidden since a few months.
That was exactly one of my crucial questions I had to answer myself by investigating on close location as possible. How real are the chances that after the downfall of the Assad tyranny a together between both Muslim groups will become true? I guess that's also one of the questions the think tanks and officials of the global community are trying to figure out.
Without coloring the future outlook too dark we have to face the fact that those tensions are having to take serious, particularly the longer the regime is playing its' barbaric role. Each new massacre creates new incomprehension, new feelings of rage, in the worst case the poison of hate. Even the desire for revenge is understandable when you try to imagine the feelings of people who've lost their children, their beloved ones, their whole families. Speaking about those feelings is the first necessary step to overcome the risk of realizing them sometimes later. Making the experience of sharing those emotions with other people able to have a certain understanding for that makes it definitely easier to avoid common cruelties and to crackdown the vicious circle of violence.
The world's powerful have failed to prevent the Syrian people from the regime atrocities until now. As disillusioning this is, it's never to late to change a dead end path. In this case by building up trust and faith in a slowly but constantly together growing Syria after Assad. The least the world could do now.
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