May 16, 2011 6:00 AM

Justice delayed is justice in Syria

The volatile political situation in Syria these days has set me to thinking a lot about my own experience there. Being an amateur historian, I’ve always found myself drawn to the idea of people struggling for freedom and the right to make a better life for themselves. Repressive regimes like Albania, the USSR, and Cuba, just to name a few, have always fascinated me. The common denominator for me has always been struggle- people wanting a better life and a voice. Among the things I’ve learned from my travels is that, while culture and language may differ, humans at our most basic are really very much the same. We all want to be happy, safe, and to be able to provide for and protect our families while we pursue our dreams and aspirations…and so it is in Syria today.

It was 1984, and I was teaching at a private school on the island of Cyprus. Over spring break, I was part of a group that traveled to Jordan and Syria for a few days. Jordan was beautiful, and I enjoyed my time there, but the trip to and through Syria has really stuck with me over the years. Perhaps it was because it was my first real experience with a police state…and Syria was at that time an almost hermetically sealed and tightly controlled country.

We took a bus trip from Damascus to the northern city of Aleppo. On the way, we made a stop in Hama, a city little known to the outside world (and really only for its famous Roman water wheel. Unbeknownst to most in my group was that Hama represented a particularly dark and terrible chapter in Syria’s very recent history. In 1982, the Syrian Army, aiming to quell a Sunni revolt against the regime of Hafez al-Assad, went to war against the people of Hama. In what is widely believed to be the single deadliest act committed by an Arab government against it’s own people, the Syrian Army over the course of three weeks conducted a devastating air and ground campaign against the residents of Hama. Estimates of civilian deaths vary, from the Syrian government’s self-serving 1,000 to more objective estimates ranging from 7,000 to 40,000. Given the brutally repressive nature of the Assad regime, an accurate count of Syrian civilian deaths is next to impossible.

The genocide in Hama occurred eight months before the Sabra and Shatile Massacre in Beirut, which was widely chronicled and reported by the international pres. Hama, though, remains largely unknown except to those of us with an interest in Syria. The only reason I knew about the massacre before going to Syria is that I came across it in my research prior to making the trip.

As I exited the bus at the stop in Hama, I could sense something that I could only describe as very, very bad and uncomfortable. Though we were limited to the area around Hama’s Roman water wheel, where nothing seemed amiss, I knew enough of the massacre two years earlier to be aware of a very malevolent energy. I suppose a self-aware person doesn’t blithely inhabit a space where something like 40,000 innocents were massacred without sensing an abundance of negative energy. I’ve been to Jasenovac in Croatia, and even at the former WWII concentration camp there I didn’t sense that malevolence and evil I did while I was in Hama. The serenity of the Roman water wheel on a beautiful, warm Spring day seemed a jarring counterpoint to what I felt as I sat at an outdoor cafe. Trying to process the uneasiness I felt at being in a place where so much violence and death had been visited upon the city so recently was something that felt beyond my capability and understanding. Having grown up in a place where my definition of violence was a snowball fight, the idea of a government killing up to 40,000 of their countrymen was more than I could get my head around.

Given what’s happening inside Syria these days, I’ve found myself reflecting more on my time there. The passage of time, while it’s given me a wider perspective, has not increased my ability to rationalize genocide. In 1982, of course, it was much easier for the Syrian government to hide the brutal repression of their own subjects from the outside world. Newspapers were heavily censored, and TVs were modified so that they could receive only Syrian state television. Reporters, if they were allowed into the country at all, were heavily monitored, and what little information was allowed out of the country was massaged and censored to the point of being virtually meaningless.

In 2011, things are a fair bit different. Cell phones, the Internet, and social media has made it virtually impossible for governments to monitor and choke off the flow of news and information. One need look no further than Tunisia and Egypt to see what an interconnected world can do for the pursuit of freedom and democracy. Bashir al-Assad, the son of the dictator responsible for the 1982 massacre in Hama now finds himself confronting a much different adversary, one with a much tighter connection to the outside world. Though al-Assad the younger appears to be on the verge of resorting to the same slash-and-burn tactics that served his father so well in Hama, the ensuing 29 years have seen the world change. No longer can a despot indifferent to human life unquestioningly rule Syria with an iron fist. Things are different now, and blood that was shed in Hama with little fanfare will not escape notice today. It’s a different world, one not nearly so friendly to despots and dictators…and, though Bashir al-Assad may be loathe to admit it, history is no longer on the side of repression and genocide.

I believe the question is no longer IF, but WHEN the Syrian dictatorship will fall. A despot like Bashir al-Assad simply can no longer compete in a world in which Twitter and Facebook can organize, instigate, and inform at a moment’s notice. Perhaps it’s time that those murdered in Hama in 1982 finally received their measure of justice.

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on May 16, 2011 6:00 AM.

Nuclear power: Our energy future, built on denial, incompetence, and inept regulation was the previous entry in this blog.

Something to think about after we finish with the chest-thumping is the next entry in this blog.

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