NP: Syria, part 5

[jody2.718]

If the war keeps going in Assad’s favor, do you see any sign of this slowing down? Or do you think that this level of repression is likely to be the new norm as the war goes even more in his favor?

Unfortunately, yes. There’s an offensive right now, this weekend, trying to take territory in Idlib, and, while Idlib had become the last bastion of a lot of militant groups, it’s also where several million civilians have taken refuge, including those who fled from other areas that the government took over. So that’s a population that typically went to Idlib to avoid being detained, and, if that territory is retaken, those people risk being detained. More broadly, five million refugees don’t want to go back to Syria when there’s still a danger of being sucked into the system.

I asked a lot of people this question. I said, “Is there any reason to believe that Assad will become, let’s say, more magnanimous in victory? That he would ease up on this?” Everybody who had an experience with this system said that they believe, to the contrary, that the oppression will stay just as tight and that, in fact, the system might come back around to arrest the people that they forgot before.

And, really, one of the things that has the most impact for me is that, just as after the Hama massacre, in 1982, it was forbidden to talk about these massacres. So all this trauma had to go underground. It was repressed both psychologically and politically. It could not be talked about. That buried trauma and anger and unresolved conflict is part of what burst into the open when the 2011 uprising began.

So now we’re talking about something that was much bigger than Hama, and we’re talking about literally millions of Syrians who have a relative who is still missing inside the system and they can’t even talk about it. They can be arrested for even talking about it. And beyond that, there’s evidence that some of the people who have taken what they call reconciliation deals to stay in their homes and be under the government’s control—some of those people end up being arrested anyway.

(Continued)

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