SYRIA

Since writing this piece last week, a lot has taken place in Syria. There has been more bloodshed, more fighting, more deaths. What marks this war (the activitsts not wishing to be on the same footing as the government forces, are against the use of 'civil war' in this case, although as French foreign minister has lately asserted it very much falls into that category) is the indiscriminate targetting of civilians many of whom are women and children. Words are inadequate in the expression of the horror that has many parts of Syria in its grip; yet, I hope that the international community will begin to take serious measures in line with staunching the ongoing violence in that country...

Knock, Knock, Knock… Let Us Open the Window to the Horror, the Horror in Syria:

« Péris si tu veux, je suis en sureté »

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

It was reported on May 30 that since the start of the Syrian uprising last March over fourteen thousand people have been killed including more than eight hundred women and over one thousand children. In fact, one of the hallmarks of the Syrian violence has been the senseless massacre of children. While a great deal is being reported on the horrendous scale of the bloodshed in Syria, one cannot but feel disillusioned with humanity in its failure to respond to the latest cycle of violence which has engulfed major parts of a land formerly referred to Levant evoking the French term ‘lever’. Risen up it has and that in the face of leaders whose primary concern at the height of the killings is the online shopping of luxury items such as Ming Luce vases and Pistil candlesticks. However, it is hoped that the recent massacre in Qubair characterized by the high number of women and children among its victims may galvanize the international community into concrete action. This latest discovery of bodies marking the destruction of entire village (including its livestock, as reported by BBC’s Paul Danahar) follows the massacre of over one hundred people including forty-nine children, thirty-two of whom were under the age of ten in Houla, an area close to Homs.

How many more innocent lives have to be perished for the world to ‘rise up’? Jean-Jacques Rousseau posits : « A murder may with impunity be committed under his window [and the philosopher] has only to put his hands to his ears and argue a little with himself, to prevent nature, which is shocked within him, from identifying itself with the unfortunate sufferer ». Significantly, it was the lack of windows in a particular compound that drew a number of the victims of the Houla massacre to use it as a refuge Although Azzawi believes that if there had been windows, perhaps, the victims’ cries for help would have been heard and heeded, in view of the on-the-fence stance adopted by the international community towards Syria, one may wonder as to how things could have been any different for those victims if there had been an orifice in the wall or if any of those apertures could have translated into an overture to concrete action. True that monitors on the ground including chief UN observer, Robert Mood have expressed their anguish over the scale and modus operandi of the latest attacks; yet, gone are the days of Donne, when, along with the great Metaphysical poet, we could have said « any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind ».

The amour-propre that Rousseau alludes to in his discourses, is a negative product of civilization, an unnatural self-love that leads to the prioritization of the self at the cost of the denigration, if not annihilation, of the Other. And it is an amour-propre that has us in its grip once again as we close our windows and block our ears to the sights and sounds of the horror that pervade across a land, which true to its appellation, has risen up to demand its basic rights.

On May 29, The Telegraph quoted Abu Jawfer, a Syrian rescuer in Houla as saying: « For hours I heard the screams of women and three times of children, and always gunshots. Then the voices stopped. The silence was the most terrible thing». That silence as the first-person protagonist of Albert Camus’s La Chute, Clamence demonstrates can be interminable and haunt us for years, just as it did this not too clement character who had ignored the desperate cries for help of a young woman whom he had sighted on Pont Royal. Similarly, the protagonist of The Heart of Darkness, Charlie Marlowe finds himself in Europe only to discover that even in the West he can hear the reverberation of the onomatopoeic word uttered by the colonialist Kurtz towards the end of his life in the heart of the ‘dark continent’: « horror ».

As token measures are taken in condemnation of the horror in Syria, there seems to be a glimmer of hope that the amour-propre manifest in governments who wish to keep the status quo in place for the sake of their vested diplomatic interests in the region is being replaced by an amour de soi, in the form of a love for a self which extends beyond one’s bodily confines to include the entire human race. The world cannot afford another episode of guilt-ridden silence, neither can it afford another Rwanda, another Serbenica… another ‘knocking at the gates’ of home.