Not too late for shame

Why don’t we talk more about civil society in Syria?

A cursory search of “Syria” in Google News will produce a plethora of articles and papers about the intentions, interests, and actions of foreign powers, military groups, radical militias, and the Syrian government. In common discussion both among the policy community and the greater American public, the civil conflict in Syria is almost exclusively seen through the lens of great-power politics. There are many reasons for this:

• As Americans, we care about what our government does abroad, and consider crises with this in mind.
• It is natural when analyzing conflicts to focus on the main actors, i.e. states and military groups.
• Larger social organizations like governments and militias use press releases, a strong online presence, and propaganda to gain visibility abroad.
• Small, local organizations, or disorganized civil society are harder to place in the public eye.

The adage that “one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic” still holds. The media industry can only run so many horror stories of bombed civilians, destroyed hospitals, or sniped children before the general public shouts “enough,” and switches off. There is comfort in ignorance. Tragedy only sells in small quantities.

It has become easy to see the Syrian civil conflict as a giant game of chess between half a dozen actors and to forget the millions of lives that have been impacted by the war. Netanyahu’s latest outburst or Trump’s mood today can begin to matter more than the fifty civilians massacred in the latest Russian airstrike. It is easy, when presented with such a deluge of information and traumatic events, to filter out the bloody noise of individual annihilation and stick to the clean, sanitary puppet show of great-power politics.

For me, the bubble burst on July 13, when the Middle East Institute welcomed Syrian journalist and civil activist Raed Fares to speak at a roundtable about the state of civil society in northwestern Syria. Fares, who has survived multiple assassination attempts by ISIS and Jabat al-Nusra, founded the Union of Revolutionary Bureaus (URB) in the city of Kafranbel, located in the northern region of Idlib. Their main activity is running the FM radio station Radio Fresh, as well as overseeing women centers and other civil society endeavors around the city.

What struck home the hardest while listening to Fares is the realization of how dissociated I had become from the pain and horror of individual people living and fighting in Syria. Some might say that is for the best: emotion and objectivity don’t mix well. Good research doesn’t come from the heart.

Phasing out emotion, however, as well as concentrating on objective, feasible policy-making, can make us forget about the true victims of the Syrian civil war. National interests may take precedence over foreign lives in the minds of many, but that doesn’t mean that local casualties and damage should stop mattering. This civil war will end someday. Many would argue it is already over. The process of reconstruction is just around the corner. The state of civil society matters.

This is especially the case in Idlib. Fares is currently visiting the United States to try to rescue funding for his organization cut by the Trump administration, without which he will likely have to shut down the URB. He warned that the disappearance of secular, democracy-promoting organisms such as the URB directly profits jihadi groups such as HTS and al-Qaeda, who become the default service providers and political mouthpieces for a tired and frustrated population.

A journalist told me that Syria stories consistently are the least-read media pieces. Americans are tired of hearing about Syria. After seven years of the same-old, depressing stories coming out of the country, they apparently would rather hear about almost anything else.

The consequence, according to Fares, is a fairly similar conclusion in Syria, albeit for wildly different reasons. After seven years of blood, seven years of bombs, seven years of poverty and misery, the Syrian people are ready for the conflict to be over, regardless of who wins. They just want something resembling stability and normalcy. Currently, only Bashar al-Assad can provide this.

If anything, this is the most significant sign that Assad has won. In the territories currently or soon to be under his control, the appetite for systemic change and popular upheaval has been utterly annihilated, leaving a despot who massacres his own people as their only hope for proximate relief. Who can blame them? This is just a symbol of the moral failure reached by the international community when it comes to the Syrian people.

The policy community and the greater public need to acknowledge and focus on the plight of Syrians. Forgetting about the Syrian people is counter-productive. Stabilization is the current buzzword when it comes to Syria, and it cannot occur without the help and interest of the local population. Neither can peace-building and reconstruction, whether or not the American government is involved. Policy think-tanks and media outlets need to make a greater effort to broadcast the voices of the Syrian population, and to make sure that their hopes and needs are part of the conversation surrounding their future.

Not only is shutting out the Syrian people counter-productive, it is also wrong. Justice and morality might seem like privileges that can wait for stability and security to be restored. Local populations, however, don’t forget past injustices easily. The Syrian people, and the greater Arab world, will remember how we treated them at their hour of greatest need. It is probably already too late for redemption. It is not, however, too late for shame.