Revolution in the Arab world
It’s not easy to describe exactly how I feel about what’s going on in Syria. It’s like talking about a Surrealist painting where I’m both the artist and the colours; or I might even go so far as to say it’s like seeing my own heart suspended in front of me, and I’m supposed to talk about it somehow, like a scene from some fantasy movie: a beating heart running away as its body chases after it.
In Syria great truths overturn history; they are products of the impossible. Simple and ordinary folk are the stuff of proverbs and epics in demanding their freedom and dignity in the face of the killing machine, and in spite of all the mechanisms of media deception practised by the regime. Here is a new history on which the whole world must concentrate. The people’s revolution has been defined by two pillars that embodied the moral foundation of the intifada: dignity and non-violence. Individual autonomy is the most important human right one can ask for, through a commitment to the culture of life and peace, even when confronted with the barbarism of a military-security killing machine that has been in power for more than 40 years.
Those shouts for freedom and dignity rang out from the most impoverished and marginalised and miserable cities and small towns, before engulfing all of Syria. Despite all the attempts on the part of the regime to force the intifada into the furnace of a civil war and to encourage people to take up arms in order to strangle the essence of the uprising, it remains unable to turn this revolution into a guerilla war fought by the citizens of our united country. A danger looms on the horizon in the form of distractions arising from the regional, Arab and international situations. But the tricks concocted by the regime and implemented by the security apparatus and the shabbiha against the people of our united country have been unmasked.
The real fear now is from the scorched-earth policy pursued by the regime in those cities that have risen up against besiegement and starvation and bombardment, risen up against those who would redirect the intifada away from its moral and nonviolent course in such a way that people would have to take up arms in order to defend themselves. But weapons are the opposite of freedom’s essence.
The heroism displayed by the Syrian people allows me to be optimistic. Their path of resistance makes me ever more certain that this intifada is destined to become a precedent for the whole world. The pure meaning of courage is to stand unarmed and alone in the face of murder and all the firepower that can be mustered by cowardly oppression.
(Translated by Max Weiss.)
Samar Yazbek is a Syrian writer and journalist. In August 2011 she wrote in these pages about her experience of being detained after a demonstration. She is one of the Beirut 39 authors.
This is an excerpt from an interesting article in the Guardian titled, Revolution in the Arab World
Source: simbarusseau
