Beirut: Much like the Lebanese, who butchered each other at will for 15 long years and who then embarked on perpetual deal-making to manage their affairs, Syrians are awakening to their own unending wars, anxious to stop the violence and take back their country from domestic, regional, and international actors eager to settle differences in foreign killing fields.
The statistics are dizzying. In the words of Maha Yahya, a senior associate at the Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut and who presided on Tuesday over a timely seminar on Syria, more than 200,000 have been killed since 2011, while 6 million have been internally displaced. At least 3 million are lingering in neighbouring countries and nearly 11 million are in desperate need of humanitarian assistance to survive. Many believe that there are no military solutions to the wars under way, though most disagree on the price to pay for peace, immersed in both lucrative business affairs and perpetual political negotiations, that take on a life of their own. Pessimists conclude that Syria is now condemned to at least two or three generations of stalemate, caught between a regional balance of power games, and the rise of extremists determined to alter the existing nation-state system. Optimists are persuaded that Syrians can and will take their country back, because the space freed by the state to run local affairs — ranging from schools to clinics — that were almost always denied them, can hold on to these gains and never surrender them.
Peace possible
While media attention focuses on battlefield developments, civil society initiatives have gained momentum, even if few discuss them. Syrian organisations like Madani, the Day After Association, and others aim to focus on the potential roles that civil society can and ought to play in the future. The results of one in-depth investigation, titled Hungry for Peace: Positives and Pitfalls of Local Truces and Ceasefires in Syria, were revealing indeed. For its lead author, Rim Turkmani, an astrophysicist and the founder of Madani, a UK-based based NGO that promoted the role of Syrian civil society in state-building, peace was indeed possible even if many benefited from the war too.
Remarkably, this detailed academic product highlights how local negotiations across the country between October 2011 and the present time, produced beneficial results. Based on field research inside the country in 35 locations, supplemented by 45 interviews with civil society and political actors across conflict lines, it illustrated the many changes in several cities — Homs, the Damascus countryside, Ras Al‘Ayn that allowed citizens to “manage” their affairs. How the provision of electricity services in Deraa or Aleppo were negotiated by local officials, for example, showed the way to broker sustainable agreements and, in moments of sheer delight, allow people to live.
Omar Hallaj, the former CEO of the Syria Trust for Development, and currently a visiting assistant professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Design at the American University of Beirut, praised these local initiatives, but challenged his fellow countrymen to take stock of how daunting the task will be when the fighting stops. In addition to the 200,000 killed in the war, Hallaj affirmed that at least another 300,000 Syrians have died since 2012, because they did not receive the medical care they would have under normal circumstances. He weighed the consequence of nearly 40 per cent of all school-aged children who were now left without any schooling, and blamed both the regime as well as the opposition(s) for narrower preoccupations.
Increasingly, Syrian intellectual voices believed that while it may be accurate to conclude that belligerents are indifferent to the suffering of the masses, those who were under the impression that any control of the war and peace process granted them control over Syria, may indeed be delusional. One alternative to such narratives may well be available at the local level, where real survival concerns dominate all interests, although social cohesion and accountability would still need to be incorporated into any dialogue or peace efforts. In time, the political will to end war will gain momentum and Syria will, once again, return to a peace economy though it may be useful to ask why wily Levantines allowed their country to be so hijacked?
