You wonder whether, after close to five years of bloodletting and unspeakable human suffering, an equitable settlement of the conflict in Syria will ever be reached anytime real soon. But you also wonder whether there will be any Syrians left in the country to benefit from such a mythical settlement should it be reached.
Let’s face it. After those five years of reading almost daily news reports about atrocities in that tormented land — some truly beyond all rational understanding — we have become inured to the inhuman, nonchalant about the figures, detached from the images.
One need not invoke American foot-dragging, Russian duplicity and regime ambitions in Syria, a frustrating enterprise indeed, but rather the stark facts on the ground, facts that bespeak of a human calamity not matched by any other since the Second World War: A quarter million killed, 12 million exiled (half internally displaced) 13 million seeking aid. In short, a once middle class-income country has collapsed into one in which 80 per cent of its people, to use UN lingo, are “in need”, a people now broken in back and spirit, embodying the epic of the displaced community, forced to wander the face of the earth in search of sanctuary.
Add to all that, add those others who have died indirectly through privation, disease, inadequate health care, unsanitary conditions, unattended wounds and, yes, starvation.
In host states in the surrounding countries, where survivors of this war have sought refuge, the law prevents them from seeking employment, “whether paid or unpaid”. Resentment against them by the locals has contributed further to these deracinated souls’ sense of existential hopelessness. And their children are denied the hope that education provides, for the majority of them do not attend school, either because the parents can’t afford the tuition or because they are needed to work as child labourers to help their families survive
All of which is contributing to the emergence of a lost generation of Syrians destined to remain illiterate — a dreadful crime to inflict on a human being, for where there is illiteracy there is economic destitution and social backwardness. No wonder then that Syrian refugees are pouring across borders, waiting for that right moment when the paths are open and the seas are calm, to seek asylum in Europe.
Yawn, yawn, you say, we know all these facts. Why repeat them on this page again and risk sounding like a broken record? But that’s the point, you see? They need repetition.
Syria’s tragedy concerns all of us. In this context, United States President Barack Obama insisted recently that the brutality that the Bashar Al Assad regime has unleashed against his people, ever since the outset of the war, “is not just a matter of one nation’s internal affairs, for it breeds human suffering on an order of magnitude that affects us all”. It is that human suffering, I say, that we have become inured to. And to that extent, we and the perpetrators of the ubiquitous violence in Syria have, in a weird dialectic, slipped into the same garb and glove.
The perpetrators — whether they are dropping barrel bombs from the air-conditioned cockpits of their fighter jets on civilians, or planning their surrender-or-starve strategy in besieged Madaya or Yarmouk — after a while become blaze about the callousness of their acts. With their conscience repressed and their morals set aside, they become accustomed to the idea of atrocity as a norm, and they cease to feel guilt. The exercise of evil becomes routinised or, as Hannah Arendt called it, “banal”. The second time you kill is easier than the first, the seventh easier than the sixth and the tenth is, well, a breeze.
It is axiomatic among social psychologists that perpetrators of war crimes often experience distress, even remorse, in carrying out their initial atrocity — after all, we are all born a clean slate, sharing each others’ humanity, only to become increasingly desensitised to those atrocities over time. Indeed, some come to enjoy it. In December 1937, for example, the Japanese Army swept into the ancient city of Nanking, then capital of China, and systematically raped, tortured and murdered 300,000 civilians. Iris Chang, the Chinese American scholar, in her book, The Rape of Nanking, claims that eyewitness reports attest to how Japanese perpetrators showed clear evidence of enjoying the grisly excesses.
But what is even more shocking than this is that those of us, who are from that part of the world that Syrians call home, imbued with moral rectitude and with a compass about what is right and wrong, rob ourselves of all that is human in our humanity when, as we repetitively read about that evil, become desensitised too.
The suffering of a refugee, any refugee (and this columnist should know, having been as a child part of the 1948 Palestinian refugee exodus) contains an element of private agony to which an outsider has little access. Just as, say, a life-long ideologue, for whom the workings of history has turned his ideology upside down, is in danger of losing his reason, in like manner, a man who has lost his country is equally in danger of experiencing a collapse in his communal sense of reference. I do not know of a more grievous calamity whose victims are in need of succour.
Last week, that succour came. As instructed by five world powers, the United Nations “hoped” to start sending “80 trucks” to deliver food and medicine to starving and sick Syrians.
What more can 12 million displaced Syrians ask for? Why get impatient? Where is the urgency here?
Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.
