If misguided Christian religious leaders attempted to portray the 2011 revolution as a conflict that did not concern them, and if they stood by the Baath regime to protect their respective communities from alleged “terrorists,” most of their flocks finally rejected the official propaganda that drowned them in the rhetoric of victimisation so dear to the regime of President Bashar Al Assad. What triggered the transformation and will this radical shift accelerate the fall of the Baath?
Inasmuch as fear, intimidation, bigotry, putative financial gains, and latent racism coloured much of the oratory that was uttered by a few company clerics, Christian civilians were not only perceived as mere victims but became casualties as well. To be sure, some were kidnapped and killed as extremists gained ground, although many more were fodder in the hands of state authorities. Several prelates counselled prudence as they positioned themselves on the side of the powerful with the likes of Greek Orthodox Bishop Louqa Al Khoury or the Syriac priest Gabriel Dawood participating in pro-government demonstrations that supported Bashar Al Assad.
Such mixed messages confused masses, who believed that their leaders rejected the revolution, though most quickly became victims of the dreaded Mukhabarat. Indeed, some Christians were prosecuted, arrested and sometimes executed by revolutionaries, but not because they were Christians. Rather, as was the case with others, they died and continue to perish because they collaborated with the regime, engaged in spying activitiess, or otherwise assisted Damascus.
Christians were also caught between Free Syrian Army and Al Shabiha confrontations, which eliminated any neutrality they professed, and that translated into deaths and mayhem. Of course, and this was worth repeating, such casualties were not the result of belonging to any particular community, for deaths befell on all without discrimination. If churches were destroyed, so were mosques and, it may be safe to write at this stage that many more mosques were razed than chapels and monasteries.
If many Christians were forced to abandon their homes, many more Muslims were in similar situations, as looting was widespread and indiscriminate. If about 200,000 of the estimated 3.5 million Syrian Christians were displaced, it was also critical to note that their forced departures were not related to their religious affiliation, but the evolution of fighting on the ground, especially in Aleppo.
Several million Muslim Syrians became refugees and were also forced out of their homes.
Naturally, Damascus successfully presented its quest for order, as well as its justification on the use of extreme violence during the past two years, as a posse effort to protect Christian communities. The latter were “victims of the revolution,” everyone was told, as the state played its “protection of minorities” song time and again. Yet, and though Christian clerics polarised their communities by labelling revolutionaries “rebels” or “bandits,” such erroneous sentiments were corrected by intellectuals who gradually restored their tarnished reputations as they insisted that Syrian Christians were Syrians first.
Starting in March 2011, Christians questioned church authorities, as they informed the clergy that the uprising was not about a class, community or a particular religion. They insisted on freedom, diversity, respect for life and property, all majestically commended in the Gospels. Most important, intellectual voices cautioned the clergy not to become a tool for the moribund political system that, regrettably, failed to register. Leading political activists intervened to tell the leaders of their communities to desist from regurgitating the state’s arguments.
A 30-years old Jesuit priest, Nibras Chehayed, the ‘poet’ of the revolution on account of his carefully drafted missives against the blatant use of weapons to destroy Syria, was perhaps the most eloquent. He replaced Father Paolo Dall’Oglio, the Italian-born cleric who served at the Mar Mousa monastery for three decades, and who was expelled by the regime in October 2012.
They were not alone. A Canadian-Syrian attorney, Hind Aboud Kabawat, promoted interfaith tolerance and cooperation, while Marie Mamarbachi Seurat, the Syriac faithful whose parents were forced out of Anatolia during the 1915 Armenian massacres and whose erudite Middle East scholar husband, Michel Seurat, was brutally murdered in 1986 (his remains were found in Beirut’s Southern suburbs), fought to restore Christian credibility in the country.
Ayman Abdul Nour, who ran the online news site All4Syria, as well as the popular singer Lina Chamamyan, along with the president of the Syrian National Council, Georges Sabra, all added their voices to the chorus. None has been as eloquent as Michel Kilo, who insisted on his patriotic stances irrespective of faith, and whose eloquence in logic and word remained unparalleled.
As civilians warned priests, bishops and patriarchs against the machinations of the intelligence services, it was gratifying to finally note that, after much soul-searching, a few bold clerics changed their discourse and literally sanctioned members of the clergy whose actions aroused many months of faithful irritation. Those who routinely appeared on official television were asked to end their activities since they did not reflect the positions of the overwhelming majority of Christians who aspired towards a civil society.
Interestingly, the newly elected patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch and all the East, joined the intellectual voices that called for a careful reappraisal. During his first press conference after his appointment in late December 2012, Bishop Yuhanna Yaziji insisted that what happened to Christians happened to all other Syrians and that Syrian Christians were “in the same situation as any”. This was a breath of fresh air.
It illustrated that not all were mesmerised by cheap rhetoric and that a new reading to realities on the ground showed the way for the future.
Dr Joseph A. Kéchichian is the author of Legal and Political Reforms in Saudi Arabia.
