The people of East Ghouta in Syria are stacking up the corpses, though in smaller piles than their counterparts in Aleppo had done in December 2016, after a four-year siege marked by large-scale devastation and widespread violence against civilians, which led commentators to call it “Syria’s Stalingrad”.
As during the siege of Aleppo then, so it was during last week during the siege of East Ghouta, which highlighted how unendurably slow the international community’s proceedings can be at conflict resolution. Compounding the malevolence of its role in Syria, for example, Russia forced delay after delay on a vote by the Security Council calling for a ceasefire, as its United Nations ambassador haggled behind closed doors over the final text of the resolution and “argued over commas”. Meanwhile, over Ghouta, warplanes bombed civilians in their hospitals, schools, marketplaces, and homes.
In an emotional appeal, Mark Lowcock, the UN official for humanitarian affairs, addressed members of the Security Council before it finally mandated a 30-day ceasefire last Saturday. “Your obligations under humanitarian law are just that, binding obligations”, he said in a video-conference from Geneva. They are not favours to be traded in a game of death and destruction. Humanitarian access [to Ghouta] is not a nice-to-have. It is a legal requirement.
The image is of a people doomed to permanent purgatory, exposed to the murderousness and caprice of the inhuman.
We are left here with one question: Why? Why have the leaders of the Syrian regime, helped along by Russian military muscle in the air and equally critical Iranian military muscle on the ground, chosen to project such unspeakable cruelty against their own — their very own — people? Is there something pathological in the constitution of the totalitarian mind — and make no mistake about the fact that those folks who run that regime in Damascus are of a totalitarian bent of mind — that enables it to see all this suffering as a mere passing moment in the rational design of history’s dialectic?
And recall here, before you hazard an answer, how cheaply Joseph Stalin, the totalitarian Soviet leader behind the horrors of the Gulag, where roughly three million Russians were worked or starved to death, viewed human life. “A single death is a tragedy,” he once said. “[whereas] a million deaths is a statistic.”.
There is a precedent in Syria for the current mayhem, which began in March 2011 with demonstrators peacefully calling for reform in government and a more equitable social contract between ruler and ruled. That precedent was set in February 1982 when, under orders of the then Syrian president, Hafez Al Assad (the current president’s father) put the town of Hama, in west-central Syria, under siege for 27 days in order to quell an uprising that resulted in the massacre of between 20,000 and 40,000 people and the destruction of large parts of the city.
There is something wrong with a regime, I say, that requires a pyramid of corpses every now and again to sustain its hold on power.
Totalitarian leaders
Totalitarian leaders, such as those in Syria, rely on coercion, terror and violence to rule, and demand from their citizens absolute uniformity, orthodoxy and obedience. Thus the message from totalitarian leaders to recalcitrant citizens is this: Ask for political change at peril of death. No way out, around or through that. A call for reform is of a piece with terrorism. When you identify individuals with adversarial voices in society — individuals who ask us, as George Orwell put it, to “imagine a boot stamping on your head, forever” and to contemplate an alternative — as terrorists, then it is easy for you to legitimise acts of violence against them, to put them beyond the pale, to abolish moral restraints against killing them, and to appropriate for yourself the right to vent your rage against them. And collateral damage to civilians here is part of the equation.
Recall how It all started, seven years ago, with the Syrian regime ferociously lunging at its own citizens, tooth and nail, in order to avenge a trivial piece of nastiness on their part: They called for a better quality of life. But that is the nature of totalitarianism, and what lies at that political system’s core — intolerance for dissent and unabashed cruelty alongside an inescapable sense of triviality and dissimulation.
Meanwhile, if you believe history is dialectical, you will be tempted to believe, as I do, that those unspeakable seven years of suffering, destitution and death will in time help give rise to their antithesis. I am convinced that though the Syrian people have been punished far in excess of their guilt, in the very excess of that suffering lies their claim to dignity, having become, as it were, ennobled by the vengeful spite of the regime. The day will come. As it is said in our Holy Book, “After grief comes relief.”
Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.
