In Damascus nine months after the Revolution

The people's revolution in Syria, directed against sixty years of pitch-black tyranny and a regime that did not shrink from carrying out a systematic and prolonged genocide against its own people, has now passed its ninth month. The revolutionaries, who for a full 14 years strove with willpower, discipline and dignity to deliver their country from this frenzied gang structure, are now trying to fulfill all the requirements of being a state in the sense that the duty demands.

For 5-6 years in Idlib, the revolutionaries gained experience in providing, in a manner suited to their own country, all the economic, humanitarian and security services of nearly 5 million people who had come from every part of the country and taken refuge there. Now they are trying to run, with all its institutions, a state that is internationally recognized and has legitimacy in the eyes of its entire people. The sense of responsibility they bear and display toward the duties they have undertaken is certainly a state ethic and responsibility with which Syria's present generations have never been acquainted until now. A people who were deprived of both the meaning and the practice of freedom and of being a nation under sixty years of gang domination are now experiencing, for the first time, the difference of encountering a state actor that shows them compassion and regards every individual of the country as a part of itself.

PEOPLE NOW HAVE A STATE THEY CALL "OURS"

On one occasion our path leads again to Damascus, which we have visited several times since the revolution. This is the first thing we feel in the attitudes and conversations of the people we meet in the avenues, streets, restaurants and mosques. People now have a state they call "ours": a state that does not humiliate them, that does not suddenly descend on their property by night or by day, whose taking of all or some of a family's members to unknown places and abandoning them there is not feared, and that does not, through fear of the Mukhabarat, push brother into distrust of brother. Many people say they did not believe such an experience could become real in this country, and that they still find it hard to believe what is being lived.

Bashar al-Assad, whose very name they were afraid to whisper until yesterday and whose portraits hung in every workplace and on every street corner, can now be found embroidered as a caricature on the soles of socks. In the Hamidiyah Souk, street vendors sell these socks alongside free Syrian flags. One of them asks mischievously: can we pray while these socks are on our feet? The issue is not that a human image is present on the body during prayer, but whether the impurity of this image would break the purity (tahara) that is a condition of prayer. For a dictator who imagined himself eternal, this is of course a tragic end; but from the standpoint of humanity and of truth it is a lesson to be heeded, and for the oppressed it is naturally a consoling situation.

WE WERE SUPPOSED TO NEVER FORGET THE GENOCIDE SO THAT IT WOULD NOT BE REPEATED

While still under the influence of these lessons, we learn that a mass grave holding the remains of about 100 people has been identified in the Ateybe area of Damascus, and we pass through another gate of lessons, about how even within 9 months things can be forgotten. This gate, unfortunately, also tells us of a condition into which people very frequently fall. Alija Izetbegovic used to say that a forgotten genocide is repeated. Since he said those words, how many genocides have we witnessed, right before the eyes of the world, and today we are witnessing one in Gaza. Even a genocide whose every detail unfolds instantly before people's eyes is not enough to awaken people or to remind them of their neglect of other genocides.

The Sednaya images, which fell like a bomb onto the world's agenda in the days when Damascus was brought under the control of its own sons, had also laid bare the real truth behind the events in Syria that for 14 years looked from afar like a civil war. Of course there were no equally matched forces fighting each other. There was a despot who carried out massacres against his own people with the most savage and inhuman emotions, in spite, hatred and pleasure. Against him there was an uprising by a people who had not given up their humanity and had no intention of giving it up, against this inhuman power. The super-sadistic practices in Sednaya showed, for a brief time, that this power was a threat not only to the Syrian people but to all humanity.

We say "for a brief time" because afterwards it was as if humanity, having woken up, turned over onto its other side and went on sleeping. Today a significant portion of the so-called international community, which tries to display great sensitivity toward the Syrian administration on the so-called "minority rights" issue, does not even remember the fact that Assad, as a "minority," ignored the rights of the great majority of society for 54 years. They behave as if more than 1 million people from the Sunni segment, which makes up the majority of society, had not been brutally massacred by this "minority" rule; as if at least 150 thousand had not disappeared after being arrested, and been destroyed in the dungeons of Sednaya, Palmyra, Aleppo and Homs; as if 12 million people had not been driven from their homes and homelands, the houses they lived in demolished over their heads, and their cities left without one stone upon another.

IF THOSE WHO DID NOT STIR WHILE THE MAJORITY WAS BEING MASSACRED NOW KEEP INSISTING ON "MINORITIES"...

Those who made no sound when the rights of the majority were slaughtered in this way by a minority are now, as if none of this had ever happened or been lived, as if a new order were being established on its own, in a flurry over how the rights of minorities will be protected here.

Jihad Makdissi, who, while serving as Spokesman of the Syrian Foreign Ministry, left the regime saying he could not be a partner to the massacres Assad inflicted on his people, and began to live in the USA, expressed this contradiction in very striking words in an interview he gave just before the revolution: "Today the number of victims the Sunni majority has given against the minority regime is far greater than the number of all the minorities in Syria who stir humanist feelings."

The minorities that Makdissi, himself a Christian, meant are today the Druze, Nusayris, Kurds and even Christians, who of course enjoy the entirely self-interested and ill-intentioned patronage of the USA and Israel. Makdissi, as a Christian, said that they had never in history been subjected to oppression by the Sunni majority, and that the fact that they had managed to protect themselves until now was proof of this. Yet under the Baath regime, and especially in the time of the father-and-son Assads, no minority other than the Nusayris was left with even a trace of the feeling of living in their own country.

In these days when Syria has begun to be shaped again by its own sons, the most obvious sight is that the Islamic and historical heritage to which those who have taken over the administration are bound does not permit them to oppress minorities, but on the contrary gives them the feeling that they have inherited the trust of all people. Despite all the oppression, all the massacres and the vindictive treatment that was endured, history repeats itself today with those who have handed over the administration. The truth is that minorities, including those who were made instruments of this oppression, are today, after a century, again receiving the kind of treatment in which they feel safest. But the very moment this security is provided, the fact that certain Western powers now step in under the pretext of "minority rights" presents the most vivid example of hypocrisy and shamelessness.

No one can of course claim that the minority sensitivity that has stepped in through the Druze in Suwayda in the south, through the Nusayris in Latakia on the western coast, and through the Kurds east of the Euphrates is a sensitivity that cares about people's human rights and dignity in Syria. Moreover, the bones of those they claim to be sensitive about are still surfacing from the soil.

We will continue to convey our impressions of Syria.