Syrian Refugees and the Earth Household, Part 1.

 

Camp in Lebanon close to the Syrian border. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Author: Elgaard.

By Guest Author Dana Visalli

 

With a Lebanese population of four million, Lebanon is currently hosting over one million Syrian refugees from the violence in Syria that has torn that country apart. I wanted to touch in with the human stories of these people, and so I traveled to Lebanon in hopes of visiting one or more of the refugee camps that have sprung up all over the country.

Most of the camps are humble affairs, taking in from one hundred to one thousand people. The dwellings are typically tent-like structures with large tarps thrown over a wooden frame. Despite the fact that these camps now dot the Lebanese landscape, entry into them is both tightly controlled by the U.N. and not particular safe once you are allowed in, so it was my good fortune to visit two camps and be able to walk around and talk with some of the inhabitants (with the help of a translator).

Both camps that I visited were in the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon. The Al Jaraheya camp was a collection of about 30 wood-framed structures housing about 200 people. A dominant theme of the camp that comes to mind is emptiness. This small, lost world is not lacking in people, but it is empty of any social or cultural context or content. For example we took a tour inside one of the “homes”; there was almost nothing in it. There was a rug on the floor, a small stove (but no fuel) in the middle of an approximately 15 by 15 foot room, and a television; other than that it was just open space. An attached side lean-to had a simple sink, drainboard and a single-burner propane stove.

In a “community center” social area, there was just a small plastic table and four plastic chairs; nothing else. Four pepsis—which of course are devoid of any nutritional content—were brought and placed on the plastic table in this environment that was devoid of any cultural content. The devastation and the deprivation of any form of meaningful existence visited upon them in their home communities in Syria had followed them across the border to Lebanon. There is no work for these people, no books to read, no activities, just overwhelming emptiness in a sterile environment.

Abu Razak, young man of 25, has been in the camp for one and a half years. His village near Homs was razed to the ground by the Syrian government. People in his area were known to be critical of the Assad government; one of their major issues was the mass killing of perhaps 25,000 people in an uprising staged by the Muslim Brotherhood in 1982.

People in the area where this violence took place were deeply traumatized by the event, but they had never been allowed to talk about it; if they did speak publicly, they would likely be arrested by government agents. Abu Razak said his people “were not even allowed to think” for fear of reprisals by the government. (On the other hand, education was free in Syria and Razak dropped out of school after the 8th grade, to his regret now). How was life in the camp? His answer was similar to others I asked, “We are alive thank God, but life in camp is hard.”

Young Selwa (she did not want to give me her name so I told her to just make one up; she laughed and said, ok, call me Selwa) has been in the camp for two and a half years; her home and entire village are also completely destroyed. Who destroyed it, the government or the rebels? She said the responsibility for the destruction was shared between the Assad government and the rebels. Both sides are constantly fighting, and the people are caught in the middle. She is 29 years old with two young children; her husband is stuck in Syria because currently no more Syrians are allowed to cross the border to Lebanon.

Surviving the economics of the camp is challenging. Most camps are on private land, and most landlords charge a month rent for each tent; at Al Jaraheya the rent is $50 a month per tent; multiply that by 30 tents and it seems the landlord is making a tidy sum off of the refugee’s misfortune. There are also charges for electricity and water. There is little work to be had for the refugees, but if the rent isn’t paid in a timely manner, tents and the people in them are removed from the camp. Each person in the camp gets a card for $27 worth of food a month; sometimes people sell this sparse supply of food in order to raise money to pay the rent.

My guide Tarek tells me afterwards that everyone in the camp is against the Syrian government. They are mostly from the poorer strata of Syrian society, who are the ones who often seemed to have felt most neglected by the government, while the more well-to-do people tend to support Assad (certainly not categorically true however).

Dana Visalli is a biologist living in Washington State; he has visited Iraq and Afghanistan often and attempted to visit Damascus in Syria in March of this year. He has essays on Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam at www.methownaturalist.com 

Does nonviolent resistance work? Part 2b

Libyans In Dublin March In Protest Against Gadaffi
Libyans In Dublin March In Protest Against Gadaffi
Photo by William Murphy, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

This is the second of three posts comprising Part II of a series of posts in which Dr. Ian Hansen shares his thoughts on nonviolence.

See also Part 1aPart 1bPart 1cPart 2a and Part2c.

To achieve freedom from dictatorial oppression, what’s the prognosis for just enduring it until it goes out of style from the top?  This does sometimes happen, as it did in Taiwan under Chiang Ching-Kuo; however, Taiwan’s relatively grass-rootless transition to political liberty and democracy is a rare and exceptional case.

In the wake of Syria’s violence, the questions all nonviolent revolutionaries should be prepared to address are

  • how to start a nonviolent mass movement that is unlikely to devolve into a catastrophic civil war far worse than the dictatorship inspiring popular resistance, and
  • how best to deal with intrusions by great powers hoping to bleed one’s country into greater fealty by turning popular unrest to their strategic advantage.

The disaster in Syria suggests that sometimes it might be morally defensible to endure or work gently with an abominable, illegitimate, and oppressive government rather than mobilizing mass resistance to it—nonviolent or otherwise.

This is a gloomy and dispiriting thought, and feels like an invitation to moral cowardice, and I think it is a thought for rare circumstances only.  My impression is that usually, once nonviolent revolutions get to the point of massive police and military defections (as occurred in Syria and Libya), the dictator targeted by them is inclined to surrender or flee.

Assad and Gaddafi made it clear, however, that sometimes dictators prefer to be “suicide mass murderers”—viciously dispatching as many of their own citizens as possible until they are finally killed, potentially destroying or deeply wounding their nation in the process.  This possibility puts a much heavier moral weight on the decision-makers of would-be nonviolent movements (and on those who cheer them from afar).  Still, this ugly possibility is not sufficient grounds for never again standing up against autocracy and injustice.

Ian Hansen, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at York College, City University of New York. His research focuses in part on how witness for human rights and peace can transcend explicit political ideology. He is also on the Steering Committee for Psychologists for Social Responsibility.

Syria: Between a rock and a hard place

By guest author, Michael Corgan

Does the ongoing Syrian civil war have echoes of the Spanish civil war of nearly 80 years ago?

Unnamed grave with teddy bear for fallen children in Syria.
Unnamed grave with teddy bear for fallen children in Syria. Photo by Bernd Schwabe used under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

If the conflict were only between the Syrian government and rebel forces (as was true in opposing Franco), then it would be easy for liberal or humanitarian interventionists to oppose what Assad has done to his people and support the rebellion. Indeed, many have already done so.

During the Spanish civil war, as far as outsiders were concerned, there were communists versus Nazis, and a choice was unappealing on those grounds. In Syria today, outsiders of equally unsavory character and practices are intervening for their own purposes, and that makes choosing sides problematic.

Hezbollah supports Assad and Al Qaeda has an increasing role in shaping rebel efforts. How can one aid either side without aiding those Shia and Sunni extremist militant groups so fond of terrorists tactics, and so responsible, in Syria as elsewhere, for the deaths of many innocent Muslims?

As far as outside interests go, you also have the U.S. trying to assert some role in the area versus Russia, which is loath to abandon a long-time client state and lose its only overseas base.

The biggest problem is for the neighboring outsiders. Turkey can probably handle the huge influx of refugees from the fighting, but Jordan is strained and poor fractured Lebanon could fall apart as enlivened Shia-Sunni fighting spills into its land.

There seems to be no workable ending in sight. Nor even a less deadly one. The best that the watching world can do now is to take care of the refugees whose numbers continually swell.

Syria: Even fainter hope

By guest author Mike Corgan

Map of Syria
Image in public domain

The tragic course of violence in Syria, falling mostly as it usually does on women and children, highlights the limitations of the United Nations as a means of peaceful conflict resolution in the world.

Even at its best, the UN can only do in situations like the Syrian civil war what the Security Council allows, and that body is set to stop action rather than take it.

The best analogy of the Security Council is that of a circuit breaker. It shuts down anything that is too big for the system to handle. The idea is that if any of the five permanent members (P5) really don’t want an action, then taking it would likely cause a more widespread and destructive situation.

Right now China and Russia are both balking at anything more than admonitions to Syria for what the Assad regime is doing to its own people. Neither country, each with its own restive and sometime violent Muslim minorities in Central Asia, wants any kind of precedent-setting UN response that promotes intervention in internal state conflict, however bloody and barbaric.

Russia has the additional motivation of not wishing to be seen as weak because it abandons a decades-long client state.

Who else could intervene? NATO is withdrawing forces from both Iraq and Afghanistan as fast as it can. Trying to set the house in order for another Middle Eastern state is not on any member’s agenda.

The ratio of Arab League rhetoric to action is nearly infinite.

Israel can only watch and hope. Geopolitically speaking, a fractious Syria on its border is a positive thing–but one sunk into chaos is not.

And even if some outside power did step in to stop the massacres, the aftermath of regime change now evident in other Arab states like Libya and Egypt is not at all encouraging.

It is the inevitably depressing commentary on humankind that perhaps only exhaustion of one or both of the combatants will end the killing. Inspired leadership by someone, anyone, could also be the answer but, alas, that is an even fainter hope.

Michael T. Corgan, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Associate Chair, Department of International Relations, Boston University