نحوعمل تضامني دولي ينطلق في يوم الأسير الفلسطيني (17 نيسان/ أبريل)

" أؤكد على أن إضرابي عن الطعام، ليس من أجل قضيتي كفرد، إنما من أجل قضية أبناء شعبي، ومئات الأسرى الإداريين المحرومين من أبسط حقوقهم".

هكذا كتب الأسير خضر عدنان، في رسالة مناشدة أطلقها من على سرير مستشفى الرملة الإسرائيلي، في الحادي عشر من شباط/فبراير الجاري، وأضاف أنّ الجنود الإسرائيليين يسيئون معاملته، ويقيّدون أقدامه بالسلاسل الحديدية، ويشدّونها إلى قضبان السرير، وهو خائر القوى لا يقوى على الحِراك، في حين ينظر العالم إلى تدهور حالته الصحية، دون تحريك ساكن، كما قال. وتابع أن على المجتمع الدولي، والأمم المتحدة، الضغط على إسرائيل من أجل إلزامها باحترام حقوق الإنسان، والكف عن المعاملة اللاإنسانية للمعتقلين الفلسطينيين.

والآن مع انقضاء اليوم الـخامس والستين للإضراب المستمر للأسير عدنان عن الطعام، والذي ألهم أحرار العالم بمعاني الكفاح والصمود، وحرّك عجلة التضامن مع حقوق الفلسطينيين، فإنّنا كحقوقيين، مدعوون لرسم استراتيجية شاملة تؤسس لدعم دولي للنضال الفلسطيني من أجل نيلهم حقّهم بالحرية والعدالة والمساواة.

خضر عدنان يكافح اليوم من أجل الحقوق الأساسية التي حُرم منها آلاف المعتقلين الفلسطينيين، كالحدّ الأدنى من المحاكمات القانونية والعادلة، والمعاملة الإنسانية اللائقة، والتحرر من التعذيب وعشرات الممارسات العقابية الممنهجة ضدهم، والتي يظهر بأنها تُمارس على أساس من التمييز العرقي، حيث تظهر في تعامل السلطات الاسرائيلية القاسي مع الفلسطينيين فقط، دوناً عن الإسرائيليين، بما في ذلك المستوطنون الذين يقيمون بطريقة غير شرعية (وفق القانون الدولي) داخل أراضي الضفة الغربية.

وتُخضع إسرائيل المعتقلين الفلسطينيين من المناطق المحتلة في الضفة الغربية والقطاع  لسُلطة القضاء العسكري، مما يوفر غطاءً لاحتجازهم بصورة تعسفية وعقابية، ودون لائحة اتهام معلنة، مما يعني غيابًا كاملًا للإجراءات القانونية الواجبة وفق ما ينصّ عليه القانون الدولي، وتعني أيضًا اعتقالهم بناءً على "لائحة اتهام سرّية"، لا يُتاح للأسير أو لمحاميه معرفتها، أو الدفاع عن نفسه حيالها، فيما يُعرف اليوم باسم "الإعتقال الإداري"، التي تُشرعِن إسرائيل لمحاكمها العسكرية تجديده تلقائيًا لفترات تتراوح ما بين بضعة أيام، إلى سنة كاملة. 

ويعاني الفلسطينيون الذين يتم اتهامهم بتهم سياسية تسميها اسرائيل “أمنية” فإنهم يعانون من نظام "أبارتايد" يميز ضدهم وتكون إجراءات المحاكمة والحكم مغايرة لتلك المتبعة مع اليهود.  لا تكون محاكماتهم لا عادلة وغير منصفة ويتم فيها استخدام "الأدلة السرية" ضدهم وأوامر منع النشر، ويتم تثبيت وجمع ادلة عن طيق تعذيب المعتقلين.

ووفق إحصاءات الأول من يناير/كانون ثاني من العام الجاري، فإنّ 4417 أسيرًا ومعتقلًا فلسطينيًا يعانون ظروفاً صعبة في سجون الإحتلال الإسرائيلي، بينهم 170 طفلًا، وست نساء، كما يُحتجز 310 فلسطينياً رهن الإعتقال الإداري، دون تُهمة أو محاكمة، تمامًا كحالة خضر عدنان، وبينهم قرابة عشرين نائباً منتخباً في المجلس التشريعي (البرلمان) الفلسطيني.

ونحن مؤسسات حقوق الإنسان الدولية والإقليمية الموقّعة على النداء العالمي للتضامن مع الأسير خضر عدنان، نطالب بالافراج الفوري عن جميع الأسرى والمعتقلين في سجون إسرائيل، الذين يقعون ضحية أنظمة وتشريعات عنصرية وغير عادلة تولّد ممارسات غير قانونية وغير إنسانية، تُمارسها الحكومات الاسرائيلية المتعاقبة ضدهم، بصورة ترسّخ الظلم والعنصرية والتمييز.

إننا نطالب إسرائيل أن تتوقف عن سياساتها التالية:

الإعتقال الإداري

التعذيب وسوء المعاملة

العزل الإنفرادي

تحويل الفلسطينيين في المناطق الفلسطينية المحتلة عام 1967 إلى المحاكم العسكرية بطريقة غير مشروعة

اعتماد لوائح "إتهام سرية" ضد المعتقلين الفلسطينيين مما يتناقض مع العدالة

اعتقال الأطفال والمرضى وذوي الاحتياجات الخاصة (المعاقين)

ويعتبر النداء العالمي لنصرة الأسير خضر عدنان مقدمة لعشرات النشاطات التضامنية مع حق الأسرى والمعتقلين الفلسطينيين، أبرزها:

إحياء يوم الأسير الفلسطيني الموافق 17 أبريل/ نيسان المقبل، في كل من قطاع غزة والضفة الغربية وإسرائيل.

تنظيم وقفات احتجاجية أمام السفارات والقنصليات الاسرائيلية حول العالم.

توجيه الرسائل الاحتجاجية إلى كل من اللجنة الدولية للصليب الأحمر، والأمين العام للأمم المتحدة بان كي مون، ومسؤولي الحكومات وأعضاء البرلمانات حول العالم.

رفع مستوى الوعي العام المجتمعي بقضية الأسير خضر عدنان، وزملائه من الأسرى والمعتقلين الفلسطينيين.

تقديم الدعم المعنوي للأسرى والمعتقلين الفلسطينيين عبر إرسال الخطابات التضامنية إلى السجون.

ختامًا، فإن الواجب الإنساني يدعونا إلى التضامن الواسع مع إضراب الأسير خضر عدنان، الذي ضرب رقماً قياسياً في عدد أيام إضرابه، وفي قوة إرادته وتحديه للجبروت والعنصرية الإسرائيلية. وفي هذه اللحظة التاريخية في سجل الكفاح السلمي الفلسطيني، ندعوكم إلى الانضمام إلينا لتدشين حركة تضامنية عالمية، لتفعيل مظلومية المعتقلين والأسرى السياسيين الفلسطينيين، وعائلاتهم وأهمية نيلهم حقوقهم العادلة والمشروعة كما ينص عليها القانون الدولي والإنساني.

معا نحقق الانتصار ... معاً ننتصر!! 

وليحيا الأسير خضر عدنان.

المؤسسات الموقعة:

مؤسسة الضمير لرعاية الأسير وحقوق الإنسان 

الحركة العالمية للدفاع عن الأطفال- فرع فلسطين

الشبكة الأوروبية للدفاع عن حقوق الأسرى- النرويج/المملكة المتحدة

صامدون- شبكة التضامن مع الأسرى الفلسطينيين

حملة الحرية لأمير مخول

حملة إطلاق سراح أحمد سعدات

العودة- نيويوك- ائتلاف حق العودة للفلسطينيين

الوجود هو الصمود

مؤسسة فرانتس فانون- فرنسا

إتحاد يهود فرنسا من أجل السلام – فرنسا 

حملة التضامن الإيرلندية مع الفلسطينيين – إيرلندا 

عمال من أجل فلسطين 

محامون من أجل حقوق الفلسطينيين

اللجنة الدولية للمحامين الوطنيين/ لجنة الحرية لفلسطين

حملة التضامن مع فلسطين- المملكة المتحدة

حملة التضامن مع الفلسطينيين – اسكتلندا

الحملة الامريكية للمقاطعة الاكاديمية والثقافية لاسرائيل

لإضافة اسم مؤسستكم الرجاء التسجيل عبر الرابط التالي:

http://palestinianprisoners.org/palestinian-prisoners-day/#endorse

The world watches as tragedy unfolds beneath its gaze as Khader Asnan enters his sixty-third day as a hunger striker in an Israeli prison being held under an administrative detention order without trial, without charges, and without any indication of the evidence against him. From the outset of his brutal arrest by scores of soldiers, featuring blindfolding, cuffing, and physical roughness in the middle of the night, a gratuitous ritual enacted in the presence of his wife and young daughters, Khader Adnan has been subject to the sort of inhumane and degrading treatment that is totally unlawful and inexcusable, and an assault on our moral justification. At present, approximately three hundred other Palestinians are being held in administrative detention, and Mr. Adnan has indicated that his protest is also on their behalf, and indeed against the practice of administrative detention itself.

The only plausible explanation of such Israeli behavior is to intimidate by terrifying all Palestinians who have lived for almost forty-five years under the yoke of an oppressive occupation that continuously whittles away at Palestinian rights under international humanitarian law, especially their right to self-determination, which is encroached upon every time a new housing unit is added to the colonizing settlements that dot the hilltops surrounding Jerusalem and throughout the West Bank. While Palestinian prospects of a viable political future are continuously diminished by Israeli expansionism the world politely watches in stunned silence. Only resistance from within and solidarity worldwide can provide the Palestinians with hope about their future. They have been failed over and over again by the United Nations, by the European Union, by their Arab neighbors, and above all by that global leader beholden to Israel whose capital is in Washinton, D.C. It is only against this broader background that the importance of Khader Adnan’s resistance to the continuing struggle of Palestinians everywhere can begin to be appreciated as a political act as well as an insistence on the sacred dignity of the human person.

The case of Khader Adnan is a revealing microcosm of the unbearable cruelty of prolonged occupation, It also illuminates the contrast drawn in the West between the dignity of a single Israeli prisoner held in captivity and the steadfast refusal to be attentive to the abuse of thousands of Palestinians languishing in Israeli jails through court sentence or administrative order. Mr. Adnan’s father poignantly highlighted this contrast a few days ago by reference to Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held by Hamas in captivity for several years and recently released in good health: “Where are the mother and father of Gilad Shalit? Do they not feel for me in this humanitarian case? Where are they?” The comparison pointedly suggests that it is Mr. Adnan who is the more deserving of such a global outpouring of concern: “My son was arrested from his house, from among his wife and children, was taken prisoner. He was not carrying any weapon. Whereas Shalit was fighting against the people of Gaza, and destroying their homes, and firing upon, and Shalit was released.”

In fact, Shalit has not been personally associated with violence against the Palestinians and their property, but he was operating as a member of the IDF that has been consistently engaged in such activity, frequently in stark violation of international humanitarian law. While Shalit was being held foreign authority figures, from the UN Secretary General on down, displayed their empathy not only for Shalit but for the intense anxiety experienced by Israelis concerned for the wellbeing of Shalit, but these same personalities are notably silent in the much more compelling ordeal taking place before our eyes in the form of Mr. Adnan’s captivity seemingly unto death. It should not be surprising that surviving family members of IRA hunger strikers have stepped forward to express solidarity with Mr. Adnan. They have also compared the Irish transforming acts of resistance in 1981 (ten hunger strikers died, and Britain shifted from counterterrorism to a politics of reconciliation) to that of the Palesinians, increasingly referring to Khader Adnan as the West Bank Bobby Sands.

And who is Khader Adnan? We do not know very much about him except that he is a member of the Islamic Jihad Party, a thirty-three-year old father of two young daughters, a baker by profession, and viewed with respect and affection by his neighbors. There are no accusations against him that implicate him in violence against civilians, although he has a history of imprisonment associated with his past activism. A fellow prisoner from an earlier period of confinement in Ashkelon Prison, Abu Maria, recalls Mr. Adnan’s normalcy, humanity, and academic demeanor while sharing a cell, emphasizing his passionate dedication to informing other imprisoned Palestinians about the history and nature of the conflict: “Prison was like a university in those times and he was one of the professors.” Commenting on his hunger strike that has brought him extreme pain, Abu Maria says he is convinced that Khader Asnan wants to live, but will not at the price of enduring humiliation for himself and others held in administrative detention: “He is showing his commitment and resistance in the only way he can right now, with his body.”

Addameer, the respected Palestinian nongovernmental organization (NGO) concerned with prisoner issues, “holds Israel accountable for the life of Khader Adnan, whose health has entered an alarmingly critical stage that will now have irreversible consequences and could lead to his fatal collapse at any moment.” Physicians who have observed his current condition conclude that, at most, Mr. Adnan could live a few more days, saying that such a hunger strike cannot be sustained beyond seventy days in any event. Any attempt at this stage to keep Mr. Adnan alive by forced feeding would be widely viewed as a violation of his right to life and is generally regarded as a type of torture.

Finally, the reliance by Israel on administrative detention in cases of this sort is totally unacceptable from the perspective of international law, including the Geneva Conventions, especially so with no disclosure of the exceptional circumstances or evidence that might warrant for reasons of imminent security the use of such an extra-legal form of imprisonment for a few days. Given the number of Palestinians being held in a manner similar to that of Mr. Adnan, it is no wonder that sympathy hunger strikes among many Palestinians in and out of Israeli jails are underway as expressions of solidarity. Have we not reached a stage in our appreciation of human rights that we should outlaw such barbarism by state authorities, which is cunningly shielded from critical scrutiny by the anonymity and bureaucratic neutrality of the term "administrative detention"? Let us hope and make sure that the awful experience of Khader Adnan does not end with his death, and let us hope and do everything in our power to encourage a worldwide protest against both administrative detention and prisoner abuse and by the government of Israel, and in due course elsewhere. The Palestinian people have suffered more than enough already, and passivity in the face of such state crimes is an appalling form of complicity. We should expect more from our governments, the United Nations, human rights NGOs, and ourselves! 

[This post originally appeared on Richard Falk's blog, Citizen Pilgrimage] 

His untimely death silences one of the best Middle East reporters. 

We at the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore, along with the global Middle East Studies community, mourn the loss of the brilliant, gifted Anthony Shadid, whose reporting of the Middle East over the past two decades enlightened all of us. 

Perhaps he was not well known in Southeast Asia, except for readers of The New York Times, the Washington Post, and Boston Globe. But Shadid was a “must” for anybody seriously following the often bloody events in our region. The Middle East is a dangerous beat for journalists. Anthony, quietly fearless, braved the chaos of Iraq, suffered a gunshot wound in the West Bank, and almost lost his life having been kidnapped in Libya. He was operating under cover in Syria, risking his life,  when—ironically—he died of an acute asthma attack.

Academics sometimes disparage “mere journalists” who allegedly only scratch the surface of Middle Eastern complexities and convey more stereotypes than sound analysis. (We should be careful of such generalizations.) Anthony Shadid was no mere journalist. He brought a breadth of understanding and a gift for uncovering the deeper significance of the daily events he was covering that earned him the respect and admiration of the best scholars in our field. He belongs in that very small group of Western journalists whose analysis of the Middle East stands so far above the average: one thinks of Eric Rouleau of Le Monde, David Hirst of The Guardian, Robert Fisk of The Independent, John Cooley of The Christian Science Monitor and a younger generation of reporters like Nir Rosen, who writes for The Nation, not to mention writers for Middle Eastern papers like Ha’aretz, Al-Nahar, Al-Masry Al-Yaum, and others.

It was heartening that his brilliance was recognized and celebrated: he won two Pulitzer prizes, among other honors, and had been nominated by The Times for a third Pulitzer in 2012 for his coverage of the Arab uprisings.

I came to know Anthony when we invited him to speak at Georgetown a couple of years ago. We had a common interest and many common friends in Lebanon: his forebears had come from Merjayoun in south Lebanon and were distantly related to the family of my late wife. We were to have met again last June in Lebanon but he was called away to Ankara, where he was looking in to Turkey’s rift with Bashar al-Asad’s regime in Damascus—an issue that we was continuing to follow at the time of his death on February 16^th. We were planning to invite him to Singapore this year.

Fluent in Arabic, comfortable in Middle Eastern society, admiring of its heritage and contemporary culture, Anthony Shadid was not only a keenly observant reporter; he also conveyed that indispensable but elusive ingredient: context.

A year has passed since Arab youth took to the streets demanding freedom and dignity, unleashing a long-awaited revolution. As authoritarian regimes fell in Tunisia and Libya, were shaken in Egypt, and are struggling fiercely in Yemen and Syria, I went searching for the Arab Spring in Ramallah, looking for the reverberations of the Arab uprisings on Palestine. Euphoria as much as apprehension accompanied me as I looked for the promise of a revolution devoid of any grand ideology, a revolution about freedom and rights, inclusive of everybody—Christians and Muslims, Islamists and liberals, young and old—if only for a short while.

On 15 March 2011, just over a month after mass demonstrations in Cairo brought down Husni Mubarak and peaceful protestors in Bahrain were being violently dispersed, thousands of Palestinians took to the streets in Ramallah and Gaza City. El Herak El Shababi, a loose group of young activists formed in November 2010, joined forces with a number of progressive political parties and various nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to demand the end of the political schism between Fatah and Hamas. The March 15 Movement that emerged then sought to build on the weekly sit-ins at Al Manara, Ramallah’s central square, that El Herak had been organizing since February to demand an end to Palestinian division. Fatah and Hamas watched as the young protesters camped in the street of Ramallah, Nablus and Bethlehem, making sure that the police encircled them and did not let them move too far. The youth did not seem much bothered by the attempt of the Palestinian Authority (PA) to intimidate, divide or co-opt them. They were decentralized and computer savvy enough not to be unduly deflected from their goals: to reassert Palestinian rights and bring down the Oslo regime.

Already in early March, the “Third Palestinian Intifada” Facebook page was set up calling for demonstrations to commemorate the 63^rd anniversary of the Nakba. El Herak did not know much about the group that set up that webpage, but it did not oppose their message. Through the Palestinian Youth Network and other Facebook pages, young people in Ramallah and Gaza were communicating with youthful compatriots in Burj Al-Barajneh and Ein al-Hilwa in Lebanon, in Yarmouk and Damascus in Syria, El-Wahdat and Zarqa in Jordan, in Chicago and San Francisco, as well as Haifa and Sakhneen. Their message was simple: to reiterate and protect the Palestinian right of return. And their plan was daring: to organize a peaceful march into their homeland on 15 May 15^th, the anniversary of the Nakba, to reiterate their internationally recognized right. Within less than two weeks nearly 250,000 subscribers joined the webpage. Israel felt concerned enough to demand that Facebook close down the page, claiming it “was inciting violence and hatred”. Facebook complied. Palestinians saw this as a testament to the power of their message.

The 15 May March went ahead, to the surprise of many - the youth included. The 15 March Movement disintegrated as soon as Fatah and Hamas signed their first reconciliation agreement in Cairo on 4 May 2011. Members of El Herak El Shababi (The Youth Movement) left the group, while others debated how to move forward and build on the non-violent resistance movements that have taken ground in the West Bank since the second Intifada through Popular Committees against the Wall in Ni’lin and Beil’in, the Boycott National Committee and the Stop The Apartheid Wall Campaign, among others. Many from El Herak mounted on buses organized by the Stop The Wall Campaign that took descendants of refugees to demonstrate at the Qalandia checkpoint and the Erez crossing in Gaza.

Their compatriots in Syria and Lebanon were meanwhile marching towards the borders with the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Some managed to cross from Syria into Majdal Shams; thirteen were killed by Israeli soldiers, and one managed to hitchhike all the way to Jaffa, his grandfather’s home town. Another group, the 6 June Movement, emerged soon after calling for peaceful demonstrations to commemorate the Naksa, the 1967 War. The protestors, mostly independent members of leftist parties, NGO, and youthful cadres, marched again towards Qalandia. But this time they were met with more violence and less media coverage. I wondered if the youth were seeking to revert politics to mass mobilization, as during the first Intifada, and if so at what cost to the PA? Can they force the Palestinian leadership to rethink its strategy if not the statehood project in its entirety? Can Palestinian rights be affirmed and protected without a state, outside the two state solution paradigm? And if so how?

I arrived in Ramallah in mid-June to participate in a conference jointly organized by Muwatin, the Ramallah-based Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy, and El Herak El Shababi, on the question of the Palestinian bid for United Nations (UN) membership, officially announced by the PA in April 2010. I was actually surprised that so much attention was being given to this topic. It seemed at odds with the spirit of the Arab Spring that is reinventing the meaning of national liberation away from an obsession with statehood and towards the fulfillment of basic rights. But when I arrived in the West Bank I could not find much excitement about the Arab Spring, the reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas that Palestinian youth activism helped bring about or the prospects of a UN seat for the Palestinian state.

When I went to Birzeit University for some meetings, I could find no slogans on the wall promoting the UN bid or calling for the fall of the Oslo regime. The students I talked to seemed rather more concerned about their future, what work they will find once they graduate. Although Ramallah was buzzing with public works as the PA moved on to implement Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s Palestinian Reform and Development Plan, many complained that jobs were scarce outside the construction sector and the security apparatus that had been expanding in accordance with an American agenda. When asked about the Arab Spring, some students were eager to point out that the Palestinians had been there long before the others. “Our first Intifada (1987–1993) with its nonviolent strategy of resistance is what the Arab youth are emulating today”, one of them said.

Mujid, who graduated in business administration two years ago is now working as a car dealer between Nablus and Jenin. He is busy making money and did not want to talk about politics. “Nablus is finally peaceful now that Hamas has gone underground and Israel has eased some of the restrictions on movement. Going to the UN will not end the occupation nor terminate Palestinian fragmentation. It is just a ploy to save the PA and earn it money and time”. Alia, sitting beside him, agreed, but she disapproved of his political disengagement. “We are still living under occupation and must fight it”, she said as she distributed leaflets calling for the boycott of Israeli products, prepared by the local Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campus committee.

I went to the Muwatin conference not knowing what to expect. As a taxi drove me through increasingly clogged Ramallah roads made worse by an unprecedented number of SUVs, I noticed the new “Muqata’a”: the PA’s West Bank headquarters. It was totally transformed from just 6 months ago: a grand new entrance; a small esplanade for the anticipated diplomatic cars bringing dignitaries to greet the president; and a small, newly constructed area planted with grass and some old olive trees, with a fountain in its midst despite the water shortage Israel has imposed on the West Bank. I asked the driver what he thought of all these new renovations. “A waste of donors’ money”, he said. “A futile way for the PA to say that the UN bid is real. But it is in vain; Hamas and Fatah will not reconcile and Israel will not give us back an inch of our land”.

I thought of Salwa, a 35-year old activist of the First Intifada who is now working with a youth organization in Hebron. She was worried that the Arab Spring could put the Palestinian cause on the back burner of Arab politics, since Arab states were too busy with their internal affairs and Palestinians with their divisions. She had not participated in either the 15 March Movement or 15 May March. Neither had her brother who was now living in Bethlehem, working illegally in Gilo settlement, the only job he could find. “What is the point of demonstrating against an 8 feet tall wall?” he said to me when I last saw him. “There is no political leadership to adopt our sacrifices and “cash” them for real liberation. Only the desperate and the rich young kids, who want to feel that they are doing something for the Palestinian cause, demonstrate these days.”

I arrived at the Friends’ School in Ramallah where the conference was taking place, and was directed to the newly constructed, but still leaking, gymnasium. I smiled at the symbolism it evoked; the youth of Palestine, the role of the United States, the acrobats needed to muscle this UN bid through. The hall was full with the familiar faces of well-known academics and analysts, but it was also packed with many young new faces I had never seen before. Ladies in jilbab and in tight jeans, young men with hippie hair and others with beards. I even heard a few Hebrew words intermixed with northern Palestinian accents, signaling that Palestinians from inside Israel, a group you do no often see in Ramallah, were among the crowd. I was told that the youth coalition that coordinated the conference organized the transportation of buses from Tubas and Hebron, Jerusalem and Jericho, El Taybeh and Nazareth to ensure that youth representatives from all cities of Palestine could attend. Gaza was unfortunately not present, but the place was full with activists—old and new, students, trade unionists, and civil servants who do not often get a chance to visit the undeclared capital of Sulta-stan, as Ramallah is unofficially called.

Many of the critical questions were posed about the UN bid. “What will happen to Palestinian rights, the right of return, if we go to the UN?” asked a bearded man. “What about us Palestinian inside '48”, said a young lady, “shouldn’t the PA consult us?” “Isn’t it time to abandon the two- state solution after these maps you presented?”, asked an angry man. “Isn’t it time to dismantle the PA and return to the Palestinian fundamental rights?” shouted a few. “Shouldn’t the Palestine Liberation organization (PLO) be revived and new elections called for?”, asked a lady in jilbab. The PA officials attending the conference were uncomfortable, and many of the questions went unanswered, but it did not matter. It was sign of changing times that these were being posed in such openness and by such youthful new faces.

At lunchtime, I sat with a group of young people who came from the Jenin area. They said they liked the discussion, adding that everyone up north is fed up with Fatah and Hamas, but people still want jobs with the PA. These are the most secure in these times of high unemployment. On another table, I could hear some girls with a Hebronite accent ask how they can get involved with El Herak El Shababi for future events in their cities. Not far from me I could hear the trade unionist, who has asked a question earlier, in heated debate about the need to reform Fatah and return to armed struggle. The group of young people sitting at his table disagreed. One of them said that the only way to reassert Palestinian rights is through international law and non-violent resistance. There is no point engaging with Hamas or Fatah, said another, it is a waste of time. What is important is reconciliation and new elections for the Palestinian National Council (PNC), not simply the PA. “Like with the Arab Spring”, added a young man from Jerusalem. “We must take our destiny in our own hands and liberate ourselves from the defeatist Oslo narrative the PA is still attached to as much as from the occupation.”

As the day ended, I wondered whether Palestinian youth were trying to reshape Palestinian politics or just venting their frustration at the sense of defeat they feel around them. After hearing them at the conference, I was left with a sense of their empowerment and determination to affirm the unity of the Palestinian people that Oslo fragmented. They are asserting that the Palestinian struggle is one of rights not statehood per se; the right of return, the right to equal political rights, the right to be free, not under siege or occupation. The PA leadership seemed to have heard them. Mahmoud Abbas’s UN speech made reference to the youth, even as it tried to coopt and redefine their message. “At a time when the Arab peoples affirm their quest for democracy— the Arab Spring—the time is now for the Palestinian Spring, the time for independence”, he reiterated. Most of the youth did not agree with Abbas’ strategy, or with his obsession with statehood, as one young man put it. As far as the youth are concerned, Palestinians are fighting for their internationally-recognized rights, not a bantustan in the West Bank.

I returned to Ramallah in January 2012 to see how far things have moved. Fatah and Hamas had signed yet another reconciliation agreement in Cairo in December 2011. Hamas had attended a meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Executive Committee, a first step towards its integration into the PLO—a long overdue demand by most Palestinians. I met with Ali and some of his friends, all members of El Herak Al Shababi at one point or another. They are in their 20s or 30s, had studied in various local universities and were abroad at some point to undertake a Master’s degree or a doctorate. I asked Ali what he and his friends, some of whom live inside Israel, have been up to.

In November 2011 a group of them had left El Herak and organized the Freedom Riders’ March towards Jerusalem, a campaign to board Israeli buses in the settlements to reclaim Palestinian right to the Holy city. The march received some international coverage but Ali did not seem to approve of it. “Why should we always emulate the Western model of peaceful resistance, and thus risk acknowledging the illegal settlements?”, he asked. “We are under occupation and we need to construct our own model of resistance without worrying what the PA or the West has to say.” He made sure to add though that he still respected his friends’ action: “Among the most important characteristic of our work, us the youth, is our acceptance of our diversity of opinions,” he explained. “We want to maintain an open forum for discussion and disagreement so long as we agree on common, non-negotiable Palestinian principles.”

When I asked what these principles were, Lena, Ali’s friend from Tulkarem, was quick to specify that they do not mean a Palestinian state on 22 percent of historic Palestine. “The two-state solution is dead”, she said, “and with it all attempts to normalize or negotiate with Israelis.” “But this does not mean we want a one-state solution either,” clarified Tarek. “ It is still too early for that and it is far from clear what is meant by a one-state solution, and on whose terms. Our struggle now is for democracy and asserting our national rights”. Huda, his friend from Haifa, did not seem to disagree. In December and January El Herak and other youth groups, such as Falastiniyyun Min Ajl al-Karameh (Palestinians for Dignity) demonstrated against Palestinian and Israeli youth meeting in Jerusalem and Ramallah to promote the Geneva Initiative that advocates a two-state solution. A similar meeting scheduled in January in Haifa was as a result cancelled.

I turned to Yasmin and asked her what she thinks young activists in Palestine want today. “We want to affirm our role in shaping our present and future,” she said. “The Arab Spring has taught us that we can break the barrier of fear and assert our role in the public sphere. We want to hold the Palestinian leadership accountable so that it defends our political rights, and does not trade them for false promises”. “Our aim”, she continued, “is to mobilize society and get the Palestinians to be politically engaged as they were during the first Intifada”. When I asked her how she and her friends plan to attain their objectives, she outlined a three-tiered strategy.

The first pillar is organizational; it seeks to create a structure, however loose, for the work of El Herak and other youthful associations. El Herak’s members already hold weekly meetings, produce monthly statements, and reach out to new youth groups in different cities and villages outside Ramallah. “But we do not need to become a fixed body, a political party or an NGO”, interjected Ali. “We need to remain a loose group, in order to remain in touch with our society and avoid any future power struggles”.

The second pillar is political; it focuses on defining a strategy of resistance that mobilizes the Palestinian street. It is one that builds on the popular non-violent resistance that has been taking place over the years in the West Bank and is open to engaging different political parties and forces in the country. Many from the Herak go to Nabi Saleh and Bil’in to participate in weekly demonstrations against the Wall. On 15 January 2012 Filastiniyyun Min Ajl al-Karameh (Palestinians for Dignity) and El Herak called for demonstrations at the Muqata’a against the resumption of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in Amman. Only a few people came. On 21 January, those standing in front of the Muqata’a swelled to a couple of hundred. On 26 January, El Herak called for another demonstration, this time against the PA’s decision to increase income taxes and the rise in food prices. It joined forces with trade unions and other political parties who together made the Fayyad government suspend its austerity plans. Yasmin and her friends are presently collecting all the old leaflets issued by the Unified General Command of the First Intifada in the late 1980s to see what they can learn from them for their future activities.

The third pillar of the present youth activism is a campaign to revive the PNC that the Oslo regime has marginalized. El Herak was the first youth group in the West Bank to openly call for new PNC elections, joining various activists groups in the Diaspora and the Occupied Territories who have been working on the details of such a campaign. “We need to have a Palestinian-wide discussion, not one confined to the West Bank, over what our national strategic plan of resistance is and how to rebuild our national movement”, said Lena. “We, the youth, must be part of the national conversation, because we represent over 60% of the Palestinian population”.

I left Ali, Yasmeen and their friends to join my cousin and her son of 25 who just started working in the police force. Her husband was imprisoned by the Israeli army in the 1980s and her second son used to be a Fatah cadre. As we drove in her car, I asked my relatives if they had heard of El Herak el Shababi. My cousin did not seem to know what I was talking about. Her son explained that those were the young people who stood by Al-Manarah sometimes and meet at the old Ottoman Court House in central Ramallah. Her other son said that Fatah has been watching them. “I wish them luck”, she said, “I suppose each one of us tries his best to stay steadfast.” As the car raced out of Ramallah and through the undulated olive hills outside the city, I could not help think that although the revolution is yet to come, its seeds are already being planted.

The Syrian revolution undeniably belongs to the street. It’s rooted in the public realm where masses of physical bodies occupy the squares and real voices fill the air with defiance against the brutality of a relentless regime. The virtual realm of the revolution is a strong, second line of defense. Communities of online activists in Syria tirelessly spread the voices and events from the street as far and wide as possible, while the activists outside Syria continue the ripple effect, transferring what is happening inside Syria across the world.

Supporters of the regime like to demeaningly describe the Syrian revolution as iftiraadiyyeh, hypothetical, “a virtual revolution,” fueled by outside forces far from Syrian streets (thus, Syrian interests). They mark the protesters as traitors falling prey to a “universal conspiracy” against Syria’s sovereignty. These accusations start with the head of the regime himself, Bashar al-Assad, as he declared in his last speech: “At the beginning of the crisis, it was not easy to explain what happened. Emotional reactions and the absence of rationality were surpassing the facts. But now, the fog has lifted, and it is no longer possible for the regional and international parties which wanted to destabilize Syria to forge the facts and the events. Now the masks have fallen off the faces of those parties, and we have become more capable of deconstructing the virtual environment which they have created to push Syrians towards illusion and then make them fall. That virtual environment was created to lead to a psychological and moral defeat which would eventually lead to the actual defeat.”

During the early months of the uprising, the president called dissidents “conspiracies” and protesters “armed gangs.” In his last speech he claimed if real protesters really existed, he would have joined them, “This is not a revolution. Can a revolutionary work for the enemy – a revolutionary and a traitor at the same time? This is impossible. Can revolutionaries be without honor, moral values or religious principles? Had we had real revolutionaries, in the sense we know, you and I and the whole people would have moved with them. This is a fact.”

These sentiments have been repeated by people inside Syria and out, Syrians and not, who consider the thousands of “unable to verify” videos documenting Assad’s atrocities as mfabrakeh, fabricated. They say the clips exaggerate the number of people actually protesting, while the pro-regime demonstrations are deceptively reduced or not declared as massive as they really were, or not covered at all by the biased Arab and international media. The YouTube clips are described as “pictures” by some journalists like Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn. “Pictures,” a carefully chosen, archaic term that alludes slyly to the reel not the real; directed, acted, cinematic. Were they not real even when these videos were made in front of the Arab League monitors? Were they not real even when filmed by independent journalists who have finally entered Syria (albeit on extremely short visas and even shorter government-controlled leashes)?

Recently, debates have been occupied trying to understand the nature of the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Does this army exist or is the FSA “a fax machine in Turkey”? Maybe the pundits have not seen the wide-spread protests on the Fridays christened, “We support the Free Syrian Army”, and “The Free Syrian Army Protects Us.” Rania Abuzaid’s excellent report explains the nuanced composition of the FSA. While it is true the FSA is separated into various groups defending different parts of the country and lacks a traditional central command, the thousands of men who fight and die every day in its name make it very real.

The president explains these discrepancies in reports emerging from Syria, “However, all the media fabrications, and the whole political and media campaign against Syria, were built on that phase of forging and distortion; and there is a difference between distorting the truth then giving it credibility as being presented from the inside of Syria, on the one hand, and distorting the truth from the outside of Syria where less credibility tends to be given to such misrepresentation. That is why we took a decision not to close the door to all media networks, but to be selective in the access given to them in order to control the quality of the information or the falsification which goes beyond the borders.” So the regime decided to be selective about who was allowed access to Syria, to combat the masses’ fabrications and control the message. Is that the definition of propaganda?

One of those “selective” moments is the now infamous Barbara Walters’ interview. Assad was apparently shocked at how poorly he was portrayed in the interview, declaring the fabrication so convincing, he almost believed it himself. But recently, while activists combed through the hacked email accounts of government officials, they uncovered an email by Syrian ambassador to the United Nations, Bashar Jaafari’s daughter, Sheherazad. She prepped the president for the interview by studying, in her mind, the typical American viewer, “It is hugely important and worth mentioning that ‘mistakes’ have been done in the beginning of the crisis because we did not have a well-organized ‘police force.’ The American psyche can be easily manipulated when they hear that there are ‘mistakes’ done and now we are ‘fixing it.’” (Her “quotes.”) Staging and gaging for American likability, American sentiments, and American sympathy. Later, in his speech to supporters, Assad spins the unflattering interview into an American media conspiracy.

The president, joined by his small but growing public relations army of Arab and Western journalists/supporters and backed by “most Syrians” according to Jonathan Steele, would like you to believe the following scenario: In Syria, a minuscule number of mythical (yet sectarian/extremist/Salafi/violent) protesters repeat make-believe chants supporting (and protected by) a fictional army, while being filmed by faux cameras, made into fabricated films, to be tweeted by virtual activists, and watched by millions of fake people on their conspiratorial Arabic satellite channels and consumed by a biased Western media engaged in the “propaganda” war, in order to cover the “real” Syrian crisis in, as Cockburn says, “a fog of disinformation pumped through the internet.”

And why should the world believe Assad’s scenario over the people’s reality? Because, according to the Syrian regime, the country faces a universal conspiracy designed to validate foreign intervention which will destabilize the region, strengthen Israel, weaken Iran, declare Qatar a regional superpower, and push Syria into a civil war fueled by “inherent” sectarianism that the Assad regime has protected its citizens from for the past forty-two years.

For some, the “conspiracy” also threatens to kill what is called the last vestige of Arab “resistance.” Resistance against what? Most Syrians would say the Assad regime has never resisted anything but the Syrian people’s aspirations. (But most Syrians never understood or appreciated their country’s all-important “regional” political role. They were too busy enduring Assad & son’s domestic policies.) The Syrians on the street (the ones who matter) even chant: “Ya Bashar, you coward, go send your troops to the Golan.” No one in Syria or the Golan is holding their breath. Some people will disagree with blindly disregarding the Assad regime’s regional and international accomplishments, as a result of its historic stances of resistance. Those people should ask the families of the over 7,000 murdered Syrians if their loved ones’ deaths were worth this so-called resistance. They should ask Palestinians as well (also the ones who matter): What has the Syrian regime done for you lately? (“Lately,” is loosely defined here, but let us just say in the last fifty years.) They would probably answer: a lot; of damage. Critic Subhi Hadidi lists some of the damage, “As for the Palestinians, well, the regime did quite the opposite: It sided against the Palestinians, as well as the 'national movement’ led by Kamal Jumblatt in the Lebanese civil war; it was involved in the 1976 Tal al-Zaater siege and massacre . . . it participated in the 1983 siege and shelling of Palestinian camps in Tripoli, Lebanon.” Poet and former political prisoner Faraj Bayraqdar says those who still defend the regime’s self-declared role of resistance, “are inflicted with ideological blindness.” He adds, “Those people don’t know the difference between resistance and desisting, between rhetoric and reality.”

The regime uses this mix of recycled ideological propaganda and media manipulations to confront the mass accumulation of evidence of their atrocities that have spread across the world. The regime continues to insist it’s fighting armed gangs while using real weapons pouring in from Russia on real ships to kill unarmed civilians and defected soldiers. After months of skeptics asking, “Just who are these ‘armed gangs’?”, Foreign Minister Walid Muallem ended a press conference in November with clips of the “armed gangs” in action. It was later discovered that those clips were filmed in Lebanon in 2010. In other words, mfabrakeh. When he was confronted in December, Muallem defended himself (beginning at minute 57:00) saying the clips were “correct in all their content, but they weren’t directed in a good way, only.” Directed? Like “pictures”? How real of him. He added, “If we wanted to expose the truth, the ugly images of what the terrorist groups are doing, I believe many of you will faint.” (Thank you, Walid Muallem for sparing us the truth.) When the mysterious yet conveniently-timed explosion rocked the Midan area in Damascus last month, state television channel, SANA, was on location ready to broadcast live coverage of the “surprise” bombing. They were so efficient that they captured on film, a man holding a Syrian TV mic planting white plastic bags near the pools of blood. Even the presenter was shocked into silence as she narrated the scene. Another case of bad direction. They should have called Jaafari Jr. to handle it.

Patrick Cockburn accuses the revolutionary forces of “engaging in black propaganda,” constructing a “fake” revolution using the regime’s tools of manipulation, while the old-school regime has become incompetent and sloppy. Assad has an explanation for those “mistakes” (in a 15,000 word speech, you can expect to find an explanation for anything): “In our quest to dismantle that virtual environment and to ensure the importance of the internal situation in confronting any external interference, we took the initiative to talk transparently on having a default here and a defect or delay there in some areas.” Maybe it’s a case of the students becoming more masterful than the master. Or maybe, it’s a case of one side being real and the other finally exposed as fake.

Syrian supporters of the regime know very well what it feels like to play pretend. It’s apparent in the new, popular chant, “We will be your shabbiha forever, ya Assad.” For decades, Syrians chanted “We sacrifice our souls and our blood for you, ya Assad.” I never thought I would feel nostalgic for that chant, but I am. As insincere it as it was, it meant that we were willing to sacrifice what we were, as we were, our souls and blood, for the leader. This new chant viciously takes subserviency to another level. It expresses the willingness of the people to become something criminal—the despised, ruthless thugs for the regime. To become something they are not.

Between treacherous chants and pseudonymous identities, Syria has become a web of deception, woven by necessity by both sides for protection against the entrenched regime. But Syrians have been unaccounted for as individuals for decades. Long ago, our features were erased in a sea of empty faces that mirrored only one face. We became a pixilated canvas that created a collage of the leader’s image. Our voices formed one unified mouth only capable of expressing (fake) declarations of love and devotion. We never really mattered to the regime, and so, we forgot to matter to ourselves. Today, the Syrian people not only fight every day for their survival, but to prove that they matter. They resist to prove they exist.

In a recent article by Robert Fisk, he referred to Syria as a symbol. For decades, Syria indeed was reduced to a symbol, sometimes of Arab unity, other times of confrontational and heroic resistance. Hafez al-Assad represented revolution, as we used to chant during mandatory demonstrations, “Hafez. Assad. Symbol of the Arab revolution.” For the last eleven months, the regime has proved everyday that they are far from being a symbol of revolution. Or a symbol of unity, or Arabism, or anti-imperialism, or even resistance. They have been an emblem of nothing but tyranny and oppression.

To conceal the reality of what they really are, the Assad regime fabricates every kind of conspiracy possible: political conspiracy, media conspiracy, military conspiracy, an Arab conspiracy, a Western conspiracy, an imperialist conspiracy, an economic conspiracy, a sectarian conspiracy. And according to Jaafari Sr., Syria now faces a Google conspiracy. Every conspiracy is legitimate except the one conspiracy the Syrian people have endured for four decades: the illegitimate rule of the Assad dynasty. The regime would rather erase every citizen’s existence than admit they are the universal conspiracy that plagues Syria.

For such a virtual, hypothetical, fictitious, mythical, conspiracy-based revolution, its heavy weight is tangible with real blood, real corpses, real tears, real intimidation, real scars of real torture dug into real flesh.

The Syrian people, like their revolution, are not hypothetical, mythical, or fictitious, they are real. They are not a symbol of revolution, they are revolution. But as Elias Khoury says, "In their struggle and in their resistance, waging their orphan revolution, the Syrian people are alone." And it is wearing them out. 

[This article will be reposted shortly. Sorry for the inconvenience]

"لقد رأيت الشجرة، لكن الجذور في مكان آخر." (مثل هندي)

إنّ الصورة المهيمنة اليوم حول الثورة السورية والتي يتمّ إغراقنا فيها، سواء عبر أبواق النظام السوري أو عبر القنوات الغربية و العربية "المعادية" له مثل "الجزيرة" وأبواقها في العالم العربي، هي أنّ العالم ينقسم الى فسطاطين لا ثالث لهما:

لديك من جهة "الثوار" وجيشهم الحرّ، تركيا "العثمانية الجديدة" ودول مجلس التعاون الخليجي، وفي قلب هؤلاء قطر وأميرها، وفي الخلفية هناك الولايات المتحدة الاميركية وأوروبا وإسرائيل. أما في الجهة المقابلة، فلديك النظام الأسدي في سوريا ومن حوله إيران و"حزب الله" اللبناني، "الممانعين"، وفي الخلفية هناك روسيا والصين و"فيتوهما" في المرصاد.

للوهلة الأولى، فانّ الفيتو الروسي والصيني الذي رفع في مجلس الأمن يؤكّد تلك الرواية. إنها حتماً تلك الوقفة "المنيعة/الممانعة" للتدخل الغربي "الامبريالي" العسكري المفترض في سوريا! لكن حقيقة أشمل وأعمق من هذا التفسير السائد جداً لما يحصل، والذي يساهم الفسطاطان بانتاجه على حدّ سواء، يتبدّى لكل من يريد فهم الأمور على أعمق من ظاهرها. تكمن الحقيقة حتماً، في البحث خلف لعبة المرايا الدائرة اليوم التي تحلو جداً لفروع من اليسار العربي فهلوي جداً الى درجة اليمينية الفظّة (1) والذي يبدو أنّ مهمته تتلخص في "شدّ وجه" "الممانعة" بلغو يساروي. تحلو لعبة المرايا كذلك لتيّارات اليسار الغربي "المعادية للامبريالية" التي لا يجيد أكثرها سوى سياسات الهوية، غير مدركة أنّ محاربة الظلم الفاشي أينما كان كان ومازال جزءاً لا يتجزّأ من مسالة أن تكون يسارياً، وأنّ طلب العدالة من أجل الشعب السوري هو في صلب أن تكون يسارياً. لكنه يبدو أنّه يطيب لكل تلك التيارات بقاء الاستبدادين الايراني والسوري من أجل إعادة انتاج نفسها وخطابها الى ما لا نهاية. فوجود هكذا نظامين "ممانعين" واستبدادين مبرّر لوجود نوع من يسار يتكلّم عن فلسطين فقط من أجل أن لا يتكلّم عن أيّ شيء آخر. (2)

الا أنّه هناك أدلة مادية أيضاً على زيف كلّ تلك الرواية، أوّلها حقيقة أنّ "حزب الله" كما الكيان الصهيوني يصلّيان ليلاً ونهاراً هذه الأيام من أجل أن يخرج الاسد "حيّاً" منمأزقه!(3) فماهي دلالات التقاء اسرائيل و"حزب الله" على دعم النظام السوري من أجل أن يخرج من "ورطته"، كلّ منهما لأسبابه الخاصة؟ الا يثير الريبة بعض الشيء، أنّ يلتقي عدوان لدودان مثل ايران وإسرائيل على بقاء النظام السوري، نحن الذي نفترض مسبقاً أنّ العداء بين هؤلاء مطلق و باقٍ "الى يوم الدين"؟ كيف نفهم التفاهمات الصارخة في العراق -الذي ما يزال محتلاً- بين إمبريالية أميركية وهيمنة إيرانية، والتي جعلت من العراق مستعمرة أميركية بالكامل ونصف مستعمرة ايرانية ثيوقراطية؟ كيف نفهم العلاقات الممتازة بين قادة ليبيا، المستعمرة الجديدة، و ايران التي يبدو أنّه لم يكن لديها مشكلة بأن يحصد قصف "الناتو" أكثر من 60 الف قتيل في بلد عربي -و إسلامي- لتهلّل بالعلاقات الحميمة مع القيادة "الجديدة"هناك (4)؟ كيف نفهم هذا العطف الفجائي للامبريالية الاميركية على الشعب السوري وهي المسؤولة بالأساس عن الجزء الأكبر من المآزق التي تعاني منها الشعوب العربية اليوم- ومنها الشعب السوري- و نقصد بالذات دوام استبداد أنظمة من المحيط حتى الخليج لأكثر من نصف قرن والمرتبط عضوياً بوجود اسرائيل؟ كيف نصدّق أنّ الولايات المتحدة التي تدعم فاشية العسكر المتجددة في مصر بالتعاون مع الاخوان المسلمين، هي نفسها داعية الحرية والديموقراطية من أجل الشعب السوري؟

الحقيقة أنّ في تلك القراءة المهيمنة للسياسة الدولية حول سوريا قدر لا بأس به من اللاعقلانية. إنّه طرح يتغاضى عن اعتبارات المصالح السياسية والاقتصادية للاعبين(5) والحسابات الثورية المعتادة حول العلاقة بين ما يمكن فعله وما يمكن تحقيقه، ليغرق في أحسن الأحوال في خطاب ينظّر في السياسة الدولية من المنظار الأخلاقي؛ و يسبح هذا الخطاب في أسوأ أحواله في نظرة مانوية للعالم مستوحاة من كتابات المحافظين الجدد في عهد بوش الابن، حين تصبح فيها المعركة الأم تقام ضد "محور الشرّ" الذي يضم روسيا والصين، يتمّ فيها الابدال الضمني في خضمّ خطاب يميني سائد(6) تحت مسمى "الليبرالية"، بين روسيا والصين 2011، وصور الاتحاد السوفياتي ستالين كما صين ماوتسي تونغ.

لا نستغرب وجود هذه النظرة عند أبواق النظام بالطبع، فهذه من عدّته الاديولوجية المعروفة؛ لكننا نرى أكثر ما نرى هذه النظرة عند "قيادة الثورة" نفسها، ونعني بذلك هنا أكثر ما نعني "المجلس الوطني السوري" القطري التمويل، التركي التمركز والفرنسي الدعم. فأعضاء هذا المجلس لا يبدو أنهم يمارسون السياسة الثورية من أجل ايصال الثورة السورية وانجاحها الى برّ الامان، بل يتأرجح عملهم اليومي للمراقب العادي بين الكتابة على "فايسبوك" والبهرجات الاعلامية. يصرّ هؤلاء على تبشير الناس الرائعة التي تقتل كلّ يوم واعدين "بقرب الخلاص من النظام المجرم"، من دون الشرح لهم - وهؤلاء الناس هم "سوريا الجديدة"- ما هي الخطوات السياسية التي يعتزمون القيام بها غير تسوّل "عدم رفع" الفيتو الروسي والصيني الى ما لا نهاية... كلّ ذلك بدل أن يصارح من هم في القيادة السياسية شعبهم أن احتمال أن يقمع النظام الثورة الى ما لا نهاية و ينجو بنفسه ممكن جداً اذا ما استمرّت الامور على هذا المنوال ويفتحون نقاشاً جدياً ومن دون قيود حول ما يمكن فعله. وبالرغم انّ المحددات الداخلية هي التي ستقرّر في النهاية طول عمر النظام الذي ينهك كلّ يوم وخصوصاً على المستوى الاقتصادي، يجب الاخذ بعين الاعتبار أن تدهور الاحوال الاقتصادية في سوريا لا يعني حتمية الانهيار السياسي او الفعلي للنظام والذي قد يأخذ وقتاً طويلاً، او أنه قد يحدث شيء مفاجىء وبكل بساطة يغير من إتجاه الامور الحالي سواء كان ذلك لمصلحة النظام او لا. الا أننا بأيّة حال لا نفهم ماذا فعلت القيادة "الثورية" لهذه الناس التي تقتل بأعداد هائلة أطفالاً و نساءاً و شيوخاً في حمص المحاصرة اليوم لانجاح الثورة سياسياً غير التطنيش في حينه عن نقاش العودة الى بعثة عربية لتقصّي الحقائق- و كأنما هناك حقائق بحاجة للتقصي- يترأسها جنرال مجرم حرب سوداني أطال عملها من عمر النظام أكثر فأكثر؟

نقول ذلك الآن ونشير الى قرار تسمية يوم الجمعة "بروسيا تقتل أطفالنا" والتي تتمّ بتصويت "ديموقراطي" على "الفايسبوك"- من غير المفهوم كيف يمكن اعتبار ذلك التصويت على أنّه يمثّل حتى أكثرية السوريين ضد الأسد- خصوصاً أنّ هذا التصويت يتمّ أحياناً كثيرة بشكل موجّه "من فوق" و بتأثير من أطراف سياسية في "المجلس الوطني" وغيره وبعض داعمي المجلس من أهل الخليج العربي. إنّ هكذا تسميات تبدو لنا أنها تعبّر عن خيارات سياسية إنتحارية بالنسبة للحراك الثوري يجب التحدث فيها ومساءلتها قبل فوات الأوان، خصوصاً في ظلّ الوضع السياسي الدولي المريح للنظام السوري حتى اليوم و الذي يبدو أنه استعاد بعضاً من الدفع الداخلي في المرحلة الأخيرة ولو أنّ هذا خاضع للتغيّر دائماً. وهذا النقاش الصريح واجب على كلّ حريص على مصلحة الشعب السوري وتطلعاته بالحرية و الكرامة.

إن أوّل خطوة لفهم ما يحصل تقوم حتماً بالتخلص من وهم - ما تزال تنتجه مدرّعات التفكير الاميركية لنخبها -وهو أنّ روسيا اليوم دولة فاسدة بل "فاشلة"، و نشير هنا الى عادة الشلف في هذا الموضوع والتي تحشر كلمة "مافيات روسية" حين التحدث عن روسيا، لتصوّر أنّ الأخيرة هي "دولة عصابات" اليوم وليست دولة عظمى حديثة تأخذ قراراتها من أجل مصلحتها القومية العليا تماماً كما الولايات المتحدة الأميركية وقد تصيب أو تخطئ في السياسة مثلها مثل الولايات المتحدة أيضاً. إنّ الجواب البسيط على ذلك والعقلاني جداً، هو الاعتراف بأنّه إذا كانت روسيا بوتين لم تعد حتما اليوم إمبراطورية الاتحاد السوفياتي البائدة، الا أنّها لا تزال دولة عظمى -وليست الأعظم بالطبع- ولديها حتماً حساباتها الجيوستراتيجية في أمنها القومي ونفوذها السياسي والاقتصادي في العالم. وكما روسيا كذلك الصين، لنستنتج من كلّ ذلك أنّه من المتوقّع جداً، بل من الطبيعي، أن تحاول روسيا المحافظة على مصالحها في العالم العربي من قواعد عسكرية وفضاءات اقتصادية، والتي أمّنها تقليدياً نظام البعث في سوريا بكونه حليفاً تاريخياً لها، خصوصاً وأنّ سوريا هذه هي آخر موقع لها مباشر في المتوسط.

لكنّ لا! كل ذلك لا يبدو أنه داخل في حسابات "قيادة الثورة". بل أكثر ما نرى هو بعض المجلس الوطني في تفاجئهم الدوري على الاعلام -لا بل في استنكارهم "الاخلاقي" الطابع حصراً وبناء على تحليل خاطىء ينشرونه في الاعلام، من تلك المحاولات الروسية المفهومة جداً لأي شخص عقلاني، بالمحافظة على مصالحها وحتماً ليس إعجاباً بمجازر النظام السوري أو بتبعات موقفهم الذي يجعلهم أقل شعبية في عيون كثير من السوريين المسمّرين على الاعلام الداعم للثورة. أماا الروس وهم الاكثر تأثيراً في مؤسسات النظام السورية الأمنية والعسكرية وارتباطاتها الإقليمية فهم في وضع لا يحسدون عليه. فهم مجبرون في النهاية على دعم نظام يفقد شرعيته الداخلية يوماً بعد يوم، في حين يصعب فيه عليهم أنّ يصدّقوا أنّ انتصار نخبة تريد التخلص من النظام السوري الحالي- وهي نخبة غير مستعدّة لإعطاء أيّة ضمانات حقيقية حول المصالح القومية الروسية- لن يعني سوى اتساعاً للسياسة الأميركية-الأوروبية في المنطقة وانحساراً خانقاً للفضاء الاستراتيجي الروسي. نقول ذلك خصوصاً أنّه ومن كثرة ما تخصص أهل المجلس بشتم الروس والصينيّن، أصبحوا يؤثرون بشدة على الرأي العام الثوري وعلى تنسيقيات الثورة السورية كما عبر شعبويات "الجزيرة" والتي أصبح عندها، وخلال أشهر، حرق الأعلام الروسية والصينية فولكلوراً أسبوعياً. لكن رغم كلّ ذلك يستمرّ خطاب "يا عيب الشوم على روسيا والصين" – ولا شيء غير "عيب الشوم" يزاد على ما يقال في النقاش- في الهيمنة الإعلامية، بدل العمل السياسي الثوري على جلب دعم روسي وصيني للثورة منذ البداية.

يبدو أنه قد أصبح ثابتاً من وجهة النظر الروسية، بعد كل هذا الوقت من قمع النظام - وهناك حقّ على كلّ من ثبّتها في أعين الروس- أنّ بعض ممن في القيادة السياسية للثورة أصبحوا من العدة الغربية بارتباطاتهم و التزاماتهم الإقليمية من قطر الى تركيا. وإلى أن يبدأ العمل من أجل تغيير ذلك، تكون أسباب ذلك مفهومة بعد سبعة أشهر من وجود "المجلس الوطني السوري"، لذلك يُطرح السؤال المركزي هنا: كيف يمكن تقبّل واقع أنّ قيادةً "ثوريةً" يفترض بها جلب كلّ الدعم السياسي الممكن للثورة والتخفيف من عمر النظام بشكله الحالي، لا تملك من الحكمة في التعامل مع مصالح الدولة العظمى الأكثر تأثيراً على توجّهات القيادة السورية الحالية الّا باستعدائها تلك الدولة الى أقصى حدَ؟ ولماذا لم يتم طرح إمكانية أن توفر سوريا ديموقراطية في مرحلة انتقالية غطاءاً حقيقياً لمصالح الروس في المنطقة بشكل جدي؟ (7) هل تلك مجرّد أخطاء سياسية أم يفسّرها ارتباط مادي لجزء من تلك النخب ببعض الأطراف الدولية دون أخرى؟ (8)

الواضحٌ إذاً هنا أنّه ثمة فرق شاسع بين الثوار السلميين على الأرض وبين قيادتهم. هناك ثوار لا طائفيون إجمالاً، يسجّلون بطولات خالدة في وجه قمع دامي وهائل؛ وهناك قيادة أبو ملحم "الثورية" التي لا تعمل في السياسة بل تعيش خارج الحسابات العقلانية للسياسة الدولية وقد أضاعت بذلك بوصلة الحراك الثوري (9)، لا بل هي ساهمت بشكل أو بآخر في إطالة عمر النظام الذي يقتل كلّ يوم. يبقى من الواجب هنا التشديد على عدم الخلط في الحكم على الثورة السلمية بشكل ساحق من خلال أداء قيادتها، بل من خلال ما تعبّر عنه التنسيقيات السورية والتي هي الممثل الأقرب إلى ما يريده الشعب السوري المنتفض اليوم، اللهم حينما لا تعيد تلك التنسيقيات إنتاج كلام قيادتها، خصوصاً إذا ما أخذنا في الحسبان التأثير بالغ القوة لمن يقرّر السياسة التحريرية لقناة "الجزيرة" في تشكيل السرديات السائدة للسياسة الدولية لدى الرأي العام للثورة.

الواضح مثلاً عدم وجود مشكلة فعلية لدى الولايات المتحدة الاميركية في بقاء النظام في سوريا رغم كل ما تقوله مما يعاكس ذلك. (10) إلا أنّ أهل المجلس لا يبنون حساباتهم السياسية على النيات والمصالح التي تضمرها الولايات المتحدة بل على ما تعلنه فقط وهو ذاك الخطاب الإنسانوي الإمبراطوري حول الدعوة إلى الديموقراطية والمعطوفة على حرية الرأسمال. لا مشكلة لدى الولايات المتحدة وإسرائيل في بقاء النظام في سوريا على الإطلاق. لا بل أنّ احتمال أن تكونا إلى جانب النظام في الحقيقة وتعملان على إفشال الثورة قد يكون قائماً وحقيقياً بشكل فعلي. (11) فنحن لم نر حتى الآن سوى الولايات من المتحدة سوى دعم كلامي، صوري و سينمائي للثورة السورية من دون أي دعم مادي وحقيقي بعد أكثر من 11 شهراً من القتل اليومي (12)، لتنتهي البهلوانيات الكلامية الغربية دائماً بوضع "الحق على الروس". نسأل بعد كل ذلك: في مصلحة من إذا طغيان معزوفة "الغرب واميركا مع الثورة" عند الجميع؟

إنّ جل ما تحققه الولايات المتحدة من خلال موقفها الحالي من الثورة السورية، ولومها كل شيء على الفيتو الروسي والصيني هو استمالة أعداد أكبر من السوريين اليها وتنمية عداء متزايد لقطاعات من الشعب السوري لروسيا والصين. هذا مكسب سياسي لا يستهان به تكتفي به الولايات المتحدة اليوم ولا بأس إذا ذهبت البلاد في حرب أهلية بالنسبة لها، فذلك سيكون أفضل بكثير لمصالحها ومصالح اسرائيل في المنطقة من ديموقراطية في سوريا. فلعبة المرايا التي تدور اليوم مبنية على وهم مركزي: إن مقولة التدخل العسكري الغربي في سوريا.

في الحقيقة، لم تكن هناك يوماً وليس هناك حتى الآن، أية نيّة لتدخلٍ عسكري في سوريا كما حصل في ليبيا (13)، رغم كل البروباغندا والبروباغندا المعادية حول ذلك. الدليل الأكبر على ذلك هو المآل الأخير للسياسة الخارجية اللفظية التركية حول سوريا والتي خفتت بشكل مفاجىء منذ أشهر. ولا ننسى التذكير هنا بالمناسبة، بأنّ تركيا هي الدولة العضو في "الناتو" وهو الذي يصرّح قادته العسكريون مرّة تلو الأخرى ألا نية لديهم في الهجوم على سوريا (14). يعني هذا فيما يعنيه الكثير، حين نحسب أنّ السياسة الخارجية التركية بمعناها الواسع هي امتداد للسياسة الأميركية في المنطقة.

فبين أميركيون يدعمون الأسد من تحت الطاولة و يقولون عكس ذلك بعد أكثر من 7500 شهيد؛ و بين روس و صينيون وإيرانيون يدعمون الأسد على المكشوف ويصرّحون بذلك؛ وبين أهل مجلس وطني سوري مبني برنامج عمل الكثير منهم على الدعاية لكلام الأميركيين المعسول بينما لا يفيد أداؤم سوى بإطالة عمر النظام وتخريب الثورة، يبدو جلياً اليوم أنّ الثوار السوريين منكوبون بنظام مجرم يواجههم يومياً بالقتل وبقيادة ثورية تعمل خارج مفاهيم السياسة بالمرة عن حسن أوعن سوء نية. يبقى القول أنّ أوّل خطوة في العمل السياسي الثوري هي الاعتراف بالحقيقة مهما كانت قاسية. والحقيقة هنا هي أنّ الكوكب بأسره اليوم يقف ضد الثورة السورية الباسلة. بعدها فقط يبدأ العمل السياسي الثوري.

هوامش:

(1) مثال على ذلك هو أداء وموقف قيادة الحزب الشيوعي اللبناني حيال الوضع السوري التي يبدو أنّها شاركت رجل أعمال سوري وهو قدري جميل (900 ألف دولار)، و رجل الأعمال اللبناني ميخائيل عوض (200 ألف دولار) بإنشاء محطة "اليسارية" والذي يترأس مجلس إدارتها…الأمين العام للحزب الشيوعي اللبناني خالد حدادة نفسه!أما آخر ما يمكن قراءته حول موقف الحزب الشيوعي من الذي يحصل في سوريا فهو خطاب أمينه العام الذي‪ ‬صرّح مؤخراً في مهرجان خطابي أنّه ‪"كفى حلا أمنيا، لانه لم يستطع ولن يستطيع أن ينقذ سوريا شعباً ووطناً وقضية وموقعاً في مواجهة الاستعمار والامبريالية. الحل لم يعد ممكناً إلا بتقاطع الحركة الشعبية الممثلة بالكثير من الوجوه والهيئات والأحزاب والشخصيات المعارضة الديموقراطية، وليس بمجلس إسطنبول وبرهان غليون، مع الخطط المعلنة للإصلاح، وهذا التقاطع هو وحده الكفيل بأن يدخل   سوريا ومعها الكثير في وضع المنطقة في مرحلة بناء الدولة المدنية الديمقراطية المتنوعةوالعددية."‬

(2)‪ ‬ على الرغم من أهمية وجود  حملة مقاطعة ومعاقبة اسرائيل في لبنان ً فانّ الإنشغال الإعلامي المبالغ به حول ذلك إذا ما قورن بتتبع الاستنفار الاعلامي من أجل ضحايا السوريين، لا يبدو أنّه موجود أو بصدد التحوّل نحو إنتاج تيار لبناني يساري خارج اصطفافي14 و 8 آذار يقف مع عدالة القضية السورية. كل ذلك بينما الكتّاب الفلسطينيون أّول من يتضامن مع الشعب السوري في بيانهم الأخير بعنوان ‪"‬ليس باسمنا ليس باسم فلسطين أيها القتلة‪.‬"
 
(3) مع أنّ الأمين العام لحزب الله مصيب في ظاهر نقده للشعارات المرفوعة من قبل جزء من المعارضة في سوريا بقوله "إن الذي يريد حقن الدماء، الحريص على الدم السوري، على الشعب السوري، على مستقبل سوريا، لا يقول فات الأوان، لا يذهب إلى حوار بشروط ، "إما يتنحى الرئيس أو لا حوار"، يعني هناك استهداف. الحريص على سوريا يذهب إلى الحوار‪!‬ " لكنّ الحقيقة هي أن الأمين العام لحزب الله يدافع في خطابه عن القيادة السورية بشكل فاضح و يساهم في البروباغندا للنظام، متجاهلاً كل القمع الذي يحصل و القتل و القصف الممنهج للمدنيين، فيصوّر وكأنه ليس هناك من عمليات قتل و قصف منهجيين للمدنيين في سوريا من قبل النظام طوال الأشهر الأحد عشر الماضية وفي حمص في نفس الوقت الذي كان فيه هذا الأخير يلقي الخطاب. أما بالنسبة لدراسة معمقة للموقف الإسرائيلي من تغيير النظام في سوريا فانظر إلى الدراسة الممتازة التالية هنا بعنوان "الموقف الاسرائيلي حيال الأحداث في سوريا" و التي ترجّح، بشكل مقنع، بأن من مصلحة اسرائيل بقاء النظام السوري.

(4) إيران تحتفي بمقتل حليفها المديد القذافي على أنه" نصر عظيم".

(5) يشرح كيلو موقف روسيا في المقابلة أدناه قائلاً "هناك عامل آخر لا ينتبه له. روسيا هي مورّد الطاقة الرئيسي لأوروبا الغربية، خاصة من الغاز. هناك مشاريع أميركية وأوروبية لبناء مصدر للطاقة، للغاز، من قطر والعراق عبر سوريا إلى أوروبا. إذا حدث هذا وخرجت روسيا من سوريا تستطيع أن تتصوّر أي روسيا ستكون هذه الروسيا. ستكون فعلياً دولة من الدرجة العاشرة. روسيا تدافع الآن عن حالها بسوريا وعلينا نحن الآن أن لا نضعها في الزاوية."

(6) أكثر ما يسود هذا الخطاب هو عند كتاب يدافعون عن انتهازية جناح 14 آذار في خصوص الثورة السورية والتي تستخدم خطاباً يزعم دعم الثورة السورية يتراوح ما بين طائفية محرّضة مغرضة وبين علمانية يمينية تحاول الترويج "لسوريا جديدة" لا مشكلة لديها مع الغرب وإسرائيل بالإجمال. المفارقة هنا هي أن النائب أحمد فتفت من "تيار المستقبل" وهواليساري السابق، قال إنه بحسب معلومات لديه من قلب الولايات المتحدة فإنّ اللوبي الاسرائيلي يضغط على الإدارة الأميركية بشكل شديد لإنقاذ الأسد. 

(7) في مقابلة حديثة للمعارض السوري المعروف ميشيل كيلو، اعتبر هذا الأخيرأن روسيا تعتبر أنه من الممكن "التفكير بحل "يمني" في سوريا ...ويقوم على تشكيل حكومة وحدة وطنية بإشراف نائب رئيس الجمهورية الذي يتولّى صلاحيات واسعة و بضمانات... و يكون عملها الحقيقي باتجاه نقل الوضع إلى مرحلة انتقالية تخرج البلد من أزمتها...أعتقد أن هذه طريقة مقبولة لايجاد حلول لأزمات مستعصية" و حول موقف روسيا يقول "موسكو طرحت فكرة لم نحتفل بها كثيراً كمعارضة..أنا شخصياً قلت هذا ممكن. أخذت الجامعة العربية الفكرة، قفزت عن المرحلة الثانية من المبادرة التي تقول بمفاوضات بين المعارضة و السلطة على مرحلة انتقالية و حددت نتائج هذه المرحلة الإنتقالية بقرارها-أي الجامعة العربية- ثم أخذت الحلّ "اليمني" الذي هو اقتراح روسي إلى الأمريكان في مجلس الأمن. أنا أعتقد أنّ هذا ما أزعج الروس كلّ هذا الازعاج وأشعرهم أنه هناك من يريد الذهاب الى مجلس الأمن على الطريقة الليبية في كلّ الظروف والأحوال...كان يجب أن يذهب أمين العام الجامعة العربية مع السيد وزير خارجية قطر، إن أراد وزير خارجية قطر، لأن وزير خارجية قطر هو الذي كان ضد زيارته إلى موسكو  ويقول لهم "نحن سنقبل الحلّ اليمني و سيعتمد عربياً ونريد أن نتباحث معكم حول شروط تطبيق هذا الحلّ، و الضمانات التي تقدمونها له والتي تطلبونها من المعارضة في سوريا و من المرحلة الانتقالية"...ثم يذهب  بعد ذلك وبموافقتهم إلى مجلس الأمن حينذاك  لا تكون المسألة مشروع روسي وإعطائه للامريكان…هذه الغلطة الكبيرة التي ارتكبتها الجامعة العربية تحت ضغوط قطرية، أقولها لك بكل صراحة".  و يزيد كيلو "المبادرة الروسية هي فعلاً فرصة حقيقية لاعطاء النظام دوراً في مستقبل سورية، ليس ربما لاشخاص وانما النظام، وأنا أعتقد أنّ الروس هم الوحيدين الذين يستطيعون الكلام مع النظام حول مستقبل سوريا بعكس الامريكان، الفرنسيين و الألمان…وكان يجب حتى في حال أن النظام لا يقبل، أن نتحدث معهم،أو أن تتحدث الجامعة العربية معهم حول ها الحل أقلّه لكسب روسيا ولإخراجها من معادلة الصراع باعتبارها دولة تريد أن تدافع عن مركزها في سورية لأنه ربما كان آخر مركز في آسيا...روسيا لها مصلحة كونية في أن تبقى في سوريا...وانا مع أن تعطى روسيا ضمانات وأن يكون لها وجود حقيقي في سوريا".

من هنا واجب التفكير إذا ما كانت تلك الضغوط القطرية نابعة من قطر أو من الولايات المتحدة وماذا يعني ذلك بالنسبة للتصورات الرائجة حول موقف الولايات المتحدة من الثورة السورية في صفوف المعارضين المناصرين للولايات المتحدة، خصوصاً إذا ما أضفنا الى ذلك الموقف الاسرائيلي المعادي للثورة.  لقد كتب كيلو مقالاً حول ذلك في جريدة "الشرق الأوسط" بعد مقابلته  بأيام بعنوان  "هل أخطأت الجامعة العربية؟!"

(8) كتب ميشيل كيلو مقالة ممتازة  فاعتبر‪ ‬أنّ "ليس رفض الحوار واتهام كل من يتحدث عنه غير دليل على تخلف الوعي السياسي عامة والديموقراطي خاصة: فالسياسي يعلم أن الحوار ورقة يمكن أن تكون ضاغطة جداً على الخصم، وأنها قد تسبب له من الإرباك ما قد تعجز الوسائل الأخرى عنه، وأن كل صراع قد ينتهي بحوار يمهد لتفاوض وتالياً لحل لا تعينه الرغبات بل موازين القوى، التي يجب على كل ثوري العمل لبنائها بطريقة تجعل نتائج الحوار لصالحه، فيكون رفض الحوار خيانة للثورة، وقبوله خدمة حقيقية لها، على عكس ما يظن بعض الجهلة بأبسط أوليات السياسة. بدلاً من العمل لخلق ميزان قوى كهذا، يضيع ثوار آخر زمن وقتهم في تخوين من يدعو إلى حوار يسهم في بناء ميزان قوى في صالح الشعب، لاعتقادهم أن لا دور لأي حوار في بنائه، وأنه سيكون في جميع أحواله لصالح الخصم، الذي يرفضه مثلهم في الحالة السورية الراهنة، لكنه يستخدمه كورقة يشق بواسطتها الحراك الشعبي، لإيمانه أنه سيجد في ثوار آخر زمن من يعينه على بلوغ هدفه، بقسم البشر إلى مؤيدين للحوار فهم خونة، ورافضين له فهم ثوار، مع أن الواقع كثيراً ما قال عكس ذلك تماماً، وأكد أن التخلي عن مبدأ الحوار قد يعادل في ظروف معينة التخلي عن ورقة السياسة، التي لا تنتصر ثورة إن تخلت عنها. أما الديموقراطي، فهو مع الحوار كمبدأ، لكنه لا يرى منفصلاً عن حاضنته العامة، ويقومه انطلاقاً من فاعليته وجدواه وما يمكن أن يقدمه من خدمة للنضال الشعبي.

(9) يقول ميشيل كيلو في المقابلة المذكورة "أعتقد أن هذا الحراك الشعبي الهائل في سوريا ليس له تعبير سياسي حقيقي...التعبيرات السياسية الحاضرة عن المعارضة هي في جزء منها تعبيرات نشأت في الماضي واشتغلت في الماضي ولاتزال تعيش في الماضي في أساليب عملها و طرقات تفكيرها...غير هذه التعبيرات أربك الحراك السوري إلى درجة الانهاك...بدل أن يمثله ويدافع عنه وأن يأخذه الى سكة السلامة أدخله في متاهات لها أوّل و ليس لها آخر.المجلس الوطني السوري قال إنه يعبر عن الحراك والثورة. أنا لا أعترف له بهذه الصفة ".

(10) نشرت جريدة "السفير" في 24 كانون الاول 2011، وبشكل حصري " محضر لقاء كلينتون بالمجلس الوطني" وهو مثير جداً للاهتمام، حيث قالت هيلاري كلينتون لبرهان غليون و بسمة القضماني إنّ" ‪ ‬الولايات المتحدة الأميركية تؤكد لكم أنها تتعاون مع بقية الدبلوماسيات العربية والدولية وتبذل قصارى جهدها وسط التعنت الروسي والصيني وأعود وأؤكد هنا على ضرورة أن يلعب العرب الدور الرئيسي في أي عمل مستقبلي يهدف إلى حماية المدنيين وندرك ان الولايات المتحدة عليها مسؤوليات ولكن مــسؤوليات مشتركة مع بقية الدول، والمجموعة العربية بشكل أساسي‪.‬". أما قلّة الكرامة التي تبديها بعض أركان المعارضة السورية، عكس الشعب السوري الجبّار الذي يقاتل من أجل الكرامة، فيتلخص باستجداء خطاب الإمبريالية الانسانوي و الإجادة في خطابها حيث قالت بسمة قضماني لكلينتون في نهاية الاجتماع "نحن نقدّر كل ما تقوم به الولايات المتحدة من جهود ونحن متأكدون تماماً أن المستقبل يحمل لنا علاقات مميزة بين الشعبين وأريد أن أطلب منك كامرأة سورية تخاطب امرأة تشعر بمعاناة الآلاف من النساء في سوريا ممن يغتصبن يومياً أننا لا ننتظر الكثير من مجلس الامن بقدر ما ننتظر من الولايات المتحدة راعية الحرية وحامية الحقوق في العالم‪.‬" نتساءل هنا لأي درجة يمكن أن نبرر تسوّل شفقة الولايات المتحدة؟
أما إصدارات "مجلس العلاقات الخارجية" وهو عادة معبّر جداً عن الآراء المعروضة في الادارة الاميركية فمعظم كتّابه، ما عدا المحافظين الجدد منهم مثل اليوت ابراهامز، يجمعون على عدم وجود نية تدخل عسكري في سوريا.

(11) نشير هنا الى البدء بانتاج خطاب "وجود القاعدة في سوريا" و تسرّب الارهابيين اليها من قبل أبواق الولايات المتحدة بشكل مفاجىء بعد ظهور الظواهري على "الجزيرة"، رغم أن الأخير كان قد ظهر خلال كل الثورات العربية المختلفة لكنّ الإدارات السياسية للغرب وإعلامها لم تعلّق حينها بشيء على الأمر لا بل نفت تهمة الإرهاب. يبدو أن الثورة السورية وحدها خصصت بهذا "الشرف الإمبراطوري" المستجد وأحدث مثال على ذلك هو افتتاحية في النيويورك تايمز حول أعضاء من القاعدة في العراق في سوريا وافتتاحية  طويلة بعد ثلاثة أيام في الجريدة نفسها عن القاعدة و متطرفين إسلاميين في سوريا، ثم ما لبثت أن انتشرت آلاف المقالات التي تتكلم عن ذلك استناداً إلى وجود "مصادر" مجهولة. يبدو أن ذلك جزء من عملية جارية اليوم للتضليل الإعلامي والعمليات الحربية النفسية ضد الثورة السورية من قبل الولايات المتحدة.

(12) ينفي السفير الأميركي روبرت فورد في سوريا في أوّل مقابلة له أية نية لتدخل عسكري ويدعو" لوقف العنف في سوريا" ويذكر "كثرة وجود العصابات المسلحة"! لكنّه يبدو أنه مع المشروع السعودي الأخير في مجلس الأمن و الذي تحوّل الى قرارا للجامعة العربية يستمر مسلسل الانتاج المقصود  لقرارات سياسية من قبل المجموعة الخليجية –التي تلعب دور الحاضن السياسي العربي وتحدد للمعارضة السياسية برنامجها السياسي- ستفشّلها روسيا حتماً في مجلس الأمن كجزء من عملية إستمالة الجمهور السوري ضد الروس من جهة، من دون أية نية لانتاج حلّ سياسي- وذلك باسم انتاج حلّ سياسي!- و بذلك يستمّر قمع النظام من دون أيّ رادع.

(13) نختلف هنا مع المعارض ميشيل كيلو والاكثرية السائدة من المعارضين السوريين وغيرهم ممن يعتقد بوجود حقيقي لإمكانية للتدخل العسكري في سوريا.
‫
(‬ ‫14)  لقد نفت قيادة "الناتو" وبشكل متكرّر أي نية أو ‬خطط لتدخل عسكري‬ في سوريا طوال الأشهر السابقة. كما أن الناطقة في بروكسل باسم الحلف الأطلسي قالت ‫إنه "حتى اليوم ليس هناك كلام بالمرة عن دور للناتو بما يتعلق بسوريا. تركيا وهي عضو في حلف "الناتو" قد تلعب دوراً محورياً وهي تعمل مع الولايات المتحدة من أجل انشاء منطقة عازلة من أجل حماية المدنيين." حتى الآن ليس هناك من منطقة عازلة لحماية المدنيين. أما مؤخرأ، فإن الناتو أعلن أنه سيبقى خارج سوريا حتى لو كان هناك تفويض من ‬الامم المتحدة! الواضح أنه ليس هناك من أساس للافتراض أنه هناك أي نية أو احتمال.‬

On the one-year anniversary of the February 20 protest movement in Morocco, (henceforth referred to as Feb. 20), the kingdom boasts relatively meager political progress. Despite the much-vaunted reforms and constitutional changes, Morocco has reinvigorated its state edifice, managed to outmaneuver an inexperienced Feb. 20 protest movement, and engaged in a crackdown on freedom of the press and speech. In the last couple of weeks, the regime has arrested three Moroccans for crimes against his majesty’s person and “defaming Morocco’s sacred values.” In a country where the monarch is inviolable, the use of cartoons depicting the king is considered an outrage to a symbol of the country. 

More importantly, a year after the initial mass protests, we need to assess the record of the movement in terms of appeal and success in Morocco. The Feb. 20 movement has undoubtedly sparked a national discussion for institutional changes, but fell short in exercising enough pressure for deeper structural changes to both the political system dominated by the king, and a system of crony-capitalism that has for decades crippled the national economy. The new constitution is an impressive exercise in state management of dissent. Groundbreaking only in its style and cosmetic in terms of real effective change, the constitution allows for greater executive power for the Prime Minister, but falls short in tackling the vast discretionary powers of the monarchy. 

The constitution does not address aspects of direly needed reforms. Kleptocracy and nepotism are endemic in the Moroccan administration and economy. No matter how inchoate institutional reforms are, they have to be complemented with stringent, implementable guarantees against abuse of power, corruption, and inequality of the laws. Individual freedom and liberty of the press are guaranteed in the constitution, but have to be safeguarded from the arbitrary abuses of the state. The result is the same maladies of yesteryear: a regime suffering from institutional schizophrenia, promoting inconsequential reforms, and tightening its grip on power and individual freedom. 

Even the much-publicized electoral victory of the Justice and Development Party is hardly revolutionary, and is in fact out of sync with the ambitions of millions of Moroccans longing for democratic progress. The elections featured the same panoply of state engineering as past elections. In the absence of rigorous laws against corruption and fraud, one can expect the same old violations. Moroccans abroad were also barred from voting, the electoral districts were drawn arbitrarily to favor pro-palace parties, and some thirty-one parties from different ideological and non-ideological strands saturated the electoral scene. This inevitably bars any one party from gaining an outright majority in the 395-seat parliament. In such an environment, elections have brought minimal political progress to Morocco and are yet another tool for the regime to control the public discourse in the middle of turbulent times for the Middle East and North Africa region. The elections also served to legitimize the cosmetic constitutional changes of July 2011 as the regime sits unchallenged, uncontested, and jubilant. 

The success of the regime so far is also a function of the weakness of the protest movement in Morocco. From the very first protests, the movement was beset by reports of infighting, as three founding members called for the cancellation of the demonstrations because of what they perceived as foreign interference with the movement. The movement lacks organization and popular appeal. I was at the movement's post-referendum protests in Marrakech, and the number of protesters was negligible. The results of the referendum have dealt the movement a major blow. It may not prove to be a fatal one, but it has severely restricted the movement’s ability to mount a significant challenge to the edifice of the state in Morocco. 

The movement for reform in Morocco has to regroup and recast its message in more strategic ways, focusing on what can be achieved in the short versus long term. Any attempt, or perceived attempt, of reproach for the monarchical institution has to be carefully calibrated, in order to reflect the duality in the modern Moroccan state between the ‘Alaoui monarchical regime and the institutions of the government. The monarchy has been an institution above the political fray, of course, with total control over the travails of the political scene. 

The Feb. 20 movement must, at this point, strive for cohesion and build the foundations for an autonomous visionary leadership away from widely perceived "puppet" relationships with the left or the right in Morocco. If this movement is a reflection of the youth movements elsewhere in the Arab world, it has to distance itself from old political and civil society organizations. Most of all, it has to polish its image and message and diversify its sources of information dissemination. Reliance on social media as a sole means of organization may prove limited given the state’s capacity to intercept and manipulate social media massages. 

Social media has been crucial as a form of coordination for the Arab protest movements that toppled dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, while destabilizing others. Social media significantly increased the geographical reach of social movements and cemented members to each other. However, that same form of organization reduces the cost of participation and can limit the effectiveness of collective action. A movement that relies solely on media activism will inevitably face a greater dilemma of message control and member commitment. Additionally, such movements face the constant dual state response of censorship and propaganda. Social media isolates the movement from the majority non-users of its technological tools. In a country where the majority of population is illiterate, this creates a fundamental problem for the protest movement’s appeal. A mixture of strategies between social media and on the ground mobilization could prove more effective in re-branding the Feb. 20 movement, not just as a channel for disenchanted youth, but as a national movement for socioeconomic and political change.

The Feb. 20 movement is at a loss for a genuine strategy of contestation that provides an alternative challenge to the state discourse of socio-political reforms. Despite continued demonstrations and sit-ins, the movement is dwindling in numbers and has degenerated into unorganized gatherings of popular grievances. Some have suggested the evolution of the Feb. 20 protest movement into a political party; however, that will still not be successful. In the absence of a vibrant political party scene in the country, a new party will simply drown in the current fragmented and carefully managed party system.  Instead of party politics, Feb. 20 has to re-organize as a social movement and identify a source for mobilization. As a movement with disruptive potential, its leadership, if any, needs to identify ways to generate and sustain organized mass action with new forms of diffusion and organization.

“Not a year has passed without hunger in Iraq,” wrote the great Iraqi poet al-Sayyab (1926–1964) more than half a century ago in his memorable poem “Rainsong.” Now, many years and many wars later, there is hunger aplenty. Were he alive today, al-Sayyab would have expressed nothing short of horror at the massive hunger in the “new” Iraq, especially when considering the obscene wealth that has been and is still being plundered and squandered by its rulers.

One in six Iraqis live in poverty. This is in a nation with the second highest oil reserves in the world and a budget surplus of more than fifty billion US dollars in 2011. According to Transparency International, Iraq has one of the most corrupt governments in the world. Some of the wealth stays inside the country and is spread among the beneficiaries and clients of the new political elite. Much of it, however, is transferred outside and translated into real estate or other assets, or is often hard to trace. Not a year has passed without plunder in Iraq.

The villains are not only or always Iraqis and the stolen money is not US taxpayer money. At least eighteen billion US dollars from Iraq’s frozen assets in the United States and from the surplus of the United Nations (UN) Oil-for-Food Program was sent from the Federal Reserve Currency Repository in New Jersey to Iraq right after the war. It was slated for the so-called Iraq Development Fund (IDF) during L. Paul Bremmer’s reign. All of that is now missing and there is not a single piece of paper to account for it or explain its whereabouts. Aside from the monstrous US embassy in Baghdad, the Iraq Reconstruction has nothing to show.

The executive summary of the Congressional Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan stated in its August 2011 report that “at least 31 US billion dollars, and possibly as much as 60 US billion dollars, have been lost to contract waste and fraud” in both countries. Perhaps this is what Fouad Ajami had in mind when he described the invasion and occupation of Iraq as an “acquisition.” The plunder has not been limited to paper money. Scholars have documented the pillaging of Iraq’s ancient and modern cultural heritage immediately after the invasion of 2003. Some have called it a form of “cultural cleansing.” Every now and then we read “happy stories” about some of these stolen artifacts being found in the United States and returned to Iraq. But much remains missing.

It is not only precious artifacts and relics from Iraq’s ancient history that were smuggled to the United States. The United States pillaged millions of documents belonging to the Iraqi state. Another important collection of official records was seized by an Iraqi-American. The itinerary of this archive and the rhetoric legitimizing its “acquisition” is quite telling. In April 2003, Kanan Makiya, one of the cheerleaders of the war (during its first few weeks he wrote that the bombing was music to his ears) made his way to the basement under the Ba'ath Party’s headquarters in Baghdad. Makiya removed the records he found there to his family home in what became later the Green Zone. The house supposedly became the Baghdad office of the Iraq Memory Foundation, a Washington, DC-based institution he established. The entire staff of the Iraq Memory Foundation is comprised of five persons, two of whom are not Iraqi. It has no advisory board of any sort, nor does it have any links to any Iraqi historians. It has no presence on the ground in Iraq outside the Green Zone. In 2005, the foundation reached an agreement with the US army to ship the documents to the United States.

Considering the rampant corruption of both the US occupation and the Iraqi puppet regime it installed in Iraq none of this is surprising. Nevertheless, it does not change the fact that these documents are not anyone’s private property. They belong to the Iraqi people and their seizure and transfer to the United States. was a violation of international law. Despite calls from Saad Eskander, the Director General of Iraq’s National Library and Archive, to return these documents to Iraq, the Iraq Memory Foundation decided otherwise. In January of 2008, the foundation signed an agreement with the Hoover Institution to transfer the documents there. Opposition did not only come from inside Iraq. In April of 2008, the Society of American Archivist (SAA) and the Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA), the world’s largest organization of archivists with 5100 members, expressed its “deep concern about [these] records and others obtained by the United States. . . in actions [that] may be considered an act of pillage, which is specifically forbidden by the 1907 Hague Convention.” The letter stressed that these records must be returned to Iraq “to be maintained as part of the official records in the National Library and Archives.”

These plundered documents are a treasure for scholars. They illuminate the inner dynamics of the Ba'ath regime and trace its growth and detail its various visceral effects on Iraqi society. But, alas, neither Iraqi scholars, nor Iraqi citizens, the victims of the Ba'ath regime, have access to these important documents from their visceral past. One of the “happy” stories about the benefits of this plunder to “our knowledge” speaks about the intensity with which some scholars are working on these “recovered” documents. “Recovered” is the key word here. The plunder is conveniently erased. But not for Iraqis. They have to live with the loss and fight to retrieve their plundered memory. And not a year has passed without plunder in Iraq.

As for the concerned scholars who mine this archive to “understand” the barbarism of the Ba'ath regime, I wonder if they will find time to contemplate the "barbarism [that] taints the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another," to borrow Benjamin's words.

Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Betty S. Anderson (BSA): I always joke that I conceived the project in the pool of the Carlton Hotel in Beirut. In June 2000, I visited Beirut for the first time so I could attend an Arab American University Graduate (AAUG) conference. One day, I walked with some friends all along the Corniche and up through the American University of Beirut (AUB) campus and then back to the hotel. Since it was late June and ridiculously hot, the only option at that point was to jump in the pool as quickly as possible. Two minutes in the pool and the thought occurred to me that my next research project was going to have to be about Beirut in some way. I had fallen in love with the city in just that one day. A half second later, I thought, I should write a history of AUB.

Besides the fact that I wanted to get back to Beirut as soon as possible, I wanted to know why AUB had been so influential in politicizing its students. At the time, I was doing additional research for my book on Jordan (Nationalist Voices in Jordan: The Street and the State) and a number of the political activists I studied had attended AUB. Their memoirs were filled with explanations and stories about how important those four years were for the development of their political identities. However, I had no idea as I floated in the pool that day that I’d have to do extensive research on Protestant missionaries and education long before I could even get to those Arab nationalists. At the time, I really knew relatively little about the school’s history.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does it address?

BSA: When I finally got back to Beirut in 2004, it was research on the educational systems offered at the Syrian Protestant College and AUB that eventually ended up directing my thesis. I was struck initially by the goals the American founders and their successors set for the school. They talked more about the transformative process they wanted the students to undertake than the course options they were offering. For example, Daniel Bliss (1866-1902) preached about producing Protestants who understood not only the liturgy but the lifestyle required of one converting to this faith; Bayard Dodge (1923-1948) exhorted students to follow the model of the modern American man as they sought to develop new characters for themselves. The former presided over a missionary educational system, the latter the new liberal education system then being formulated back in America. The first half of the book discusses this shift as the American University of Beirut was renamed in 1920.

[Main gate of AUB campus. Photo by Betty S. Anderson.]

Liberal education, as American educators developed it in the second half of the nineteenth century, asks its students to be active participants in their educational experience. Before this point, professors taught their students a fixed body of knowledge; students were required to memorize and recite the data to prove that they had learned it. In liberal education, the system asks that professors teach students how to think and analyze so they can produce data on their own.

The second half of the book examines how the students reacted to this shifting pedagogical focus. The American leaders of the school repeatedly stated their goals for the students, and most books and articles on AUB focus on only those voices. However, that stance leaves out an important element of the AUB story, because only the students can truly determine whether the programs are effective. AUB is famous for the many student protests that have taken place on campus, starting with the Darwin Affair of 1882, leading to the Muslim Controversy of 1909, and then on to the large protests of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. As I discovered when I delved into the archives, students used dozens of newspapers to explain why they were protesting. The catalyst was always a particular event, on campus or off, but the students always framed their arguments around the freedom they felt the liberal education system promised. They fought against any administrative attempts to curtail their actions and frequently accused the administration of not following the guidelines set by American liberal education. This issue became increasingly contentious as students worked to define an Arab nationalism that called on them to be politically active while on campus. The administration continually opposed this position, and many of the student-administrative conflicts centered on the differing definitions of freedom put forward on campus. I put “Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education” in the subtitle of the book because by the twentieth century, these were the two dominant elements defining the relationship between the students and the administration.

J: How does this work connect to and/or depart from your previous research and writing?

BSA: Most of my work has centered on education in one form or another. In my book on Jordan, I wrote of the politicizing role high schools in Jordan and Palestine, as well as schools like AUB, played in mobilizing a national opposition movement in the 1950s. I have published a number of articles analyzing the narratives the Jordanian and Lebanese states present to their students in history and Islamic textbooks. Moving on to a comprehensive study of one particularly influential school was a natural progression. The difference was that I now had to study American education in the same way I had previously examined the influence of education in the Middle East.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

BSA: I hope AUB alumni want to read the book and, equally, that they find something of their story in it. I did not want to cite just the Americans who founded and ran the school; I purposely wanted to write about the students themselves. Typical university histories leave out the words and actions of the students in favor of hagiographies about the founders and their famous successors. I also hope that scholars and students interested in studies of education and nationalism will be interested. This is a book that addresses both Middle Eastern and American studies.

[Assembly Hall and College Hall, AUB Campus. Photos by Betty S. Anderson.]

J: What other projects are you working on now?

BSA: I have a contract with Stanford University Press to publish a book called State and Society in the Modern Middle East. Like with anyone who undertakes to write a textbook, I am frustrated with those that are currently available. Textbooks of the modern Middle East typically focus just on state formation, the actions of the chief politicians, and the political interplay between states. My text focuses instead on the relationship between state and society as it developed over the last two hundred years. The states in the region centralized in the nineteenth century, faced colonialism in the early twentieth century, and then independence after World War II; these stages created new roles for state leaders. Civil society, in the broadest definition of the term, emerged from the eighteenth century forward as people sought new ways to organize within and against the states now intruding on their lives. They took advantage of the new institutions the states built to establish for themselves new class, national, and gender definitions, while frequently opposing the states that had introduced these very institutions. My text examines how schools, government offices, newspapers, political parties, and women’s groups constantly negotiated new relationships with their respective states.

Excerpt from The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education

From Chapter One:

"The great value of education does not consist in the accepting this and that to be true but it consists in proving this and that to be true," declared Daniel Bliss, founder of Syrian Protestant College (SPC; 1866–1920) and its president from 1866 to 1902, in his farewell address. President Howard Bliss (president, 1902–1920) said in his baccalaureate sermon in 1911, "In a word, the purpose of the College is not to produce singly or chiefly men who are doctors, men who are pharmacists, men who are merchants, men who are preachers, teachers, lawyers, editors, statesmen; but it is the purpose of the College to produce doctors who are men, pharmacists who are men, merchants who are men, preachers, teachers, lawyers, editors, statesmen who are men." Bayard Dodge (1923–1948) stated at his inauguration as president of the newly renamed American University of Beirut (AUB; 1920– ), "We do not attempt to force a student to absorb a definite quantity of knowledge, but we strive to teach him how to study. We do not pretend to give a complete course of instruction in four or five years, but rather to encourage the habit of study, as a foundation for an education as long as life itself." The successors to these men picked up the same themes when they elaborated on the school's goals over the years; most recently, in May 2009, President Peter Dorman discussed his vision of AUB’s role. "AUB thrives today in much different form than our missionary founders would have envisioned, but nonetheless—after all this time—it remains dedicated to the same ideal of producing enlightened and visionary leaders."

In dozens of publications, SPC and AUB students have also asserted a vision of the transformative role the school should have on their lives. The longest surviving Arab society on campus, al-`Urwa al-Wuthqa, published a magazine of the same name during most academic years between 1923 and 1954 and as of 1936 stated as its editorial policy the belief that "the magazine's writing is synonymous with the Arab student struggle in the university." From that point forward, the editors frequently listed the society's Arab nationalist goals. In the fall 1950 edition, for example, al-`Urwa al-Wuthqa's Committee on Broadcasting and Publications issued a statement identifying the achievement of Arab unity as the most important goal because "it is impossible to separate the history, literature and scientific inheritance of the Arabs" since "the Arab essence is unity." Toward this end, al-`Urwa al-Wuthqa pledged to accelerate the "growth of the true nationalist spirit" among the students affiliated with the organization. In describing education as an activist pursuit, the statement declares, "To achieve political ideas which are aimed at our nationalism it is necessary for we as students to seek information by many different means." In this call, the AUB Arab students must take on the task of studying the Arab heritage as thoroughly and frankly as possible so that when they graduate they can move into society with solutions to the many problems plaguing the Arab world.

Since the school's founding in 1866, its campus has stood at a vital intersection between a rapidly changing American missionary and educational project to the Middle East and a dynamic quest for Arab national identity and empowerment. As the presidential quotes indicate, the Syrian Protestant College and the American University of Beirut imported American educational systems championing character building as their foremost goal. Proponents of these programs hewed to the belief that American educational systems were the perfect tools for encouraging students to reform themselves and improve their societies; the programs do not merely supply professional skills but educate the whole person. As the quotes from al-`Urwa al-Wuthqa attest, Arab society pressured the students to change as well. The Arab nahda, or awakening, of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries called on students to take pride in their Arab past and to work to recreate themselves as modern leaders of their society; the Arab nationalist movement of the twentieth century asked that students take a lead in fighting for Arab independence from foreign control. The students streaming through the Main Gate year after year used both of these American and Arab elements to help make the school not only an American institution but also one of the Arab world and of Beirut, as the very name, the American University of Beirut, indicates. This process saw long periods of accommodation between the American-led administration and the Arab students, but just as many eras when conflict raged over the nature of authority each should wield on campus; the changing relationship between the administration and the students serves as the cornerstone of this book, for it is here where much of the educational history of SPC and AUB has been written.

From Chapter Five:

The 1952 April Fool’s Day issue of Outlook (called Lookout on that day) satirized the proliferation of student protests that had dominated campus life for the previous few years. In the paper’s lead article, the author declared, “A School of Revolutionary Government, designed to equip AUB students with a wide knowledge of modern techniques of conspiracy and revolution, is to be opened during the fall semester, a communique from the President’s Office announced late Friday.” Continuing the same theme, the article reports, “All courses will include a minimum of three lab hours to be spent in street battles with gendarmes and similar applications of theories learned in classrooms.” President Stephen Penrose (1948-1954), the article stated, gave a Friday morning chapel talk on the new school motto: “That they may have strife and have it more abundantly.” In a further announcement, the paper described the day’s protest.

There will be a demonstration this afternoon at three in front of the Medical Gate to object against everything[.] All those interested please report there promptly five [minutes] before time. The demonstration promises to be very exciting—tear gas will be used, and the slogans are simply delightful. If all goes well, police interference is expected. If not to join, come and watch.

This, of course, had not been the first era of student protest; the difference by the 1950s was the widespread and sustained nature of the conflict between the administration and the students. When Lookout published its satirical articles in 1952, students had been organizing demonstrations in support of Palestinians and Moroccans, and against any and all things imperialist, since 1947; these events only petered out in 1955 as the administration banned the two main groups organizing them, the Student Council and the Arab society, al-^cUrwa al-Wuthqa. Students engaged in these exercises explicitly as Arabs, proud of their past, and striving toward cultural, political and economic unity in the future. In their actions, students sought to integrate their educational experiences at AUB with the real-life events taking place outside the Main Gate, for only then did they feel they could be trained to function as the vanguard initiating the necessary changes in their society.

[Excerpted from Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education. © 2011 by The University of Texas Press. Excerpted by permission of the author. For more information, or to order the book, click here.]

“The American psyche can be easily manipulated,” writes Sheherazad Jaafari, press attaché of Syria’s mission to the United Nations (UN), in a brief sent to Syrian presidential media aide and former Al Jazeera employee Luna Chebel. The brief suggested how to handle Barbara Walters’ interview of Bashar al-Assad, which was later aired on 7 December 2011. The brief comes from email correspondence hacked by the online activist movement known as Anonymous, who on 7 February announced its penetration of some seventy-eight mailboxes belonging to Syrian Presidential Palace staff and media aides—many merely protected by a “12345” password.

The Western media’s reactions to the Barbara Walters’ interview planning email have been a mixture of surprise (“astonishing office emails” according to the Telegraph), disappointment, and even outrage over the fact that a “New York spin doctor coached Syrian dictator”, the Daily Mail suggested.

Yet the reason for discontent apparently only comes from the naïve way Americans are portrayed in the leaked conversation—as people whose views on Syria are not grounded in facts as much as in perceptions that can be easily adjusted through media brainwashing.

American and Western media in general are very familiar with spin-doctoring tactics to manipulate public opinion. Moreover, planning and briefing before high-profile interviews to public figures is not an exceptional practice reserved for authoritarian regimes, but instead a routine practice widely adopted by Western democratic institutions, from media to governments. The most “disturbing” aspect of Jaafari’s leaked email is precisely that it sheds light on similarities rather than differences, and places authoritarian regimes and Western democracies in a continuum rather than at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum.

More disturbing similarities come from other leaked emails published by Anonymous here, which allegedly originate from Butheina Shaaban’s inbox. Shaaban is media and political advisor to President Assad and a prominent member of his seemingly reform-minded inner circle. She is fluent in English and holds a PhD in English literature from Warwick University. She is the woman who delivered the first public speech after the uprising started in Syria last March 2011, promising reforms and a diplomatic solution to the crisis.

A look at Shaaban's leaked correspondence sheds light on the symbolic and material appeal that the Assad regime has exercised over a wide spectrum of professionals and personalities, including Western journalists, university professors, entrepreneurs, and even leftist activists. The presidential advisor's hacked inbox draws attention to the elective affinities betwen Bashar al-Assad's inner circle and Western elites.

People like George Galloway—the former British Labour Party member of parliament, who co-founded the Viva Palestina! Organization to bring humanitarian aid and relief to Gaza's civilian population after the 2008 Israeli attack—is one of Shaaban’s pen pals. In writing to Shaaban and asking for Assad’s support for a Viva Palestina! mission to Gaza, Galloway salutes Syria as “the last castle of Arab dignity”—apparently the only Arab country committed to the “historic endeavor” of liberating Palestine. It is probably in this commitment to the Palestinian cause that Galloway and many other leftist activists have found a common ground with Assad’s rhetoric that claims Syria as the champion of Panarabism and only country defending Arab interests against Western imperialism (a recurring discourse in his recent January 10^th TV address).

Yet this shared language is not only to be found on pro-Palestinian and anti-imperialist ideological grounds. Assad’s inner circle has also proven itself to be a suitable business partner for Western public relations (PR) firms who offer public diplomacy services that reduce relationships between two states or between a state and its citizens to a PR matter to be regulated through the media. Email leaks reveal an ongoing conversation between Shaaban and the Washington, DC-based Capital Communications whose services cover “crisis communications and reputation management” and “how to pitch a story to the US media.”

In another leaked email, even an academic, David Lesch—a Trinity University History Professor who specializes on Syria— proposes Shaaban use an American PR company “to improve the US-Syrian relationship at a crucial time before the next administration comes into office, to improve the image of Syria and President Bashar in the United States, and help with other forms of cooperation.” And his website states that he has met with President Assad and his aides, presumably including Shaaban, “on a regular basis since 2004.”

Shabaan’s circle of global friends also includes Billy Sager, an American billionaire who expresses his gratitude for the “first-hand perspective” he got from visiting the “Ummayyad mosque, souk, coffee shops, and even a hammam (Turkish bath).” In a leaked email, Sager writes that his visit helped him see the country without the “distorting filters of the media,” referring to numerous international articles describing the unrest provoked in Syria by a popular movement seeking dignity and freedom whose existence Syrian government media have never officially acknowledged.

Shaaban`s leaked emails display a gallery of Western professionals from different fields, including a few journalists who were officially invited to the country after the uprising started. All were bound to Assad’s seemingly reform-minded circle through a system of mutual favors and exchanges, personal friendships, and business interests. These relationships have been and continue to be forged by mutual complaisance, indulgence, material comfort, and pleasure. They reveal how deeply the Syrian regime was intertwined with Western elites and to what extent the latter were enmeshed with what the West now largely labels as “the dictatorship.”

Anonymous-leaked emails also shed light on the ability of seeming reformists in Syria to master the universal vocabulary of neoliberalism and globalization through their use of words like “empowerment”, “entrepreneurship,” and “self-initiative”—terms that Westerners’ ears pretend to interpret as a guarantee that a more democratic system would somehow match the opening up of the Syrian market. 

As a Western diplomat told me in Damascus a few weeks after the uprising started, “They fooled us. We thought they were like us, ’cause they were speaking the same language as us.” This sentence reveals a dangerous but very common assumption in the West: “us” is good. The fact that Assad’s entourage was speaking the same language “as us” has led to the misleading interpretation that they were going to comply with “our” values—those supposedly on the right side of history.

However, Butheina Shaaban’s inbox and the network of relationships disclosed by the Anonymous leaks prove that the situation is indeed a bit more complex than simply an “us” versus “them” scenario.

A call by the Hayward gallery has been circulating regarding a second installment of the Jeremy Deller piece, It Is What It Is. The call, an excerpt of which follows, was sent out to look for participants in the gallery show opening this month (February 22) in London:

“I work as Assistant Curator at the Hayward Gallery and am currently carrying out research for our forthcoming exhibition on Turner prize-winner Jeremy Deller which takes place at the Hayward Gallery from 22 February - 13 May 2012.  The exhibition will feature a number of works, including an installation of ‘It Is What It Is’ - a work which explores the recent history and current circumstances of Iraq through the presentation of a destroyed car, maps, a banner, a film work, as well as a participatory element…The work ‘It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq’ has been successfully presented at the New Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles in 2009. A list of the guest experts who have participated in the Hammer Museum exhibition is included in the attached document for your information. . .”

Because this exhibition is being resurrected in yet another major contemporary art space, it begs consideration of its first iteration. In Feb of 2009, the New Museum and Creative Time in New York inaugurated this high profile exhibition, which subsequently went on to the other museums mentioned above. The nearly year long initiative was part of the “Three M Project”, a collaborative museum program to commission, organize and co-present new works of art. The ambitious program commissioned a project by Deller:

In an effort to encourage the public to discuss the present circumstances in Iraq, a revolving cast of participants including veterans, journalists, scholars, and Iraqi nationals who have expertise in a particular aspect of the region and/or first-hand experience of Iraq have been invited to take up residence in the New Museum’s gallery space with the express purpose of encouraging discussion with visitors to the Museum.1

This project then toured the US on a three-week road trip in an RV.  Conversation stops along the way took place at homes, town halls, and public meeting places (not unlike the trips US politicians make stumping before elections).

The “objects” in the exhibit consisted of a bombed out car, juxtaposed maps of Iraq and the US, and a banner bearing the title of the program in English and Arabic. These materials, to be used as prompts, serve as a starting point for the project and signal some of the problems that are both initially apparent and those that emerge.

These objects were meant to “ground and stimulate discussion.” However, the use of a bombed out car and Arabic script as a starting point for a conversation in America about the complexity and tragedy of the war in Iraq begins the conversation with stereotyped images found on the evening news for the last ten years. Isn’t the grounding of the conversation with the same tired props used in nearly every US media report on Iraq exactly the wrong place to begin an open and exploratory dialogue?

The curatorial literature states that the bombed out car was a remnant of a car destroyed in the bombing of Mutanabbi Street on March 5, 2007. This bombing, which claimed 26 lives, was a searing blow to Iraqis because of its history as a main Baghdadi thoroughfare famous for centuries as a booksellers market and hub of intellectual activity. In Deller’s project, the bombed out car is the only signifier needed, apparently, to make a link to Iraqi culture. Speaking to Art in America, Deller explains that the bombed out car was important because, “Its very difficult to even hold or see something that’s actually come from Iraq. Its very rare that you get that opportunity so here we have this huge car –it’s a massive, ugly, mangled wreck from Iraq. Its almost like a piece of evidence has been dropped down in the museum.”2

But why is it so “rare” to see or hold something from Iraq? What could Deller possibly mean by this? Iraqis have produced a vast canon of artistic work, literature, and cultural objects, from ancient works that are very visible in museums in Britain and the US, to modern and contemporary works in a variety of disciplines. Deller’s comment speaks to either an ignorance of this work existing (which hardly seems possible), or a problematic insistence on Iraq as a site that can only be made visible as a map of mangled objects. This is especially disturbing when considering the very concrete losses that took place under the occupying forces, who famously allowed Iraq’s museums, cultural institutions, and other critical sites to be looted and irreversibly damaged at the start (and during the course of), the war; deeming Iraqi cultural production at best insignificant.

By relying on the use of a blown up car, Deller chooses to replicate narrow British and American media portrayals of the conflict and this bombing in particular. Deller explicitly acknowledges this in another interview: 

The car will be very familiar though, because whenever you watch the news and there’s been a bombing, you don’t see the bodies, you see a car. It becomes a replacement for the body; they would never show a dead body on the news in Britain or America. So in that respect, our car is a body as well, effectively.3

If, as Deller says, his interest is in focusing on the impact of the war by “those who have first hand experience,” why did he decide to utilize the same dehumanizing strategies of using objects to replace people? Not only did Deller decide to only use the bombed out car as a reference to the Mutanabbi event, he and the New Museum decided not to include any of the artistic and creative responses of those directly affected by the bombing, which had sparked a near-immediate outpouring of literature, artistic work, and films by booksellers, artists, and citizens commemorating the disaster. 

The objects in the exhibition seem to be of secondary importance to the conversations that serve as the main participatory component of the program. These conversations, notes from the curators explain, are not to provide a simple “for” or “against” view of the war. It is to be “open-ended,” “messy,” and that, the (Museum) literature assures participants, is ok. It is even “good, as black-and-white readings of this situation have been of little use up to now."4 This all sounds very encouraging, except for the fact that the four people steering this conversation and taking it on the road were: Jeremy Deller, a British artist who has spent no time in Iraq; Essam Pasha, an Iraqi artist and former employee of the US Army who may or may not feel comfortable speaking freely in the US; Sergeant Jonathan Harvey, an American veteran of the Iraq War; and Nato Thompson, a Creative Time administrator and curator who has never spent any time in Iraq. Four men, two of whom worked for the US Army, have been chosen and sanctioned by some of the most prominent cultural institutions in the world (and certainly within the US), to “encourage conversation about our world” through “a project that strives to present a broad, informational, nonpartisan perspective of Iraq.”

The title and content of the exhibition conflates a conversation about Iraq with a highly guided perspective of the Occupation dressed up as a neutral museum space offering. Deller and his commissioning partners felt it appropriate to define “Iraq” through US military involvement, rather than as an independent site of experiences, histories, and narratives particular to its real and imagined borders. The war in Iraq “is as it is” to whom, exactly? This construct (of the project’s title) leads one to think that perhaps this is not an open forum about Iraq –or its long and varied history and people. In fact, the selection of “experts”, not to mention Deller and Thompson, and the choice of objects in the exhibition ensure that this “conversation” falls squarely on a US military grid.

The pervasiveness of the military’s imprint on the exhibit, and how information was presented, is most pronounced in the employment of Jonathan Harvey as one half of the “Expert” team who took this exhibit on the road.

Jonathan Harvey, who currently serves in the U.S. Army Reserve, is described in the New Museum’s biographical literature as having been a Platoon Sergeant in the US Army since 1997, and as a “specialist in the psychological effects of warfare…assisting in projects that include progressive teaching and, leadership and management roles in the academic and military environments.”5

While Harvey may have assisted in teaching projects in various environments, this description paints Harvey as a passive actor in an active war. In fact, Harvey was a PSYOP specialist actively serving in the US occupation, and says himself that he “worked closely with the Brigade’s Information Operations Officer.”6

In an interview published on the New Museum website, Harvey glosses over the specifics of his work, noting that PSYOP sounds “more mysterious than it really is. Without resorting to the boring army manual definitions to describe what (we) do, in a nutshell it involves communicating with Iraqis.”7 Harvey goes on to describe his role as a distributor of printed materials and newspapers, warnings and other such “helpful” means to “reach the people of Baghdad.” Harvey also describes his platoon’s role in assisting in “nighttime raids” in civilian homes. He goes so far as to claim that by approaching families “with a smile, my rifle at my side,” he was able to “transform their experience.”8

It is unclear how Harvey is able to surmise that he was able to “transform” the experiences of Iraqi families faced with soldiers breaking into their homes in the middle of the night for surprise interrogations. With or without a smile, it seems unlikely that these were “transformative” experiences, at least in the positive ways insinuated. Moreover, one would imagine an Iraqi family faced with armed units in the middle of the night to not respond in a way that might communicate anger, trauma, or offense, lest they be viewed as ‘suspect.’  More significantly however, is the way that Harvey describes (and the museums involved lend passive agreement to) his role as a PSYOP specialist with the US Army. As an Information Specialist, it comes as no surprise that he is able to narrate his role as a peacemaker, making order out of chaos, distributing helpful information as though he were a volunteer member of a neutral public awareness campaign.

While Harvey may find the army definition of PSYOP “boring,” it is anything but that. According to US Army recruitment material:

PSYOP Soldiers use information to influence the behavior of foreign audiences in support of U.S. policy and national objectives. Used during peacetime, contingencies, and declared war, these activities are non-lethal…The ultimate objective of U.S. military Psychological Operations is to convince enemy, neutral, and friendly governments, forces and populations to take actions favorable to the United States and its allies…Strategic psychological operations advance broad or long-term objectives; global in nature, they may be directed toward large audiences or at key communicators.9

This role of PSYOP’s is far from neutral during war, and the use of a seasoned PSYOP officer, trained to provide information to domestic and foreign audiences that will shape opinions in support of US military action, provides a clear use of the military narrative in a contemporary art setting, a compelling site if targets include “key communicators.” That his central involvement in creating a framework for discourse was approved by staff at four separate, highly regarded institutions is disturbing to say the least.

Nato Thompson, a co-curator of the project from Creative Time, participated in the road trip and produced an online diary of his experiences. While much of Thompson’s diary was composed of fairly benign encounters and conversations that took place on the trip (interspersed with various dinners and social interactions with curators and organizers along the way) his comments regarding co-participant Essam Pasha exemplify the mistrust of a non-mitigated Arab voice and person.

During a stop in Santa Fe, Thompson describes a heated discussion between a man who “came at Essam with some aggression,” accusing religious extremists of being the problem in Iraq. Essam replies that money is at the root of the issue, and that members of the US Army are “actually mercenaries.” Thompson states that the man “lost it,” and instead of focusing on the man’s misplaced reaction Thompson goes on to observe:  

Essam’s opinions are coming to the surface more frequently as the days wear on. I am sure that he knew that calling the US troops mercenaries would upset that man, and I think he enjoyed that idea. There’s no point trying to stop him. His temperament, whichever way it goes, is part of the project.10

It seems that as Essam’s role continued, he began to maneuver away from his initial, more placid remarks on the war and the US army. The negative effect of his “opinions,” (which might upset some because they are removed from the dominant American narrative) is for some reason seen by Thompson as something Pasha derives pleasure from. Perhaps he does find pleasure in stating his opinion. Wouldn’t anyone?

Thompson makes the assumption that this pleasure is simply the result of making an American upset, rather than from voicing one’s own beliefs. Thompson’s next reaction, that there is “no point in trying to stop him,” is equally demeaning. Why would he, or anyone else, try to “stop him” from allowing his “opinions to come to the surface?” Is this not the point of the project? According to Thompson, it may not actually be his opinion that is the point of the project, but “his temperament, whichever way it goes.” Is the temperament of “our Iraqi giant,"11 as Thompson describes Pasha elsewhere in the diary, the point of the project, or is it an open platform for conversation?

The description of Pasha as both “our Iraqi giant” and as possessing of a temperament that takes pleasure in the negative reactions of Americans effectively turns Pasha into a caricature of the volatile Arab. “Our Iraqi giant,”11 is a domesticated kind of beast, taken cross-country for exhibition. As is inevitable in the tired “other” construct, the true, volatile nature of the beast rises to the surface (here in the form of an independent opinion), and when this happens, “there is no point in trying to stop him.”

Thompson seems to be unaware of the gravity of his remarks regarding Pasha, nor the fundamental issues with the way the project was constructed. Responding to a critique of the project in Art Lies: A Contemporary Art Quarterly, Thompson states that,  

Trying to not sound too pro- or antiwar was important in producing a peculiarly tense area for focusing on people who have been there…There is also the strange accusation that the project is somehow a tour of apathy. Surely, producing dialogue with a blown-up car, a soldier and an Iraqi on hand certainly evades what one might describe as apathetic. How strange it is that the most damning of political accusations tend to fall on the few –and there are so very few –political projects that actually try to address complex phenomena such as audience, points of legibility and political urgency. Compared to what kind of project is this project “apathetic.”12  

Thompson is absolutely right when he states that the project is not “apathetic,” though he seems to be surprisingly unconscious that naming two US military personnel (regardless of whether or not one is Iraqi) as “experts” is precisely why the project could never be seen as apathetic. While there were additional participants involved in the series of conversations that took place at the New Museum in New York (which included a more diverse group of speakers outside of the military and male sphere), these two individuals (“a soldier, an Iraqi”) formed the centerpiece of the talks, and were the only “experts” present at each point of the cross-country trip. Not only are these central individuals devoid of expertise regarding Iraq, but their involvement in the war produces a narrative that cannot be neutral. “Producing dialogue with a blown-up car, a soldier and an Iraqi” is the same sort of controlled dialogue that has been produced over and over again for US consumption by the US military and media. And it is the same imagery that has served as a central part of the war effort. Thompson identifies the critical need for “political projects that actually try to address complex phenomena,” but fails to realize that the points of legibility needed are in complete opposition to those he has assisted in curating and presenting.

This program was, in all earnestness, touted as an opportunity to converse with “experts” that might address the “gaps in information” about Iraq in a nonpartisan setting. As a work of conceptual art subject to critique, one can ask whether it has accomplished its goal. Perhaps the exhibition at the Hayward Gallery will be handled in a different way during its four-month run, though it seems there has been no shift from “a destroyed car, maps, a banner, a film work, as well as a participatory element.” As such, the “gaps in information” would be more effectively addressed if their investigation were not relegated solely to participants, but on the artist himself and the institutions privileged with the opportunity –and power- to frame these discussions.

1 "Exhibitions: Past, "New Commissions: Jeremy Deller: It Is What Is: Conversations About Iraq," (2009).

2 Sarah Hromack, "What It Is: A Conversation with Jeremey Deller," Art in America (2009).

3 "Laura Hoptman, Nato Thompson, and Amy Mackie, in Conversation with Jeremy Deller," (2008).

4 Amy Mackie Laura Hoptman, and Nato Thompson, "Project Description "It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq: A Project by Jeremy Deller"," (2008).

5 "Experts on the Road," (2008).

6 Jonathan Harvey, "Essay by Jonathan Harvey," (2008).

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 "Psychological Operations ",  http://www.bragg.army.mil/sorb/SORB_PSYOPSHOME.html.

10 Nato Thompson, "Sante Fe Plaza, Santa Fe, New Mexico," (2009).

11 Nato Thompson, "University of Houston, Houston, Texas," (2009).

12 Nato Thompson, "In Response," Art Lies: A Contemporary Art Quarterly 63 (2010).

يُعامل التاريخ على يد المؤرخين المحترفين كسلسلة من الأحداث المترابطة منطقياً، وغالباً ما تتحوّل معالجات كهذه إلى ما يشبه الحتميات التاريخية لدى آخرين. بيد أن ما يغيب عن التاريخ باعتباره سلسلة من الأحداث المترابطة منطقياً يتمثل في استبعاد الغرائبي، واللامعقول، والاستثنائي، باعتبار أن مكان هذه الأشياء كلها الهامش لا المتن.

بيد أن هذا الإقصاء، وإن كان ممكناً في أزمنة مضت، لم يعد ممكناً بعد الانقلاب في مناهج العلوم الاجتماعية والإنسانية بداية من النصف الثاني من القرن العشرين. ومن نتائج هذا الانقلاب أن التاريخ نفسه، باعتباره سلسلة من الأحداث الموّثقة والمترابطة منطقياً، أصبح أمراً يصعب التحقق منه، استناداً إلى فرضية مفادها أن الحقيقة التاريخية إن لم تكن مستحيلة، فهي متعددة الأوجه والتأويلات.

لذا، انقسم علم التاريخ، الذي اقتصر في أزمنة مضت على سير الحكّام والفاتحين، إلى تواريخ مختلفة لهذه الحادثة، أو الحقبة، أو تلك. يمكن أن نفهم تاريخ الحرب العالمية الثانية، مثلاً، بطريقة جديدة تماماً، إذا كتبنا تاريخ النساء، أو الأطفال، أو عمّال النظافة، أو الحانات، أو اللصوص، أو الأقليات، في الفترة نفسها.

وغالباً ما يقوم الأدب، وعلومه، بسد الفراغ الناجم عن وجود مناطق رمادية، في هذه الحادثة التاريخية أو تلك. وهذا أمر يقبل التحقيق استناداً إلى فرضية بسيطة لكنها جديدة تماماً في مناهج العلوم الاجتماعية والإنسانية، ومفادها أن تاريخ هذه الحادثة أو تلك قد يكون أشياءً كثيرة في وقت واحد، لكنه في نهاية الأمر نص، وعمل من أعمال السرد، يتجلى في اللغة وبها، وبالتالي يصدق عليه ما يصدق على غيره من النصوص السردية، بقطع النظر عن المضمون. 

وقد أسهمت هذه الفرضية، أكثر من أي شيء آخر، في توسيع نطاق المعالجة التاريخية، إذ فتحت علوماً مختلفة ومستقلة على بعضها. وبالتالي قلّصت مساحة اليقين، بقدر ما أسهمت في توسيع نطاق المعرفة. وهذه سمة من سمات الجهد المعرفي في زمن ما بعد الحداثة.
على أية حال، وطالما نحن في سياق تحوّلات تاريخية، من عيار ثقيل، يعيشها العرب منذ مطلع العام الماضي، وما تزال مستمرّة حتى يوم الناس هذا، فإن هذا الكلام عن التاريخ يتم وفي الذهن تلك التحوّلات.

ما الذي حدث ويحدث؟
ولا اقصد، هنا، التشخيص والتأويل، بل التساؤل عن مكان الغرائبي، واللامعقول، والاستثنائي في كل ما يحدث وما يحدث، وعمّا إذا كانت لدينا القدرة، بالفعل، على التقاط الغرائبي، واللامعقول، والاستثنائي، والحيلولة دون إزاحته من المتن الهامش. لن تتمكن ثقافة ما من إعادة النظر وتحرير العلاقة بين الهامش والمتن من سلطة المألوف، والسائد، ومن سلطة النخب المُهيمنة في الحقلين السياسي والاجتماعي، قبل تفكيك العلاقة بين المعرفة والسلطة. وهذا لن يحدث في وقت قريب.

على أية حال، من اللافت للنظر في ما حدث ويحدث البرنامج الوثائقي عن أيام بن علي الأخيرة قبل الفرار من قرطاج. قبل فراره بيوم واحد، استدعت زوجته امرأة تمارس الرقية، على اعتبار أن عيناً قد أصابته.

وفي مصر، كما جاء في مقابلة مع صحيفة أجنبية، اعترف أحد المتنفذين في أجهزة الإعلام المصرية، أن عائلة مبارك كانت تنتظر معجزة من السماء، على اعتبار أن اسم مصر ورد في النص القرآني خمس مرّات، بينما لم تذكر مكة أكثر من مرّتين. هذا ما جاء في المقابلة، وثمة مشاهد درامية وردت على لسان الشخص نفسه حول سوزان مبارك، والحالة الهستيرية التي أصابتها عندما أدركت بأنها ستغادر القصر الرئاسي إلى الأبد.

أما في ليبيا، فقد روى أحد المقرّبين كيف أنفق القذافي أيامه الأخيرة بعد فراره من طرابلس في القراءة وإعداد الشاي. ثمة ما يشبه هذا الأمر في كلام علاء بشير عن أيام صدّام الأخيرة، كانت الحرب على الأبواب، وصدّام منهمك في كتابة روايته الأخيرة، بينما بنات العائلة الحاكمة يتسابقن على الذهاب إلى عيادة الجراحة التجميلية.

نحن لا نعرف ماذا يفعل بشّار الأسد في خريف النظام الذي ورثه عن أبيه، ونرجو ألا يطول الوقت قبل أن نعرف، لكن طريقته في الكلام والسفسطة ولغته الجسدية تفتح باباً مدهشاً للتأويل.

كل هذه الأشياء تدخل في باب الغرائبي، واللامعقول، والاستثنائي، لكن تحليلها يمكننا من إضاءة جوانب إضافية تُسهم في تعميق المعرفة بالنظم والنخب السياسية التي حكمت وما تزال في مناطق مختلفة من بلاد العرب. والواقع أن الأمر لا يقتصر على تعميق المعرفة بتلك النظم والنخب وحسب، بل يتعداه إلى تعميق المعرفة بمعنى ومبنى السلطة، أيضا.

تبقى مسألة أكيدة، الغرائبي، واللامعقول، والاستثنائي، ليس حكراً على بلاد العرب دون غيرهم. ففي عهد آخر القياصرة الروس، صعد نجم دجّال اسمه راسبوتين، احكم قبضته على العائلة المالكة، وتحكّم بهذا القدر أو ذاك في مصير النظام. جورج بوش الابن كان يسمع رسائل من السماء، وكانت لديه قناعة بأن العناية الإلهية أرسلته لغرض ما. في حالة راسبوتين وقعت مأساة، وفي حالة بوش الابن توفرت كل عناصر الملهاة. كلتاهما وجه لعملة واحدة.

المهم كلما سألنا ما الذي حدث ويحدث، يجب ألا تغيب عن أذهاننا ضرورة البحث عن الغرائبي واللامعقول والاستثنائي. في أميركا اللاتينية نجم عن سؤال كهذا أدب من طراز رفيع. سؤال يمتد من فترة الفتح الأسباني وحتى ظهور الدكتاتوريات الحديثة. وفي بلادنا يمكن أن يحدث هذا، وعلاوة عليه يمكن أن نزداد معرفة بمعنى السياسة والسلطة، إذا بحثنا عن نقطة بعيدة في الماضي، وعدنا إلى زمن الجمهوريات الوراثية. فلا شيء يفنى أو يُخلق من عدم. 

[عن موقع "الحوار المتمدن"] 

In October 2011, the newly renovated Sourp Giragos Armenian Apostolic Church reopened in Turkey’s southeastern province of Diyarbakir. Among the hundreds gathered to celebrate its first mass in over ninety years were local men and women who had chosen the occasion to be baptized into the Armenian Apostolic Church. Raised as Sunni Muslims, these men and women were the children and grandchildren of Armenians who had converted to Islam to escape persecution in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire.

Living in a society that glorified cultural homogeneity and in a country that still bore the scars of its Ottoman past, the first generation of converts often kept their Armenian heritage hidden from their children. They integrated into the communities around them and adopted, at least outwardly, a new language, religion, culture, and identity.

Less encumbered by the fear that silenced their parents and grandparents, the grandchildren of these Armenians have recently begun to dig into their family histories and to discuss their backgrounds with a kind of pride uncharacteristic of previous generations.

This growing trend in Turkey that values multicultural identities—and, in the process, exposes the absurdity of purity as a cultural ideal—rails against the Turkish nationalist model of identity that has become familiar to those who follow Turkish politics. But it is not the government that is fostering change; it is members of the civil society who are taking the matter of identity into their own hands.

These themes have been most notably explored through personal accounts of the grandchildren of converted Armenians. In examining the impact that the discovery of Armenian ancestry has had on their own identity construction, the grandchildren attest to the possibility of multiple belongings. This is a concept that unhinges the common adversarial depiction of Armenian and Turkish nationalism advanced by states and leaders and inspires a more fluid, inclusive understanding of identity, where both Turkish and Armenian elements can coexist within an individual.

Crypto-Armenians: Then and Now

While the international community is well acquainted with the plight of Armenians driven from Anatolia in 1915, it has only been in the past decade that attention has been focused on the Armenians who stayed in Turkey—known as “crypto-Armenians,” “Islamicized Armenians,” or, more disparagingly, as “leftovers of the sword.”

Although a small fraction of the pre-1915 Armenian community preserved its language and culture in Istanbul after Turkey’s founding in 1923, most Armenians who remained in Turkey faded into the social fabric of rural towns and villages across Anatolia. But, in recent years, these men and women are being pulled from obscurity with increased momentum, thanks in part to the 2004 publication of Fethiye Çetin’s memoir, Anneannem [My Grandmother].

In this groundbreaking text, Çetin—a Turkish human rights activist and lawyer best known abroad as legal counsel for the family of slain Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink—recounts her grandmother’s personal history. Her grandmother, born Heranoush to an Armenian family, was taken from her mother and siblings by a Turkish gendarme during the death marches in 1915. She was renamed Şeher, was raised as a Turk, and repressed all memory of her Armenian past until the very end of her life.

Çetin’s pioneering account reverberated across Turkey, resonating particularly with families who had uncovered similar stories in their own personal histories. In some cases, My Grandmother prompted these families to discuss their Armenian ancestry openly and without shame, leading to the publication of another unparalleled work, written with Ayşe Gül Altınay, Torunlar [The Grandchildren], published in French as Les petits-enfants.

Les petits-enfants is a series of personal accounts by twenty-five grandchildren of converted Armenians, originally published in Turkish in 2009 and translated into French by Célin Vuraler in 2011. In these interviews, the grandchildren piece together what they know about their grandparents’ childhoods and families, explain how their grandparents were integrated into Sunni or Alevi communities, and describe their relationship with them.

The startling, often brutal way that the grandchildren discovered their grandparents’ Armenian ancestries, rattling whatever clear conception they had of their identities up until that point, is a key feature of each account. For example, one grandchild, the celebrated poet Bedrettin Aykin, remembers first learning of his family’s past unexpectedly when a friend’s mother referred to his mother as “the young infidel,” leading him to question his mother about their origins. Having been treated as a secret within their families and a source of shame within their society, the discovery of Armenian heritage often came as a shock to these grandchildren and forced them to reevaluate the way they understood themselves and their relationships to their communities.

These painful recollections are nevertheless interspersed with bittersweet indications—obvious only in hindsight—of the past their grandparents kept hidden from view. One granddaughter recalls that her grandmother preferred to be called Satenig rather than Süreyya, the Turkish name on her identity card; only when talking about her grandmother to an Armenian friend did she realize that Satenig was, in fact, an Armenian name. Another grandchild remembers coloring eggs with her grandmother every year in the early spring, entirely unaware, at the time, of the insight it gave into her grandmother’s Christian upbringing.

Grappling with Latent Armenian Identity

The grandchildren—raised as Turks, Kurds, or Alevis, speaking Turkish, Kurdish, or Zaza, and practicing, to varying degrees, Sunni Islam or Alevism—reacted to the news of their grandparents’ Armenian heritage in ways representative of the diversity among them. Most took the opportunity to read more about Armenians; a great number of grandchildren cited the work of novelists Migirdiç Margosyan, Elif Shafak, and Kemal Yalçin as fundamental in humanizing an unfamiliar yet vilified group of people. Many also began to read about Ottoman Armenian history, and in the process, challenged the depiction of Armenians as wicked traitors, which had been instilled in them at school and in their larger society from an early age.

Some grandchildren were intrigued by the religious piece of their Armenian ancestry, which prompted them to study the intersections between Christianity and Islam or, like those baptized at Sourp Giragos last October, to convert to the faith in which their grandparents were raised.

Although the conclusions that each grandchild drew from his or her discovery varied considerably, each was compelled to reflect on his or her identity and how this new revelation would impact it. For some, their grandparents’ past had no effect on how they conceived of their identity. One grandchild reflects: “I was born in Turkey. I am Turkish. I am Muslim. Should I, all of a sudden, become Armenian and go to Yerevan?” Or: “Up until today, I have never felt Turkish, Kurdish, or Armenian, even after learning of my family’s history. I don’t identify with any of these nationalities. I don’t want to be attached to anywhere.”

The absence of a single, dominant identity and the significance of multiculturalism are themes repeated in a significant number of accounts. After an initial period of crisis and uncertainty, many of the grandchildren came to value belonging to an eclectic mix of communities: “I have Armenian, Kurdish, and Turkish cultures. I know all of them well and I am the product of what they represent. But I don’t know how to respond when one asks me if I am Turkish, Kurdish, or Armenian. I am a bit of all three.” This emphasis on multiple affiliations illustrates a flexible, more inclusive understanding of identity—a break with the prevailing nationalist conceptualization that so often attempts to place people into neat categories that do not represent reality.

Hybrid Identities

There is something hopeful to be said about a generation that can see beyond artificial constructs of nationhood and has the confidence to formulate identities based on its own individual experiences. After successful attempts by their grandparents to assimilate into the dominant culture, and desperate attempts by their parents to conceal any suggestion of their otherness, these grandchildren are bravely rejecting their society’s taboos by acknowledging and, in many cases, embracing their Armenian ancestry. In his interview, one grandchild eloquently comments on the dangers of identity suppression so common in past generations:

I don’t wish for anyone to hide their true identity or to mask past errors. I think that people become much more extremist when they hide their pasts and protect themselves by diverting attention. [Bülent] Ecevit, wanting to erase his Kurdish origins, became a Turkish nationalist politician; my uncle, hoping to make people forget his Armenian ancestry, immersed himself fervently in Islam. People who are sure of themselves would not exist in such contradiction.

The shift towards self-acceptance is promising because it indicates that identities no longer need to be understood as mutually exclusive. One granddaughter, who considers herself a devout Muslim and has chosen to wear hijab, celebrates the fact that she is not a “pure Turk” and credits her converted Armenian grandmother with teaching her about the faith. She shows us that a variety of seemingly irreconcilable identities can coexist harmoniously with one another.

We see this emphasis on coexistence again in the accounts of grandchildren with extended families whose members belong to communities often understood to be in perpetual conflict with one another:

I like this diversity very much because my two families, Armenian and Kurdish, mutually respect each other. For example, when my mother visited my Armenian family, we would always make them a prayer rug. And my mother, during Christian holidays, would always make a meal for the occasion. This proves that it’s completely possible for the two cultures to cohabitate. Communication and common ground is all that is needed.

Another grandchild shared a similar experience:

In our family, there are Syriacs, Armenians, and Muslims. My aunts—my mother’s sisters—married Syriacs and live as Syriacs. My sister married an Armenian. As for my maternal grandparents, they are still Muslim and pray five times a day. It is a mix of different lifestyles.

These stories are models of exceptionally productive understandings of identity. Rather than being used as a way to create divisions among people, these families see identity as a personal code that provides comfort and a sense of belonging, but that resists politicization and spurns the idea of boundaries and limitations.

Implications for the Armenian Diaspora

The struggle to formulate identity is not foreign to Armenians living in the diaspora, who are also exposed to a variety of different cultures and identities from which to choose. The accounts of these grandchildren are in fact quite relevant to diasporic experiences and provide an alternative approach to Armenian identity construction, which encourages a kind of inclusivity that does not often characterize Armenian communities.

The Armenian diaspora today is composed of descendants of Ottoman Armenians who, despite having lived in exile for almost a century, still feel a close connection to their heritage; in some cases, they continue to speak Western Armenian, a linguistic branch distinct from the one spoken in the Republic of Armenia today. Scattered in large part across Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas, the people who comprise the Armenian diaspora have, to varying degrees, retained aspects of their ancestral culture while at the same time participating in the societies in which they were raised.

Despite what seems to be fertile ground for the development of dual identities, Armenians in the diaspora have internalized the idea that identity fusion makes their Armenian experience somehow inauthentic. A hierarchy of “Armenianness”— based on the degree to which a person adheres to a perceived, yet undefined paragon of ethnic perfection—is born from these feelings of inauthenticity. This hierarchy is dangerous because there is no ideal way to understand identity or the factors that influence it; the sole requirement is for it to have value to the individual. For some, language may be the most important building block; for others, it may be food, religion, or music.

Identity is personal, but it becomes public when people create an environment welcome only to those who subscribe to the same brand of identity. General feelings of exclusion from the Armenian community are illustrated in a comment from Behçet Avci, one of the grandchildren baptized at Sourp Giragos last October: “We have been ostracized by both Sunni Muslims and Armenians. It is a very emotional moment for me and I’m a bit upset because unfortunately we do not belong to either side.”

Understanding that identity is not static, but rather that it is evolving—constantly being defined and redefined—would encourage others to see the value in multiple belongings, ease feelings of alienation, and eliminate the idea that there is a certain kind of ideal Armenian identity for which to strive.

The accounts of the grandchildren in Les petits-enfants can teach the diaspora that hybrid identities are not corrosive or threatening; they enrich one another and, most importantly, they represent reality. Egyptian-Armenian, American-Armenian, French-Armenian, Syrian-Armenian, Argentinean-Armenian: hyphenated identities describe lived experiences and should be appreciated rather than tinged with guilt.

The accounts in Les petits-enfants also implicitly encourage readers to view each person as an individual with his or her own complex identity, and not as a representative of a country or a culture. They show us that prejudices wear away with personal contact, with time, and most importantly, with knowledge. The grandchildren were forced to come to this realization abruptly, but by learning from their stories, both Turks and Armenians can come to this realization more gradually by transcending the hostility fueled by the nationalist rhetoric on both sides and seeing one another as individuals above all else.

14مليوناً و 600 الف من السوريين والسوريات مطالبون بأن يقرأوا ويناقشوا مشروع دستور من دزينة من الصفحات قبل أن يستفتوا بقبوله أو رفضه في غضون اسبوعين لا أكثر. للاستحقاق وجهان: امتحان نسبة المشاركين في الاستفتاء، واختتام مسيرة «الإصلاحات»، على اعتبار ان الدستور المقترح هو أم التشريعات وصيغة التعاقد «الجديد» بين الحكام - والأحرى الحاكم الفرد - والمحكومين.

إن نظرة مدقّقة لمواد الدستور الصادر بمرسوم جمهوري في الخامس عشر من هذا الشهر لا تبشّر بأكثر من دعوة للاستفتاء على إبقاء النظام كما هو او يكاد.

إذا استثنينا الرطانة الحضارية والحداثية في المقدمة، بما تحمله من «الاعتزاز بالانتماء العربي» وبموقع سوريا الاقليمي ومخاطر الامبريالية والصهيونية، يلاحظ القارئ ثلاثة امور نافرة:

- اولاً، نقل مهمة «تحقيق الوحدة العربية الشاملة» من المادة الاولى من الدستور الى مقدّمته لسبب خفي تفسيره على كاتب هذه السطور.

- ثانياً، خلو المقدمة من أية اشارة للجولان المحتل ومهمة تحريره من ضمن المهمات الوطنية والقومية التي تضطلع بها سوريا بما هي «قلب العروبة النابض وجبهة المواجهة مع العدو الصهيوني والحامل الأساسي للمقاومة ضد الهيمنة الاستعمارية على الوطن العربي ومقدراته وثرواته» (المقدمة).

- وثالثاً، لا يتوقع لمثل هذا التعريف الانتمائي العربي الصرف لسوريا أن يساهم بشيء في تعاطي النظام مع الجماعات السورية غير العربية، الذين لا يقدّم لها الدستور غير كفالة «التنوع الثقافي» (المادة 9).

على عكس ما تبرّع البعض إعلامياً بالحديث عن إسقاط العلمانية من الدستور، ينبغي التذكير بأن المفردة لم ترد في دستور العام 1973أصلاً. والفقرتان من المادة 3 اللتان تعلنان أن دِين رئيس الجمهورية هو الإسلام وأن «الفقه الإسلامي مصدر رئيسي للتشريع» لم يطرأ عليهما اي تعديل. الجديد هو إضافة فقرة تنص على ان «الاحوال الشخصية للطوائف الدينية مصونة ومرعية». هل يعني ذلك غير ان البلد الشقيق قد انضم الى النادي اللبناني من حيث طائفية أحواله الشخصية؟ فكم نظام احوال شخصية سوف تفرّخ سوريا؟

حسناً فعل المشرّع بإزالة اية اشارة للاشتراكية في تعريف هوية الدولة والنظام (المادة الاولى) وفي البند الثقافي (المادة 23 عن الثقافة القومية الاشتراكية). ومع إسقاط الاشتراكية يسقط مبدأ المساواة (المادة 19). والنظام لم يكن له من الاشتراكية حتى الاسم. ولكن ثمة بقايا الممانعة... في الاقتصاد. لا يتبنى الدستور الاقتصاد الحر، لكنه يؤسس الاقتصاد على التخطيط والتنمية الشاملة المستدامة والمتوازنة. ويدخِل فوق ذلك تعديلات معبّرة على اشكال الملكية إذ يختصر اشكال الملكية الثلاثة لدستور1973- ملكية الشعب والملكية الجماعية والملكية الفردية - بصيغة ملتبسة هي «الملكية الخاصة من جماعية وفردية».

التعددية السياسية تمارسها أحزاب «مرخّصة». كيف لا؟ علماً ان الدستور يمنع تأسيس احزاب على اساس «ديني او طائفي او قبلي او مناطقي او فئوي او مهني او بناء على التفرقة بسبب الجنس او الاصل او العرق او اللون». من يتولى فحص منسوب كل هذه العناصر في طالبي الترخيص والتأكد من خلوّهم من آفات «التفرقة»؟ الجواب في قانون الأحزاب الجديد: لجنة برئاسة وزير الداخلية يعيّنها رئيس الدولة! ويتساءل المرء إزاء هذا اللائحة الطويلة من المحرّمات: هل هي اكثر من لائحة اعذار لرفض اي حزب يراد رفض الترخيص له؟ فهل احزاب «الجبهة الوطنية التقدمية» التي اعتبرت مرخصة حكمًا، منذ صدور قانون الاحزاب، تتوافر فيها حقاً كل هذه الشروط؟ اضف الى ذلك ان بعض ما ورد في الدستور متناقض مع قانون الانتخاب الذي لا يزال قائماً على اساس التوزيع المهني للمرشحين بين عمال وفلاحين ومستقلين.

لن ننسى إلغاء المادة الثامنة. يبقى السؤال عن مفاعليها. كان الدور القائد لحزب البعث يتضمن احتكاره العمل الحزبي في المؤسسة العسكرية وبين الطلاب. هل يعني إلغاء المادة العتيدة فتح باب العمل السياسي والحزبي في هذين القطاعين؟

بيت القصيد هو طبعاً صلاحيات رئيس الجمهورية. حتى لا يضحك علينا أحد بأن المشكلة في الدستور والنظام السياسي كامنة في حكم الحزب الواحد: الدستور السوري، القديم والمقترح، يكرّس نظاماً سياسياً قائماً على حكم الفرد من خلال الصلاحيات الاستثنائية شبه المطلقة لرئيس الجمهورية. لنقل فوراً إن التعديل الوحيد هنا هو ان الانتخابات الرئاسية باتت تنافسية بشروط وان الدستور الحالي يسمح للرئيس الاسد برئاسة تمتد الى 16 سنة اضافية. والطريف أن المشرّع نسي أن يعدّل سنّ الترشيح لرئاسة الدولة فبقي على حاله حسب آخر تعديل أتاح لبشار الاسد في الرابعة والثلاثين من عمره أن يترشّح لخلافة ابيه في العام 2000.

الشعب ينتخب نوابه لمجلس الشعب لكن رئيس الجمهورية هو الذي «يدعوهم الى الاجتماع» بواسطة مرسوم رئاسي، ما يؤكّد انهم لا يصيرون نواباً للشعب الا بمصادقة السلطة الرئاسية التي يُراد لها ان توازي السيادة الشعبية (المادة 60).

ورئيس الجمهورية هو رأس السلطة التنفيذية والتشريعية. الغموض في كيفية تشكيل الوزارة يفيد أنه يعيّن الوزارة ويقيلها فرداً ومجموعاً، مع ان مجلس الشعب زيدت صلاحياته من حجب الثقة عن الوزراء الافراد الى حجب الثقة عن الوزارة برمّتها. عدا عن ذلك، يمارس الرئيس سلطاته التنفيذية في علاقة مباشرة مع الوزراء الأفراد، ويجمع مجلس الوزراء برئاسته، ويطالب الوزراء بتقارير عن نشاطهم، ما يعني انهم مسؤولون تجاهه، فيما يتولى رئيس الوزراء «الاشراف» عليهم (المادة 98). من جهة ثانية، لا يكتفي الرئيس بإصدار القوانين التي يقرّها مجلس الشعب، ولا مجرد اقتراح قوانين على مجلس الشعب، انه يملك سلطة التشريع خارج دورات انعقاد مجلس الشعب وخلالها «اذا دعت الضرورة» ولا يستطيع مجلس الشعب إلغاء القوانين التي يصدرها الرئيس الا بثلثي أعضائه، وللرئيس الى ذلك الحق في استفتاء الشعب (المادة 112) وفي تجميد عمل مؤسسات الدولة «في حال خطر جسيم وحال يهدد الوحدة الوطنية» (المادة 113).

وحتى لا يطول الشرح، للرئيس الحق في حلّ مجلس الشعب (المادة 117). وهو، فوق هذا كله، ليس مسؤولاً عن «الأعمال التي يقوم بها مباشرة» الا في حال الخيانة العظمى. وهذا يعني أن الرئيس ليس مسؤولاً عن الاعمال غير المباشرة التي يقوم بها من هم تحت إمرته بما هو الآمر الناهي في السلطتين التشريعية والتنفيذية وتتويجاً القائد العام للقوات المسلحة والأمنية. ولعل هذا ما يفسّر التصريح الشهير للصحيفة الاميركية بأنه ليس مسؤولاً عن اعمال قواته المسلحة!

هذه قراءة في الدستور السوري المقترح على الاستفتاء، والمفترض أنه يشكل تجسيداً وتتويجاً لـ«الإصلاحات» التي يدعو النظام الشعب السوري أن يوافق عليها لمعالجة أزمة دموية مستمرة منذ ما يزيد عن سنة، اندلعت الاحتجاجات فيها مؤخراً في عقر دار النظام وعاصمتيه السياسية والاقتصادية، وهي أزمة يصفها رئيس الدولة نفسه بأنها تهدّد بتقسيم سوريا.

هل من حاجة لمزيد؟

بلى. كيف يمكن تصوّر «الحوار» الذي يدعو إليه الراعي الروسي والصيني، وقد صدرت نتائج الحوار سلفاً؟

[عن جريدة ”السفير“ اللبنانية]

Sunday Times reporter Marie Colvin, killed in Syria on Wednesday reminds us all of the importance of front line reporting (1) along with a French photographer, Remi Ochlik and, on the previous day a Syrian citizen journalist Rami Al-Sayed (2)

‘Phone Calls to Hell’: Syria’s citizen journalists, including Rami Al-Sayed

‘Damascus Launching the Syrian Journalists Association after Decades of Oppression’

‘Syrian Security Forces Target Doctors’, in The Guardian

‘Red Cross tries to broker Syria truce as tanks move on Homs’

‘Officials killed in Syria’s Idlib Province’, report by Al-Jazeera English

‘Syria: Razan Ghazzawi and female colleagues freed’, in Global Voices update

‘Syria: my enemy’s enemy is not my friend’, a spat within the UK Left emerges on Syria

‘Syria disintegrating under crippling sanctions’: Faisal al-Qudsi interviewed by the BBC

‘Syrian forces fire on funeral procession’ in The Wall Street Journal (1) and see footage here from Mezze (2)

‘China backs Syria’s referendum, calls for end of violence by all sides’

Wallerstein on the ‘Syrian impasse’

British government announces humanitarian aid package for Syria; it feels unable to confirm who the 3 humanitarian agencies are as this might hinder implementation in Syria

Live streams from Homs via Bambuser are now being blocked by the Syrian government

The director of the Council for the Advancement of Arab British Understanding has a letter in The Economist: setting up a buffer zone is not the answer and will not be a safe haven for civilians

‘UN Syria resolution which countries voted no’

‘Syrian rebel refugees in Jordan nurse wounds and plan a fightback’, in The National newspaper

‘American reporter Anthony Shadid dies in Syria’ (1); read his NYT obituary here (2)

Fears for Damascus activists arrested says Amnesty

UN Resolution on Syria, 16 February (1), and see the digital boards at the UN vote here (2)

If you want, you can now access all CNN’s Syria coverage from one site

‘Syrian refugees get help across the border’ report from Turkey in Spiegel online

‘Why Israel should intervene in Syria’: had to include this gem.  Nathan, perhaps stick to fiction?

‘Secretary General castigates Syria ahead of General Assembly vote’, in the New York Times

They are pushing Syrian into a religious war that they will certainly get’, in-depth reporting by the Guardian’s Martin Chulov

‘Syria blocks texts with Dublin made gear’ in Bloomberg

Arabic Language Articles:

معارض سوري: كيف يمكن لشعب أن يقبل الحوار والمسدس مصوَّب نحو رأسه

ملاحظات على مشروع الدستور السوري الجديد

1/2 مسارات غير مطروقة: التأمل في تبعات الديناميكيات السورية

2/2 مسارات غير مطروقة: التأمل في تبعات الديناميكيات السورية

إستفتاء الأحد في سوريا: أول مرة بلا %99.98 

عن الدين والدولة والدستور السوري الجديد… بقلم علي المير ملحم 

دستور سوري مدني أم «عثملّي» ديني؟

بيــن مؤشــرات الركــود و«المناعــة» الاقتصاديــة

سورية بانتظار خطاب التنحي

بعد أن وصلت إلى 12 ساعة .. وزير الكهرباء: تقليص تقنين الكهرباء إلى 6 ساعات يوميا بداية الأسبوع القادم 

المقدم خالد الحمود: نرفض عسكرة المدنيين ونطالب بتسليح الجيش الحر 

ملامح من الوضع الراهن للأزمة السورية

        تمرْكُس الظواهري وتأسْلُم غيفارا! 

علي فرزات: كي تكون حراً …يجب أن يكون الآخر حراً

الجمعية العامة تؤكد اليوم «عزلة» سورية

Social Media/Video clips

The Times front cover for Wednesday 22 February “Syria slays its children” on its Facebook site

Very witty tweets from https://twitter.com/#!/SameralAtrush in the last week, especially commentary on Nasrallah’s speech (Thursday 16 March) and insight into family arguments on Syria:

After prolonged negotiations with my Baathist uncle we have agreed that there is someone shelling Homs. Now negotiating over who is shelling (14 Feb)

See Malek Jandali’s Qashoush Freedom Symphony on YouTube tweeted by @JKhashoggi

Art and the politics of foreign powers collide in this video

Recent Jadaliyya Articles on Syria

الاستفتاء على الدستور السوري: النظام الفردي كما هو 

لا شيء يفنى أو يُخلق من عدم 

حين يكون الكوكب بأسره ضد الثورة

The Real Me and the Hypothetical Syrian Revolution - Part 1 

Syria's Islamic Movement and the Current Uprising: Political Acquiescence, Quietism, and Dissent

Remembering Anthony Shadid

Our Friend Anthony Shadid's Stories

Anthony Shadid Is No Longer with Us

Syria: Razan Ghazzawi Arrested...Again

كامل نص الدستور السوري الجديد الذي تسلمه بشار الأسد

The Insha'at Exodus

Jadaliyya Launches Syria Page 

Is It Time to Intervene in Syria? NPR Discussion with Bassam Haddad and Others

Sowing the Seeds of Dissent: Economic Grievances and the Syrian Social Contract’s Unraveling

خرجت من سورية، ولا فخر، كلمة الشبيحة إلى العالم ولغاته، بينما كان المسمى يخرج إلى "الشارع" السوري كالجنّي، يروع ويقتل، ويكره ويقذع في البذاءة. "يُشبّح". ودخلت اللغة العربية ذاتها كلمة لم تكن معروفة خارج سورية، بل لم تكن معروفة في سورية نفسها على نطاق واسع. ولم تلبث أن أدرجت في عائلة من الكلمات النسيبة: شبّح، يشبّح، تشبيحا؛ وأن جُعلت علما على الموالين للنظام، يقابلها "المندسون" التي استصلحها المعارضون الشباب عنوانا جامعا لهم؛ وأن أدخِلت في سياقات جديدة: شبيحة القلم (رنا قباني)، شبيحة المعارضة، شبيح الفلاسفة، وهذا لقب سوري لبرنار هنري ليفي. 

أصل الكلمة غير واضح: هل هي مشتقة من أشباح، لكون الشبيحة خارجون على القانون يعملون في الظلام، بالمعنيين الحرفي والمجازي، ويظهرون ويختفون بسرعة؛ أم من سيارة المرسيدس "الشبح"، المنزوعة النمرة(1)، والمجهولة الهوية تاليا، التي يبدو أن كبار الشبيحة يفضلونها في عملياتهم وتمييز أنفسهم؟ أم ربما من "تمديد الصلاحيات وتعريضها وتوسيعها"(2)، على نحو ما يجري تمديد الشخص وتعريضه، شبْحه، بأن يقف على طوله وذراعاه ممدودان على جانبيه؟ "الصلاحيات" هي التخويل الرسمي بعمل ما، و"التمديد والتوسيع والتعريض" هو ما يفترض أن الشبيحة يقومون به.

1

من المحتمل أن الكلمة دخلت التداول السوري في النصف الثاني من سبعينات القرن العشرين، وبخاصة بعد التدخل السوري في لبنان عام 1976، وما تزامن معه من قفزة في التهريب من بلد مفرط الانفتاح كلبنان إلى بلد كان منغلقا اقتصاديا بإحكام كسورية. لكن الكلمة حازت انتشارا وطنيا بالتزامن مع أزمة وطنية كبرى وقعت قبل أكثر من ثلاثين عاما. ولقد اقتصر لقب الشبيحة حينها، وحتى تفجر الثورة السورية في منتصف آذار 2011، على شبان ذكور من منطقة الساحل السوري، علويو المولد، ورؤساؤهم من آل الأسد، وفي وقت لاحق من أسر نافذة أخرى: آل ديب (نسائب لبيت الأسد)، آل مخلوف (أولاد خال أبناء حافظ الأسد). وهم يعملون في التهريب (أدوات كهربائية، تبغ، مخدرات، خمور، آثار،...)، أو فرض الخوّات، ويتصفون بالخشونة والقسوة، وبالتبعية العمياء لرؤسائهم الذين يوصف واحدهم ب"المعلم"(3) أو "الخال"(4). فهم بذلك أقرب إلى منظمات المافيا، ومثلها هم معروفون من قبل أجهزة الحكم المركزية التي نتغض النظر عنهم، والمحلية التي تتواطأ معهم، وتضمن لهم، الحصانة بحكم قرابة رؤسائهم، ولا تتجاسر حتى على الدفاع عن نفسها حين يحصل أن تتضارب المصالح(5).

في ثمانينات القرن العشرين كان الشبيحة، المتمتعون بحصانة تامة، يتصرفون بحرية مطلقة في مدينة اللاذقية. يحصل أن يمتعوا أنفسهم بإجبار زبائن مقهى على الانبطاح تحت الطاولات، وصادف أن كان بينهم مرة المفكر السوري المرحوم إلياس مرقص؛ أو يقتلوا شابا رفض إهانة من أحدهم(6)، أو يتوسلوا التهديد للاستيلاء دونما مقابل أو بمقابل زهيد على أملاك اشتهوها لأنفسهم، أو يغتصب زعماءهم فتيات جميلات؛ أو يتولوا التحكيم بين شخصين مع نيل عمولة كبيرة ممن يفوز، وهو الأغنى طبعا(7).  

وضحايا الشبيحة متنوعون، غير قليل منهم علويون. تتكلم مرويات متواترة من بداية التسعينات عن اختطاف الشابة هالة عاقل، ثم اغتصبت وقتلت ورميت جثتها أمام منزل ذويها. وفي الفترة نفسها قتل الأستاذ الجامعي سمير غفر لأنه رفض إنجاح طالبة يبدو أنه محسوبة على شبيح كبير. وبما أن الشبيحة يقيمون في الأحياء العلوية أو المختلطة فإن أول أذاهم يصيب جوارهم. كان الشبيح أبو رماح يسخر من جيرانه في الحي في اللاذقية، قبل أن يغلق مدخله، وينصب فيه مراجيح لأطفاله و"شادرا" يستخدمه كمضافة(8).    

2

أولى ملامح ظاهرة الشبيحة السورية أن الحدود بينها وبين أجهزة النظام مائعة. في أصل ذلك قرابة الدم التي تجمع "معمليهم" بالرئيس في نظام حكم شخصي (يوصف الرئيس بالمعلم أيضا) من جهة، وقرابة بنيوية تتمثل في شراكة الطرفين في الاعتباط و"التَبَلّي" و"السلبطة"(9). والأخيرة كلمة سورية شائعة، يتكثف فيما نمط ممارسة السلطة في "سورية الأسد"، وتمتزج فيها مدركات السلب (جذر سلب) واللبط (جذر لبط) والتسلط (جذر سلط). أما التبلّي فهو الاتهام الكاذب لشخص بأمر من شأنه أن يلحق به أذى شديدا، مثل أنه شتم الرئيس أو قال كلاما طائفيا(10).

ولقد كانت "سرايا الدفاع" بدءا من النصف الثاني من سبعينات القرن العشرين ولعقد بعده، أقرب شيء إلى ميليشيا لا يضبطها قانون، ويُنفق عليها بسخاء تمييزي من المال العام. وكان رفعت الأسد، قائدها حتى عام 1985، "شبيحا" بكل معنى الكلمة، رجلا شعبيا خشنا، عنيفا ومتهتكا وجشعا، لا نهاية لقسوته وفساده، وكان شبه محتكر لتجارة وتهريب الآثار من البلاد. كان رجل الغريزة والاندفاع مقابل أخيه حافظ الذي كان رجل الحساب والأناة. ومعلوم أن رفعت كان البطل المباشر مذبحة حماة عام 1982، وقبلها لمذبحة سجن تدمر صيف 1980. أما حافظ فهو بطل كل الأشياء. ولعل التعذيب اليومي العشوائي للسجناء الإسلاميين طوال عشرين عاما في سجن تدمر هو المثال الأنسب على نمط البطولة الذي يشبهه.

على كل حال كان يكفي أن تكون الأولوية العليا للنظام هي دوامه حتى يجري النظر إلى المجتمع المحكوم بريبة، أو يعتبر مصدرا للمخاطر يتعين الاحتراس منه. هذه النظرة ركن جوهري في عقيدة أجهزة الأمن السوري في الأزمنة الأسدية كلها. فإذا تقاطع ذلك مع سردية مظلومية تاريخية، منتشرة في البيئة العلوية التي خرج منها أكثر القادة الأمنيين في العهد الأسدي، وكثير من عموم رجال الأمن، صار مرجحا أن تظهر عناصر ما دون دولتية في سلوك أجهزة الأمن، لطالما تظاهرت عبر التعامل الحقود والثأري مع المعارضين، العلويين منهم بقدر لا يقل عن غيرهم، ومع المجتمع ككل. صار متوقعا أيضا أن يجنح رجالها في أوقات الشدة إلى التصرف كشبيحة. ولقد رأى السوريون والمهتمون بالشؤون السورية فيديوهات تظهر مجموعات المخابرات تتصرف بأسلوب الحملات التأديبية الاستعمارية، أو بالأسلوب الذي يميز المليشيات الطائفية في الحرب اللبنانية والحرب العراقية. فيديو البيضا من أشهرها(11). لكنه ليس الوحيد. 

يمتزج في مدرك الشبيحة الأصلي أربعة أشياء. أولها قرابة الدم والمذهب مع آل الحاكم. وثانيها نزعة عداء للمجتمع، تجعل من الشبيحة أداة صالحة لممارسة العنف المنظم وغير المنظم ضد السكان. ولعل العداء للمجتمع تحوير لنزعة معادية للسلطة والنظام الاجتماعي، منتشرة في أوساط المهمشين والأقليات، وذات محتوى ديمقراطي مبدئي، لكنها انقلبت في الزمن الأسدي إلى نزعة عدوانية محافظة، خادمة للاستبداد والتجزؤ الاجتماعي. وثالث سمات الشبيحة التبعية الشخصية لقادتهم، التي تسهل القرابة والولاء من أمرها. وأخيرا هناك الدافع الاقتصادي القوي. يعمل كثير من الشبيحة في التهريب(12) ، ويفيد بعض مصادر معلوماتي أنهم يفضلون سيارات المرسيدس الشبح، لصندوقها الكبير الذي يتسع لسلع استهلاكية ثمينة. وكان الشائع أن هذه السيارات مهربة من لبنان، وأن علامتها الفارقة تداعي مظهرها رغم حداثة تصنيعها، بسبب طيش الشبيحة في استخدامها، واستمتاعهم بالتشفيط بها، وربما لكونها مالا مسروقا في الأصل لم يتعب عليه.

ويتوسل الشبيحة القوة للاستيلاء على موارد مادية أو منافذ مجزية للدخل: الموانئ مثلا. كان لرفعت الأسد ميناء خاص به في اللاذقية، لم يغلق إلا بعد تفجر الصراع بينه وبين أخيه الرئيس عام 1984. لكن بينما يجني زعماء الشبيحة ثروات مهولة، فإن عموم الشبيحة أناس محدودو الموارد، ولا يكاد أكثرهم يملك مؤهلات للعيش غير التشبيح. ويشتبه كثيرون أن مستوى تنمية منطقة الساحل متدهور من أجل إبقاء المنطقة، سكانها العلويون تحديدا، مصدرا لعضلات متدنية التأهيل تدافع عن النظام. إنهم "قوة حكم" (على نحو ما نقول "قوة عمل") رخيصة الثمن.

والشبيح النمطي متدني التعليم، ينحدر من بيئة اجتماعية مهمشة وفقيرة، فـ"أبناء المشايخ [العلويون] لا يعملون شبيحة لأحد على الإطلاق"، حسب أحد مصادري. وهو ضخم الجثة عموما، عضلي الجسم، متين البنيان، حليق الرأس، طويل الذقن، ويرتدي لباسا أسود في الغالب. لكن مع اتساع نطاق ظاهرة الشبيحة وتعمم التشبيح، لم يعد هناك شكل قياسي للشبيح. إنه اليوم عضلات مزودة بسلاح ناري أو بهراوة كهربائية. 

والطائفية أداة سياسية مناسبة للنظام لأنها تسهل تعبئة هؤلاء واستتباعهم للدفاع عنه، دون أن تكون لهم في الغالب مصلحة مباشرة في ذلك. هذا بالضبط ما يجعل الطائفية ظاهرة خطيرة وغير عقلانية. إن فقراء أو محرومين يمكن أن يكونوا أدوات شرسة للدفاع عن أغنياء سلطة وثروة لا يحترمونهم ولا يهمهم رفاههم، وذلك عبر استنفار القرابة الدينية أو المذهبية.

لكن الطائفية مجرد مسهِّل لأمر التبعية الشخصية. وسنقول لاحقا إن ظاهرة الشبيحة تعممت خارج مهدها الأصلي، نحو أوساط تتميز بقوة علاقات التبعية الشخصية، أو المحسوبيات والاستزلام. 

3

والشبيحة على ولاء أكيد للرئيس والنظام. ولم يدخل النظام في مواجهة معهم إلا في سياقات محددة، مثلا حين قاد باسل الأسد حملة على تشكيلاتهم في مطلع التسعينات في سياق تأهيله لوراثة أبيه. وقد جرى اعتقال بعضهم، وإلزام زعماؤهم من أبناء العمومة بقدر أكبر من الانضباط في التعامل مع المجتمع.

على أن النظام لم يقض في أي وقت على الظاهرة أو يظهر عزما أكيدا على القضاء عليها. وحيث حصل أن جرت مواجهة بينهما ففي سياق إدارة المصالح العامة للنظام على حساب مجموعات منه، من شأن عدم الضرب على يدها أن يلحق الضرر بهذه المصالح العامة. لكن حتى في هذا الحالة، لا يجري استئصال هذه المجموعات، بل تحجم وتركن جانبا. في عام 2006 كان نمير الأسد وأتباعه يتنقلون بين سجني عدرا وصيدنايا، لكنهم كانوا يُشبحون على عموم السجناء والسجانين، ولا يجرؤ أحد على ضبطهم(13).

وليس الأمر عجزا، بل قربى بنيوية ووحدة حال. فظاهرة الشبيحة هي الوجه الآخر، المظلم، للنظام، أو لا شعوره السياسي المتأصل. إنها الشكل الأكثر عريا للنظام، سلطة العنف الخاص والمنفلت والعشوائي، أو مزيج العنف والقرابة والتعسف. وقد ظهر هذا اللاشعور السياسي بقوة في شهور الانتفاضة مع تراجع إيديولوجية النظام الواعية، القومية والاشتراكية، وبروز غرائزه السياسية على السطح. كما ظهر أن الشبيحة جيش احتياطي للنظام، يتطوع اليوم بكلفة رخيصة وبحماس كبير للدفاع عنه في وجه تهديد الثورة.

كانت "الدولة" قد امتصت التشبيح كعنصر في بنيانها، لكن مع "إخراجه" كعنف عام ومنظم وشرعي ضد المجتمع. لكن مهما يكن المرء متساهلا فإنه يصعب وصف عنف أجهزة الأمن السورية بأنه عنف دولة أو عنف عام وشرعي ومنظم. أو أن سجن تدمر هو سجن نظامي. الواقع أن أجهزة الأمن هي أقرب ما تكون إلى جيش احتلال، يخترق المجتمع كله بعنف وعدوانية وتعال شبه عنصري، ويمنعه من الحركة، أو يجعل مقاومته غير ممكنة إلا في سياق ثورة عامة، على ما نشهد اليوم. وفي عنفه الوحشي وسريته ونظامه الصارم، كان سجن تدمر مصنع الرعب الوطني طوال عقدين من السنين. 

وتتكثف العلاقة لعضوية بين الشبيحة والنظام في الطرفة المأساوية التالية التي يرويها المرحوم ممدوح عدوان في "حيونة الإنسان": كان شخص "يقف بسيارته الحمراء على شارة المرور الحمراء، وحين تخضر الإشارة يحرك سيارته ليتقدم، وإذا بدراجة نارية، يقودها "شبيح" تأتي من الزاوية الأخرى حيث الشارة صارت حمراء،وكاد الاصطدام يقع ، ولكن تم تفاديه، ومع أن الشبيح هو الذي خالف قانون السير إلا أنه نزل وراح يشتم سائق السيارة على عدم تبصره، فقال السائق: يا أخي الشارة خضراء والطريق لي، فرد عليه الشبيح وهو يلكمه على وجهه" الطريق لك أنت؟ ألا تعرف أن البلد كله لنا؟"! والنجن التي يحيل إليها الشبيح تمتزج فيها السلطة بالطائفة. وكان أشباه هذا "التبلي" المهين شائعا جدا في ثمانيات القرن العشرين، حتى أن اللهجة العلوية غدت سلاح ترويع عام حينها. وكان يحصل أن ينتحلها غير علويين للاستفادة من مردودات سلطوية أو مادية مرتبطة بها. 

4

تعمم مدرك الشبيحة كثيرا في شهور الثورة السورية، وصار يطلق على الميليشيات غير النظامية التي يزجها النظام في مواجهة المحتجين في جميع مناطق البلاد. ومع تعممه، انفصل عن مهده وروابطه الأصلية. في حلب ينحدر الشبيحة من أسر محلية ممتدة، من أشهرها آل برّي، يُعرف عنها اشتغالها بالتهريب، من المخدرات إلى السلاح، وعلاقتها الوثيقة بـ"النظام"، وصراعها أحيانا مع "الدولة"، القوانين والشرطة والإدارة. انتهى الأمر إلى ضرب من التعايش. تحكم هذه الأسر ورجالها أحياءها الطرفية بما يقارب استقلالا تاما، وهي تتصرف بـ"مسؤولية" تجاه النظام، وتشرك رجاله المحليين بأرباحها.

وما تطلق عليه الفضائيات العربية اليوم الشبيحة في مدن سورية مختلفة له التكوين ذاته: رجال عنيفون من أصحاب السوابق والخارجين على القانون، تطورت علاقة مركبة بينهم وبين ضباط المخابرات والشرطة، بحيث يستخدمهم هؤلاء ويتقاسمون معهم المنافع، ويحمون من يديرون شبكات تهريب أو دعارة منهم، دون أن يمنع ذلك من ضرب بعضهم أو اعتقالهم بين حين وآخر. من يتعرضون للأذى الأكبر منهم هم الصغار والمبتدئين، فيما يبقى القادة متمتعين بقدر كبير من الحصانة إلى حين قد تقتضي صراعات في المراتب العليا التضحية ببعضهم.

المشترك بين ظاهرة الشبيحة في مهدها الأصلي، وبين نسخها الأحدث هو قوة روابط التبعية الشخصية، الأسرة الممتدة والعشيرة. وهو ما يقربها أيضا من شبكات الجريمة المنظمة التي تعمل بالتهريب وتجارة المخدرات، ويتواتر في حلب أن تكون نواتها الصلبة أسرا كبيرة، تسكن أحياء طرفية، شبه خارجة عن سلطة الدولة. وحتى حين لا يكون الأمر كذلك، تدين هذه الشبكات بولاء كبير لـ"المعلم" على نحو يحاكي شبكات المافيا الإيطالية. وهذا يقربها أيضا بقدر ما من أجهزة الأمن التي يحرص قادتها على علاقات تبعية شخصية قوية بعناصرهم. وهو ما يجمعها أيضا بالرابطة الطائفية التي هي شبكة محسوبيات داخلية(14)، قائمة على القرابة الحقيقية أو المتخيلة. وما يقربها قبل الجميع من النظام، القائم بدوره على التبعية الشخصية والولاء للرئيس. ومعلوم أنه بدءا من النصف الثاني من الثمانينات صار يوصف بأنه "الأب القائد"، وينتظر من جميع محكوميه أن يظهروا حياله ما يظهره الأبناء حيال أبيهم. ولعل التقارب البنيوي بين هذه الظواهر هو ما يشدها إلى بعضها، أو يدرجها في العالم الاجتماعي والسياسي نفسه.

لكن كما للنظام نواة صلبة، سياسية أمنية، للشبيحة نواة صلبة، هي تلك التي يمتزج فيها العنف بالطائفية بالامتياز، ويتجسد فيها اللاشعور السياسي للنظام كما سبق القول. ومصير النواتين مترابط، أكثر من ترابط "النظام" مع "الدولة" من جهة، وأكثر من ترابط الشبيحة الأصليين بظاهرة الشبيحة المعممة التي ظهرت بعد الثورة. بل إنه إذا حصل وانهار النظام، كان محتملا جدا أن تتحول النواة الأمنية بالذات إلى شبيحة، أي أن يخلع عنف النظام غلالته الرسمية الرقيقة ليظهر عنفا منفلتا، كله عشوائية وخصوصية. يُسهِّل من ذلك ما أشرنا إليه من امحاء الحدود القائم منذ الآن بين أجهزة الأمن الظاهرة المعاكسة: يقوم الشبيحة بدور أمني بالتفاهم الأكيد مع الأجهزة الأمنية. 

5

لكن هل عموم الشبيحة العلويين مستعدون للدفاع عن النظام حتى آخر رمق؟ عتبة دفاعهم عنه أدنى من غيرهم بتأثير مفعول الطائفية التعبوي والاستتباعي كما سبقت الإشارة، ما يجعلهم أسهل تطوعا للدفاع عنه. لكن حتى دفاع هؤلاء الشبيحة الأصليين ليس مضمونا أو بديهيا في كل حال. في الأمر أيضا عنصر اقتصادي "عقلاني". يستبسل كثيرون في الدفاع عن النظام، ليس فقط لأن عتبة تماهيهم به أخفض من غيرهم، وإنما كذلك لأن الدفاع عنه مجز وقليل الكلفة. يقال اليوم أن عناصر الشبيحة ينالون ما بين 7000 و10000 ليرة على العمل أيام الجمعة، وألفين على الأقل في الأيام الأخرى(15). ومعلوم أن كلفة العمل متدنية بفضل الطابع السلمي العام للانتفاضة(16). فإذا انخفضت موارد التشبيح من جهة، وارتفعت نسبة الخطر من جهة ثانية،كان محتملا جدا أن يتوقف البعض عن العمل(17). وقد قيل فعلا أن شبيحة أضربوا في شهر تموز 2011 بسبب انخفاض مواردهم، وعاد بعضهم إلى قراهم وبلداتهم في الساحل(18). ولعل في هذا ما يسوغ اعتبار عموم الشبيحة بروليتاريا قمع: يبيعون قوة قمعهم لـ"رأسماليي" السلطة.

على أن معلومات متواترة تفيد أن النهب الشائع المساكن والممتلكات الخاصة في بؤر الثورة يندرج في سياق تأمين تمويل ذاتي للشبيحة من قبل نظام تتراجع موارده المالية. يقول تقرير مهم صدر في تشرين الأول عن "لجان التنسيق المحلية"، المصدر الأكثر موثوقية للمعلومات في شأن الثورة السورية، إن ميليشيات الشبيحة في تلكلخ تمارس أعمال "التخريب وسرقة ممتلكات المواطنين كالمجوهرات"(19). أما في الرستن فيقول التقرير: "قام الشبيحة والأمن بنهب المحلات التجارية بنهب المحلات التجارية سرقة أغلى المعدات منها وتحميلها في شاحناتهم"(20). يجري التعامل مع ممتلكات المواطنين المنهوبة كغنائم شرعية في حرب النظام ضد المجتمع. 

تواترت كذلك معلومات عن اعتقالات عشوائية في غير منطقة، إدلب بخاصة، من أجل الحصول على المال مقابل إطلاق سراح المعتقلين(21). 

6

ما نرى من المشروع الخلوص إليه من هذا العرض المجمل، المحتاج دونما شك إلى مزيد من التفاصيل الميدانية، هو أن التشبيح نزوع متأصل في بنية النظام السوري، يرتد إليه النظام في أوقات الأزمات المصيرية، فيظهر كشبيح عام.

ولقد ظهر هذا بوضوح في ثمانينات القرن السابق. كان أسلوب الحكم في عموم البلاد شبّيحيا، واستمرت ظاهرة الشبيحة في اللاذقية في الوقت نفسه، وتطور ما يناظرها على نطاق أضيق في كل مكان من البلد. يمكن القول إن الشبيحة هم الشبح الملازم للسلطة الأسدية، حضوره أكبر وآثاره أقوى كلما اقتربنا من مواقع السلطة الحقيقية.

نخلص أيضا إلى وجود تناسب طردي بين أسلوب الحكم الشبيحي وبين انتشار الشبيحة والظواهر والممارسات الشبيحية. كلما تصرف النظام كشبيح عام، ظهر بكثرة شبيحة خواص يبذلون له ولاء غير منقوص، مقابل استقلالهم بعوائد التشبيح الخاص: تسهيلات، امتيازات، إعفاءات، غض نظر عن مخالفات متنوعة، امتيازات في التعليم والجامعات(22) ، فضلا عن أجور التشبيح المباشر وغنائمه، كما في مواجهة الثورة اليوم.

بين منتصف تسعينات القرن الماضي وبداية الثورة تراجع الأسلوب الشبيحي في الحكم والظواهر والممارسات الشبيحية في آن، لكنهما تراجعا إلى موقع الغريزة، الأساس الذي لا يرى، رغم أنه موجود دوما هناك، ويمكن أن يظهر في المجال العام في أي وقت. وهو ما وقع بالفعل، وبصورة فورية، مع تفجر الثورة.

أما الخلاصة العملية لكل ذلك فهي أنه إذا دانت الكلمة العليا للنظام في مواجهة الانتفاضة، فسيسود الطابع الشبيحي لنظام الحكم، و ستُحكَم البلاد بالشبيحة وبالأسلوب الشبيحي، وسنرى مستويات من الفظاعة والتمييز ربما تفوق ما عرفته البلاد في ثمانينات القرن العشرين. ليس "إصلاحا" من أي نوع هو ما قد يعقب سحق الثورة، بل بالضبط التشبيح الفاشي طوال سنوات. النظام الحالي لا يستطيع أن يحكم بغير هذه الطريقة، فإن استكان له الناس استعبدهم، وأن ثاروا في وجهه قتلهم ما استطاع. الانتهاء من الشبيحة والأساليب الشبيحية يقتضي الانتهاء من نظام الحكم الشبيحي.

هذا ما كثفه شعار رفعه المتظاهرون من بلدة تلبيسة الحمصية في آب الماضي: "نريد دولة مدنية تحكمنا، لا دولة شبيحة تقتلنا"! 

7

على أن التشبيح بالمعنى الذي تناولناه أعلاه علامة على وجهة أعم في السياسة والسلوك السياسي ميزت نظام حافظ الأسد، بل في الواقع الحكم البعثي منذ بداياته.

بدرجة تتناسب مع ضعف شرعيتهم الشعبية، لجأ البعثيون منذ أيامهم الباكرة إلى ما يمكن تسميته التشبيح الإيديولوجي، أي المزايدة والتخوين ورمي الاتهامات في كل اتجاه، والعمل الدؤوب على صنع حالة بارانويا عامة، بحيث يشك عموم المحكومين بمؤامرات متنوعة تعتمل حولهم، وليكون كل منهم مشروع متهم في وطنيته، ويكون العالم من حوله مكانا شريرا خطرا ينبغي الحذر منه وعدم الوثوق به.

ولقد كان التشبيح الإيديولوجي عنصرا أساسيا في إضعاف التفكير النقدي والسلوك الانشقاقي في سورية. المزايدة ليست اختراعا سوريا، ولا بعثيا. للأمر صلة على الأرجح بضعف تشكل القوى الاجتماعية وبحاجتها إلى ترميم ذاتها بالعقائد المعصومة والأفكار السامية المجردة. لكن المزايدة وأخواتها ارتفعت في سورية البعثية إلى مرتبة سياسة دولة، وبلغت ذرى غير مسبوقة من انفصال الخطاب المعلن عن الواقع المعاين وممكناته. ظل الحكم البعثي يزايد في مواجهة إسرائيل إلى حين تسبب بهزيمة حزيران الفاجعة. وظل يزايد على الجميع وطنيا وقوميا واشتراكيا، وهو يمزق المجتمع السوري، ويضرب الفلسطينيين واللبنانيين، ويثري أتباعه، ويتسبب في تأخر وجمود ما كان واحدا من أكثر المجتمعات العربية تقدما.

ولقد أفسد التشبيح الإيديولوجي اللغة العربية، اللغة السياسية بخاصة. فقد رفع منسوب الكذب فيها، وطبّع انفصال الدوال عن المدلولات، فحرم الجمهور العام من الأداة الرئيسية للتعبير عن شكاويه ومطالبه، وفرض كلغة وحيدة صحيحة لغة الحكم المصممة أولا وأساسا لسلب المحكومين القدرة على التعبير المستقل عن أنفسهم. ولعل للافتقار إلى لغة الكلام دور في الاحتجاج بالأجساد الذي كان اللغة الأساسية لأنشطة الانتفاضة. كان الاحتجاج بالكلام الفصيح، الممازج بدرجة خطرة غالبا لكلام النظام، هو وسيلة الاحتجاج الحصرية للمعارضة التقليدية، ولا ريب أنه في أصل ضعفها وعجزها. وكان ما تعرض له أكثر المنخرطين في صفوفها من اعتقال وتعذيب قد أخرج أجسادهم من الصراع مع النظام. لم يبق من جيلنا غير كلمات، ومعارضتنا ارتدت إلى معارضة أشباح، أرواح منفصلة عن أجسادها، لا يكاد يكون لها وزن حيال نظام هو جسد كثير العضلات، وكثير الألسنة أيضا، لا يكف عن الكلام. وبفعل طابعها الشبحي، لم يقتل ولو شخص واحد منحدر من المعارضة التقليدية، لكن حبس عدد قليل. 

المعارضة الجديدة المتمثلة في شباب الثورة تزج الجسد في الثورة وتخاطر به. وهناك نحو 5000 جسد دمرت في هذه المواجهة حتى يومنا(23). 

ولاستيلاء النظام على اللغة العامة دور أيضا في نأي لغة هتافات الثورة وشعاراتها عما يقرّبها من لغة النظام وكليشيهاته. لا تستطيع أن تنفصل عن النظام دون أن تنفصل عن لغته وعالمه الرمزي. هذا شيء لا يدركه من يطالبون الثورة السورية بمواقف وشعارات "قومية". يفوتهم شيئان. أولا أن شعارات النظام كانت تشبيحا لا أساس له من الواقع، إلى درجة أنه قضى على مفهوم الحقيقة ذاته، فصار النقاش يدور بين تفضيلات إيديولوجية لا تتضح صلة أي منها بالواقع، أو تتساوى في انفصالها عنها، وتاليا في ذاتيتها واعتباطها. لم تكد الجامعة العربية تصدر قرارا بتعليق مشاركة الطرف السوري في اجتماعاتها يوم 12/11/ 2011، حتى كان متكلمون على الأقنية التلفزيونية السورية يتكلمون على "عربان" متخلفين، ويتحدث بعثيون عن أمة سورية مكتملة التكوين لا شأن لها بالعرب، ويهتف الموالون للنظام في الشوارع: طز بالعروبة! 

وثانيا أن الثورة جهد شامل للانفصال التام عن النظام، قد تطور مقاربة وفهما مختلفا للقضايا المعنية. بل إن هذا محتم في تقديري، وسيكون فهما أكثر نزاهة وإخلاصا. لكن تركيزها الآن هو على لحظة الانفصال والتباعد. 

8

ثم أن النظام الذي اعتمد الشبيحة أداة حكم مهمة في الداخل السوري، عمل أيضا كشبيح على المستوى الإقليمي، أي كبلطجي قوي القلب يحكم بالقوة الخام والإرهاب في محيطه، على نحو ما يفعل في سورية ذاتها. ولقد اقتضى ذلك أن يكون ممثلي النظام، في لبنان بخاصة، شبيحة حقيقيون: عنيفون، فاسدون، بلطجية، وأن يعملوا على تشبيح الدولة والسياسية اللبنانية، أي إعادة إنتاج أنفسهم ونهجهم في لبنان، كي يخلدوا في حكمه، مثلما هو الحال في سورية أيضا. وكان آخرهم، رستم غزالة، جديرا بقيادة قوات مكافحة الإرهاب في سورية بعد عام 2005، جريا على التقليد اللغوي الأورويلي الأصيل.

على أن الأهم في التشبيح هو جني الثروات بالقوة. يتجاوز الأمر هنا ظاهرة الشبيحة الأصلية والجديدة، إلى التشبيح كنظام اقتصادي قائم على الاستيلاء والنهب والسخرة والخوات، أي توسل للقوة كأصل اقتصادي. أثرياء سورية الجدد الذين حولوا نظامها الاقتصادي إلى "اقتصاد السوق الاجتماعي" في عام 2005، هم أبناء آبائهم الذين كانوا في السلطة، ودرت عليهم السلطة ثروات مهولة. سياستهم المسماة "التطوير والتحديث" هي نهد لتحقيق الأشياء نفسها، الثروات المهولة والسلطة الكاملة الدائمة، بوسائل أقل خشونة. بعد الثورة يعود جيل الأبناء إلى نهج الآباء المجرب(24).

والواقع أن طبقة الإقطاعيين الجدد الذين يسيطرون على الاقتصاد السوري اليوم حصلوا على ثوراتهم عن طريق التشبيح الكبير، تمييزا عن التشبيح الصغير الذي يعتاش منه عامة الشبيحة. الشبيحة الصغار يعتدون على معارضي النظام وجمهور الثورة مقابل أجور وغنائم. هم ميليشيات ترتزق من النظام. الشبيحة الكبار يستخدمون الدولة، ويديرون النظام، ويجمعون المليارات. وهم من يواجهون الثورة اليوم بالقوة المنفلتة. الشبيحة الكبار هم من يحكمون سورية.

وإذ لم يظهروا بعد ثلثي العام أدنى استعداد لتغيير نهج الإخضاع بالقوة، أو إعادة النظر في بنية النظام، فلأن دولة الشبيحة دولة خلدونية، لها عمر طبيعي، تدول ثم تزول. لا تتفاوض، ولا تمارس السياسة، ولا تستطيع إصلاح أمرها. لكن لعلها أقصر عمرا من دول ابن خلدون التي تعيش أكثر من قرن.      

9

ما الذي يجمع أشكال التشبيح هذه كلها؟ توسل القوة الخام للحكم، محليا وإقليميا، ودون تمثيل؛ المزايدة الإيديولوجية المنفصلة عن الواقع والممكن؛ جني الثروات باستخدام سلطة الدولة ودون قانون؟ الانفصال. انفصال الثمرات عن العمل، والكلمات عن المعاني، والأوضاع عن المؤهلات والكفاءات. التشبيح جوهريا تعطيل للعمل، وللقوانين الذي تربط العمل بالدخل، والإنتاج بالثروة. وهو أيضا تعطيل لإنتاج الكلام المفهوم، الذي يثمر ارتباط الدوال بالمدلولات فيه معاني مفهومة للجميع. وهو تعطيل للسياسة، كإنتاج للتمثيل، أو الربط بين المصالح الخاصة والدولة العامة.

وهو أيضا ضرب للتمثيل عموما. تمثيل المحكومين في هيئات سياسية، وتمثيل الأعمال بدخول، وتمثيل الدلالات بدوال.

وعليه فإن التشبيح نمط إنتاج مادي (لا ينتج ثروات، بل يستولي)، ونظام حكم سياسي (لا يسوس، بل يقمع)، وصيغة دلالة (لا تنتج معاني جديدة) في آن. إنتاج دون عمل، وحكم دون تمثيل، ودلالة دون فاعلية تعرّف مستقلة.

هذا يوجب على الثورة السورية أن تكون جهدا لإعادة الاعتبار للعمل كمصدر أساسي للقيم المادية والمعنوية، وللتمثيل وسياسة المصالح الاجتماعية كأساس لشرعية الحكم، وللواقع المختبر كسند للمدركات والأفكار. أي أيضا إعادة الاعتبار للإنتاج، المادي والمعنوي والسياسي. فهي بالفعل مشروع إعادة تأسيس كبير، لا بد من العمل على أبعاده الثلاثة، وليس على واحد منها فقط، البعد السياسي.

[عن مجلة "كلمن" – بيروت]

هوامش

(1) http://harpers.org/archive/2011/06/hbc

(2) ممدوح عدوان: حيونة الإنسان، الطبعة الأولى، دار ممدوح عدوان للنشر، دمشق، 2007؛ ص 134.

 (3) انظر ملفا عن الشبيحة من إعداد خولة غازي، وكتاب ممدوح عدوان نفسه، الصفحة نفسها.

(4) عدوان، سبق ذكره، ص 134. ويصف عدوان "الخال" بأنه "مظلة الشبيحة"، وهو "فوق القانون، ويكتسب هذه الصفة غالبا لأنه ابن أحد المسؤولين أو قريبه". ص 138.

(5) تفجر في اللاذقية عام 1993صراع بين شبيحة فواز الأسد (ابن جميل الأسد) وشبيحة بيت ديب (بزعامة رباح ديب، أمه من بيت الأسد)، وأوقف بالنتيجة رباح ديب في سجن اللاذقية. لكن شبيحته هاجموا السجن وخلصوا زعيمهم، وقتل بعض عناصر الشرطة حينها. أنوه إلى أنه بسبب قلة المصادر المكتوبة أعتمد في كثير من المعلومات الواردة هنا على معلومات أتاحها لي أصدقاء، وأقتبس المؤكد والمتواتر منها فحسب.

(6) قتل الشاب حسان الأعسر عام 1994 لأنه دافع عن فتاة احتمت به من الشبيحة في حافلة نقل عام.

(7) قارن مع: ميليشيات «الشبيحة».. قوات خاصة فوق القانون، جريدة الشرف الأوسط

(8) مقالة روزا ياسين حسن: عن الشبيحة وسادتهم وذاكرة بلون الخوف! تقول الكاتبة إنها أتت على سيرة أبي رماح تلميحا في وقت سابق للثورة، ولم تتجاسر حينها على ذكر اسمه.

(9) يقول ممدوح عدوان، ولعله الكاتب السوري الوحيد الذي تكلم عن الشبيحة والتشبيح قبل الثورة: "والتشبيح كلمة ممتلئة بالمعاني، فهي مزيج من الزعرنة والسلبطة والتبلي، وهي كل ما يقفز فوق القانون علنا"، مصدر سبق ذكره، ص 135.

(10) في صيف عام 1997، وكنت في معسكر تدريب عسكري جامعي صيفي، اتهم طالب بعثي ملازما يدربنا بالطائفية، لأنه قال شيئا طريفا عن الحماصنة! أمسكه من تلابيبه وزعق في وجهه: أنا من أمن القيادة القطرية! 

(11) الفيديو متاح على هذا الرابط.

(12) على أن هناك فراقا بين المهرب والشبيح. المهرب "زلمة ليل، شجاع يغامر ويخاطر وقد يصطدم بالدولة"، في حين أن الشبيحة "يستخدمون سيارة الدولة ويُهرِّبون في عز النهار وفي شارع مزدحم يعرقلون المرور فيه". عدوان، سبق ذكره، ص 136. ويحيل هذا الفارق إلى الموقع الحصين للشبيحة في النظام. 

 (13) بقيادته، هاجموا في وضح النهار شركة الهرم للصرافة في دمشق عام 2005، واستولوا على ما فيها من مال. وكانوا "يتبلّون" السجناء السياسيين في عدرا عام 2006. 

(14) ربط أحمد بيضون في غير عمل له بين المحسوبية والطائفية في النظام اللبناني. مثلا: مغامرات المغايرة: اللبنانيون طوائف وعربا وفينيقيين، الطبعة الأولى، دار النهار، بيروت، 2005؛ ص 20. 

 (15) نشرة كلنا شركاء

(16) لا ريب أن من شأن العسكرة المتسعة النطاق للثورة أن تغير الحال، إن باتجاه تراجع مساهمة الشبيحة، أو أخطر باتجاه تسليحهم.

(17) عرف من ممولي الشبيحة في اللاذقية رجل الأعمال نزار أسعد. وقد شملته القائمة الثالثة من العقوبات الأوربية التي صدرت في الثلث الأخير من آب 2011. وكذلك رجل الأعمال محمد جابر الذي قالت القائمة الأوربية إنه مساعد العميد ماهر الأسد الخاص بـ"الشبيحة"، انظر الرابط.

(18) كلنا شركاء: الرابط نفسه.

(19) ص 15 من التقرير المتاح على الرابط التالي.

(20) المصدر نفسه، ص 17. جدير بالذكر أن لاستباحة ممتلكات المواطنين غير سابقة تاريخية، أبرزها استباحة حماة في شباط 1982

(21) معلومات من صفحة Ismaeel Alhamed، وهو طبيب محترم من منطقة جبل الزاوية في إدلب، على الفيسبوك، يوم 25/8/2011. المبالغ تتراوح 25 ألف ومليون ليرة سورية. ويبدو أن هناك صناعة سمسرة مرتبطة بالأمر. من لا يدفعون يبقون قيد التوقيف حتى إشعار آخر.

(22) في سياق حرب النظام الأولى ضد المجتمع السوري، عام 1980 وما بعد، كان عناصر سرايا الدفاع بقيادة رفعت الأسد والوحدات الخاصة بقيادة علي حيدر والفرقة الرابعة بقيادة شفيق فياض يضعون مسدساتهم على المقاعد أثناء تقديم امتحانات الشهادة الإعدادية (الصف التاسع) أو الثانوية (البكالوريا)، ويغشون علانية، فلا يجرؤ أحد على اعتراضهم. وبدءا من العام نفسه صارت تمنح علامات إضافية للكتائب الطلابية المسلحة المشاركة في حرب النظام، تسهل لهم الدخول إلى الكليات التي يرغبون، وكانوا بالطبع الأسوأ خلقا وعلما. ومنهم اليوم غير قليل من أساتذة الجامعات السورية. وكان الفنان على فرزات "أكل علقة" من سرايا الدفاع في ذلك الوقت لأنه رسم طالبا مظليا يهبط بمظلته على كلية الطب! 

(23) أرقام النشطاء السوريين، الصادرة عن "لجان التنسيق المحلية" بصورة خاصة، أوثق من أرقام الأمم المتحدة ومنظمات حقوق الإنسان الدولية. وهم يعتمدون معايير صارمة في تعميم المعلومات، فوق ارتباطها الحي المتفوق على أية منظمات دولية، بالثورة في ميادينها الكثيرة. الثورة لا تمارس التشبيح الإعلامي.   

(24) تواتر الكلام على استعانة النظام برجال الأب الأمنيين، علي دوبا وأضرابه. لكن يصعب التيقن من صحة هذه المعلومات.  

When my close friend of nearly two decades, the celebrated New York Times reporter Anthony Shadid, died suddenly last week of an asthma attack while crossing the border from Syria into Turkey, the plethora of tributes to him over the course of the next day helped me overcome the shock. Still, as someone who knew Anthony well and shared so many things in common, I could not help but think of what was left out of the portraits drawn by his colleagues in the media business.

Perhaps I can illustrate a small part of this—as Anthony no doubt would—through a story.

Late one Sunday night in January of 1996, Anthony and I met up in his rented flat in central Cairo to hatch a plan to watch the Super Bowl. It was before Cairo was very plugged in at all, so our prospects weren't great. But we had heard rumors of Super Bowl watching parties at one or more of the big hotels, so we started with them. When nothing turned up at the first two we called, I felt discouraged, but my journalist friend's instincts for investigation kicked in. Before I knew it, two eccentric and rather reckless American photographers had joined us to help in the quest, (Anthony always seemed to have wild photographers in his orbit), and although they both seemed to be quite drunk that did not stop them from pouring us all more drinks. Anthony and I were both embarrassed when they began to call more hotels in some sort of patois that they imagined to be pidgin Arabic, and we were relieved when they settled on another strategy. One of them had an Egyptian friend with a much coveted (and rare at the time) super-deluxe satellite dish. He lived not too far away, but he hadn't been answering his phone earlier. Now, with renewed effort, they found him at home, and—as soon as we picked up more drinks—we were off for an overnight, impromptu Super Bowl watching party.

Our host was a young, professional looking Egyptian in a sweater vest, who occupied a couch to the left of the large screen. He had just come back from work as a producer on a live late night Arabic television show, and when I expressed guilt about intruding on him so late, he waved off my worries. It was the holy month of Ramadan during which he fasted all day, so staying up at night afforded him a chance to eat and rehydrate, he explained. Meanwhile on a couch on the other side of the television, the photographers had started rolling each other joints. Surrounded thusly by piety and debauchery, Anthony and I enjoyed from the middle couch the first close Super Bowl in many years. I still remember Anthony's smile of pleasure, a mark of his joie de vivre, throughout the evening as he alternatively engaged his fellow journalists, talked local politics and local media with our host, and consumed one of his great passions: American football. By the time the game ended, dawn was breaking and I was faint from the haze of our adventure, from lack of sleep, and from seeing the team I had watched as a boy—the Dallas Cowboys—pull out a last minute victory. Anthony was probably not much better off, but—intrepid and indefatigable friend that he was—he agreed to walk with me down to the bridge across the Nile that led to the neighborhood where I lived, and we bid each other good "night" a few feet from soldiers who had stood guard all night at a checkpoint on the bridge, the last sobering image from a dizzying evening.

I don't think I have another friend with whom I could have shared that Fellini-esque evening. Anthony and I were both early-career Arabs from the Southwestern US living in Cairo. We both worked full-time and paid for extra Arabic lessons to perfect our long-lost ancestral tongue. Our interests were diverse, and we were both happy to spend an evening smoking hookah and discussing Middle East policy with young Egyptian activists and then cap it off with a late-night run for French fries at an American fast-food restaurant. All our common interests make it perhaps unfair of me to point out small things about Anthony that last week's obituaries never mentioned. Anthony's reading tastes spanned from academic tomes—by Daniel Yergin about energy or Hanna Batatu about Iraq—but equally to a tell-all ghost-written memoir by Dennis Rodman. He was fanatical about spaghetti westerns—the original ones with Clint Eastwood, directed by Sergio Leone—and he loved the old British sitcom Fawlty Towers. His opinion of Sophia Coppola's performance in Godfather III was pronounced, and he always had something to say about one of his great avocational passions: the Green Bay Packers.

Of course, I understand that most would agree these are not the things that made Anthony famous, and so they have no real place in his obituary, but I am not so sure. The last time I saw Anthony was three months ago when he came to Houston to speak. On that occasion in a workshop with students and faculty here, he stated his belief that the moment of enlightenment rested in the granular detail of stories. In the years after Super Bowl XXX, Anthony would go on to tell enlightening stories about Iraq, Palestine, his native Lebanon, and the Arab Spring. In the aftermath of the September 11^th attacks and the US invasion of Iraq when the American perception of the Arab became unstable, his steady-voiced stories intervened. With his untimely death that seemed to come at the height of his influence, we who were close to him cannot distinguish between our mourning for the stories he lived and our mourning for the stories he will not write. 

Our tactical debates should solve protesters’ problems, instead of dividing movements.

In the midst of Yet Another Tactical Debrief, this time on the recent Move-In-Day-turned-street-semi-battle-then-mass-arrest at Occupy Oakland, I ended up tossing out on Twitter a cluster of successful movement moments, some of which involved fighting back against cops—Stonewall, Cochabamba Water War, anti-apartheid defiance campaign, Tahrir Square 2011—and others of which involved a calculated refusal to fight back, even to the point of enduring direct state violence: anti-nuclear demos, the 1980s Central America solidarity movement, the Gandhian salt march. In my estimation, every single one of these was successful, which raises the question of what they had in common.

What these moments do not share in common is their achievement of a universally correct balance of nonviolence and forcefulness, self-sacrifice and safety, or daring and accessibility, but rather their solution to an immediate and tangible tactical problem that had been totally disabling to their movements. Without these solutions, the trajectories of their movements were towards frustration with the possibilities of action, and thereby to spirals of apathy and spurts of ineffective outrage. With them in mind, the trajectories shifted to hopeful emulation, contagious optimism, and surges in new participation, leading to a whole new scale for participation.

Let’s take a violent example first: the Stonewall Riot. Here the disabling problem was this: police forces, including the NYPD, had both the ability and the clearly-enjoyed tradition of violently raiding and breaking up the festivities of queer people. This was a standard scenario to shut down a gay bar, even if the Stonewall Inn was a bit more loved than some others, and the criminalization of transpeople and police beating and rough treatment of arrestees was standard practice. But the moment became politicized: “Gay Power” was shouted and “We Shall Overcome” sung. Submission to police violence, however, would have replicated the pre-existing situation, not disrupted it. The out-and-out confrontation against police raiding and looting the Stonewall Inn was destructive to property and an act of violent self-defense. It was the end of an impasse, changing participants’ attitudes to authority and themselves. And the insurrectionary mood spread through the local community, amplifying into several days of confrontations. The anniversary of the riots became the Gay Pride parade tradition, and gay rights groups spread continent-wide within months. In short, collective violent self-defense interrupted a cycle of submission that had functioned through frequent nonviolent arrests.

Switching to a nonviolent example, we could consider the Montgomery Bus Boycott, or the SNCC-affiliated wave of sit-in protests. These stories are now classed within “the Civil Rights movement” as overall super-example for nonviolence whose history is familiar to most (US) Americans. But it’s worth noting that for every such spark that we remember in this history, there were many that failed to catch ablaze. Rosa Parks was but one of a long string of black people who refused to give her seat on a Montgomery Bus; only the seemingly-within-reach prospect of public desegregation and the tireless efforts of Parks and her community in organizing the boycott campaign made it a national story. In short, a solitary act of dignified nonviolence, followed by collective boycott, broke the situation open. It should be added, however, that Claudette Colvin’s arrest on the same charges, which she forcibly resisted, directly inspired Parks.

A third classic example comes in the form of the 1930s sit-down strike waves. Workers occupied their factories during strikes, a choice that brought all kinds of benefits: the sit-down strike provides a clear-cut place for organizing, eliminates employers’ option of hiring replacement workers, and keep striking workers (and often their community) actively involved in the strike. Workers’ control of the factory itself and the capital equipment within it provide security against a violent assault (during which this equipment might be damaged) and leverage for negotiation, since further profit is impossible while the plant remains in workers’ hands. As compared with an outdoor picket, the interior of the workplace is shielded from the weather, more tactically secure against police and strikebreakers’ violence, and better suited for sustained campaigns. After a wave of strikes at GM, begun by the Flint Sit-Down, the UAW became the US’s largest industrial union and a wave of sit-downs unionized various other sectors, until they were criminalized by the National Labor Relations Board in 1939.

Quick question: Were the sit-downs a triumph of “violent” or “nonviolent” tactics? Answer: Both. The leverage of sit-down strikers depends in large part on the implicit or explicit threat to destroy factory property should a raid occur. From Flint in 1936 to the May 1968 general strike in France to the 1980 Solidarity strike in Poland, this threat has been prepared carefully. Further, the GM strike wave triumphed in part by defeating a police intervention when workers fought back, an incident that became known as the Battle of the Running Bulls (“bulls” was an old-style term for cops).

More recently and dramatically, I argue, the Egyptian uprising used first nonviolent then physically confrontational tactics to solve a very disabling problem: the complete lack of reliable safe space for public dissent. (My narrative here draws on the detailed ethnographic work of Dimitris Soudias, on my panel at AAA last November.) Several narrow formulas for dealing with the national police’s systematic policy of breaking up protest gatherings and arresting all their participants had been worked out in the decade before: generally, these consisted of using one or two prominent spots for protests organized by lawyers, or turning Friday prayers at prestigious mosques into the gathering places for rallies. Focusing on “foreign” issues that might be endorsed by the government (like Palestinian rights) was also a popular strategy for making mass demonstrations possible. All of these, though, had their obvious limits, and the question of where, when, and how to directly challenge a decades-old dictatorship for its own misrule weighed upon would-be organizers.

Between the inspirational success of Tunisia’s revolt and social media-spread calls for #Jan25, the when question was resolved. And the next key element was a combination of nonviolent marching and locational diversity. Small marches across Cairo, in the neighborhoods instead of the most prominent downtown locations, were not immediately dispersed or surrounded by police like previous actions. For the police, there was uncertainty about whether such spaces needed to be controlled, while their refusal to crack down gave more participants hope to join in. As I covered earlier, photocopiable protester media encouraged a strategy of gathering in neighborhoods and generating large groups that could converge downtown, as well as a packet of suggestions on directly deterring police suppression, many of which were confrontational (spray painting their riot shields, for example) if not directly violent.

Once numbers grew and protests concentrated on symbolically important spots, permanent occupation became a strategy for answering the when question: the answer was right now, and whenever you come we’ll be here. Around the same time, protesters combatively refused to be dislodged from spaces of value to them. They held them, and indeed gained them in the first place, by violently resisting police control. This was not a contest of equals: protesters were unarmed, but numerous, while police were essentially the opposite. And protesters prevailing generated the space of possibility for (one) more people to join them and (two) people to realistically hope that the regime would not be able to shut this movement down.

Back to Occupy: Occupy Wall Street quickly managed to solve two problems that had made protesting the economic crisis/growing economic inequality/corporate rule of the political system extremely difficult. The mobilizing problem was how to get a critical mass of people actively protesting at once, when most protest calls attract only a small number. The solution was camping in a central, symbolically important square, a solution OWS imported wholesale from elsewhere, most visibly the indignados protest in the Spain. Bloombergville protesters against city budget cuts had discovered a legal loophole in camping on sidewalks; OWS people copied this and extended it to privately owned public spaces like Zuccotti Park.

The tactical problem was how to deal with the New York Police Department’s aggressive, persistent tactics of protest response: surrounding, caging with barricades, deploying outsized numbers of police, etc. The response was a mix of persistence (we’ll be here all day, all week), assertive nonviolence, and a balance between holding whatever space was permitted and repeatedly claiming more space whenever the opportunity arose. Protesters were neither allergic to being inside the barricades (a predilection I developed after just weeks of dealing with the NYPD strategy), nor comfortable remaining inside police control. Over time, they also learned to pick up barricades and use them as their own tool for controlling space, particularly on the 17 November day of action.

However, the large-scale policing problem posed by the NYPD is not the only one US activists face. They also face the uglier problem of militarized police assault. Tear gas, concussion grenades, and rubber bullets from the police can quickly displace protesters using the OWS strategy, a fact that has made evictions from Occupy encampments commonplace. Patient milling about is insufficient to solve this problem. Here are few things that do better:

Flashback to Seattle’s 1999 World Trade Organization protests, the first time I had to deal with this problem. Two things really worked once Seattle police turned to tear gas: A) Outlasting tear gas with orchestrated lockdowns and sit-ins. That is exactly what it sounds like: handfuls, dozens, or hundreds of people, informed that they would be tear-gassed, organized, prepared as best they could (mostly vinegar-soaked bandanas), and willed themselves to wait it out. I saw this happen again and again, and participated through several rounds. Police who wanted to clear the streets with tear gas (and they wanted to use tear gas because they had no plans to arrest thousands that day) often failed. Moreover, the commitment shown by people who heard that tear gas was coming and sat down in defiance was electrifying. B) Improvised barricades and throwing back tear gas canisters. The other main option is clearing out a large neutral space between the mass of protesters and defending it by throwing back the chemical weapons police are throwing your way. A small number of committed people, ideally with baseball gloves and dumpsters, can hold space for quite a while this way. This was my first encounter as a civil disobedience activist with masked Black Bloc protesters, and by and large their relationship with me was one of useful protection. It is a simple but effective tactic.

Now, both of these strategies have weaknesses. (A) can fail when the police escalate to projectiles; our movement simply doesn’t have thousands willing to use their bodies (and eyes and internal organs) as less-lethal projectile absorbers. Nor does standing before concussion grenades and wooden bullets attract new participants in the same way that bravely outlasting tear gas does. (B) can and did fail in the absence of solid space-claiming tactics that hold particular spaces. Most dramatically, it failed in Miami during the November 2003 Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) protests, where hours of police assault pushed several thousand of us out of downtown. There’s a thin line between being mobile and being chased, and the faster the pace is, the harder it is for a large group to function cohesively. The combination of tear gas, mass arrests, mass police deployments, and projectile weapons became known as the Miami model, but it remains (along with the NYPD barricade bullying) the other key tactical conundrum activists face today.

For help with these problems, we can be thankful for the Bay Area as a place of experimentation. Eight months before Miami, Bay Area activists deployed a combination of strategy (A) and #OWS-style milling around, with a sprinkling of (B) for good measure, in a first-day-of-the-war shutdown on the San Francisco financial district. Police busy dealing with arresting people sitting down in intersections, militant and/or flamboyant blockading devices, and relentlessly recombining crowds and marches failed to get a handle on the overall situation through two business days. Nor, however, did the SFPD turn to projectile weapons.

So can seizing and claiming space, and holding it by refusal to move, be continued when the police add a projectile assault to the mix? This is precisely the tactical problem faced by Occupy Oakland since the 25 October 2011 police raid. Solving this problem would keep alive occupations even when the police turn to the formidable “less lethal” arsenals they’ve been building up and training with since 1999. The key element added to the tactical mix by Occupy Oakland protesters has been the organized use of shields as an element of crowd defense. The shields are being used both as physical defense and political symbols. On the 28 January Move-In Day, an publicly announced effort to occupy an abandoned public building as a community social center, shields were upgraded and used as part of a mass effort of over 1,000 people.

It seems apparent that they made police weapons less effective, but not less effective enough. The assembly that met afterward made it clear that holding the streets more effectively is at the center of their own reflections on the day’s events: “We have to learn how to move cohesively through the streets, to take offensive and defensive initiatives, to improve communication in highly charged situations. Critiques are important but we want everyone to understand the difficulty in undertaking such an initiative in the face of such forceful police response. The state fears that one successful building takeover will lead to another.”

Critics of Move-In Day’s tactics as self-defeating violence will surely argue that tactical effectiveness is irrelevant because a rigidly nonviolent strategy is The Only Way To Win politically. There are serious problems with this argument, one that no careful observer of Egypt 2011, twenty-first-century Bolivia, or 1930s America could take at face value. However, there is an implicit core that should be listened to: movements must balance the development of a tactical ability to hold the streets with a strategic ability to bring in ever-increasing numbers of people. In the somewhat de-mobilized political climate of the United States (by world standards, not historical ones), the easiest entry points to political activism are mass demonstrations (primary tactics: marching and milling about) or mass nonviolent civil disobedience (primary tactic: holding space by sitting in). Making these kinds of participation unlikely is a good way to cut off a movement from its base, and just as threatening to continued turnout as the likelihood that police will shut down your protest.

The biggest challenge for thinking strategically about such moments, I think, is that most (US) American heads in the strategy game are actually committed not to examining the strategic import of tactics in context, but to winning The Tactical Argument of our time: whether nonviolent action can/is better at/is necessary for/could never/is counterproductive to bringing about revolutionary change. This Argument has generated some important and prominent statements, and has encouraged genuine reflection, but its existence has polarized many people’s positions by implying that there is a Right Answer lying on one side of the debate. Particular positions on this question have been fundamental to whole schools of thought, including Peace and Conflict Studies and Insurrectionary Anarchism, each of which have their own internal momentum, but neither of which has powered any comprehensive social transformation on its own. Frustratingly, these positions have also shown a remarkable capacity to discount evidence and factual examples which contradict their, at this point, pre-conceived ideas of what is tactically effective and what is not.

A few other takeaway points from this latest round of controversy:

1. Opponents of violence who followed up on Move-In Day by critiquing Occupy Oakland’s tactics rather than those of the Oakland Police Department are just plain not consistent opponents of violence. Both OO and OPD acted in the name of the public, but one was far more aggressively violent than the other. The one-sidedness of the accusations against Occupy Oakland only convinces listeners that you are more concerned about insubordination than violence. And when people go out of their way to deploy defensive tactics that protect against injury, it hardly seems like the time to attack them as, say, “a cancer.”

2. Drawing serious attention to police violence, and challenging both the criminalization of whole communities and the militarization of police response to protest, is a full-time job. Move-In Day was a potential opportunity to talk about long-term problems of police violence, something that seems to have happened more effectively in the foreign press than here in the United States. It also is a task best connected to long-term community campaigns dealing with the locking up of massive numbers of youth and adults of color. Building (and repairing) those bridges (as the Move-In Assembly itself puts it) cannot be done in a day. It is particularly hard to do in the wake of a day-long battle. It requires showing up (and milling about) at many, many moments where people are already struggling against police brutality, prisons, and criminalization, making those struggles your own.

However, during confrontational protest, alliances can be built too. In the 2003 San Francisco financial district shutdown, many (but not all!) working-class youth of color organized autonomously and took a different balance of risks of civil disobedience arrest (generally less, from where I stood), and of risks of directly confronting police when they had the tactical advantage (generally more). Multiple crowd scenarios could help with this when everyone is on the streets together.

3. Successful solutions to tactical problems are those that are contagious; for now, we have yet to solve the police projectile assault as a tactical problem, but I’m looking forward to such a solution, and join those urging restraint in attacking people who are trying to work out a solution.

Meanwhile, the following pieces have been a joy to read.

• Puck Lo, The New Normal: This Militarized Empty Lot Called Home
• A Statement from the Move-In Day Assembly
• Jen Angel, Defending Occupy Oakland
• Osha Newman, Occupy Oakland: Are We Being Childish?

This uninformed but viral piece unfortunately is a required bit of the debate:

• Chris Hedges, Black Bloc: The Cancer in Occupy

And these are thoughtful responses to it:

• David Graeber, Concerning the Violent Peace-Police
• Victoria Welle, Chris Hedges, Please Try Again

[This article originally appeared on Carwil without Borders]