Recalling Syria in happier times
Between 2000 and 2009 I paid three visits to Syria. The tragedy that has befallen that country since 2011 weighs heavily on my heart. I recently looked through photos taken in happier times, when it seemed that Bashar Assad was succeeding in keeping his country out of the maelstrom enveloping the region. Pictures from Aleppo capture the beauty of an ancient city that bears the Unesco designation of World Heritage Site.
The covered market was a place both of commerce and hospitality, where silk, textile and rug merchants would invite me in “just for a look” while offering a chair and a glass of tea. From that vantage point there was endless live entertainment as people and animals passed just a few feet away. Before long I was known by name in the “souk” and welcomed like an old friend.
Why was I there? As a retired priest of the Episcopal Church, I had the freedom to indulge my love of travel and my particular love of the Middle East. Syria is for Christians a holy land, where Paul’s conversion began on the way to Damascus — there is a church there on the site where Ananias instructed him in the Way of Jesus — and where the early Church blossomed and produced many of its finest thinkers.
Antioch was an important center for evangelism, and it was there that the term Christian was first applied to the followers of Jesus. For political reasons, even then Syria was off the path of most Holy Land tours, but on my own it was full of wonderful surprises and warm personal encounters. Syria was one of the few Arab countries where church bells were permitted on Sunday morning, and I recall attending an Armenian Mass in Aleppo where survivors of the Turkish massacres of WWI had found refuge.
I wonder about the people I met during my time there, the children so eager to practice their English, the guide who drove me outside the city to the see the ruins of the large church and pilgrimage center built in Byzantine times to honor St. Simon Stylites, whose piety moved him to live on top of a column. He is said to have lowered a basket to receive food and water, and remains of the column can still be seen.
Could Assad have prevented the civil war that has engulfed Syria? Certainly his military over-reacted to the demonstrations in Daraa and Homs early in the “Arab spring.” He had been in power a little over 11 years, succeeding his father Hafez el-Assad who had governed Syria with an iron hand from 1971 until 2000. Bashir had been trained as an eye doctor in England, and when he assumed power there were high hopes that he would open Syria to more enlightened rule. His wife, English born of Syrian background, had studied in the United States and was believed to be a liberal influence on her husband.
Bashir inherited the “Mukhabarat” — the security/intelligence/military establishment — that his father left firmly in place, and his father’s rule had been ruthless toward the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic fundamentalists. Hafez’s action against the Brotherhood in Hama in 1982, known as the Hama Massacre, destroyed an entire neighborhood where the Brotherhood lived. It is estimated that 25,000 were killed overnight when the military acted with brutal finality.
How much control did Bashir have of the Mukhabarat? Could he have reined in the military when first responding to the protests in Daraa and Homs? We forget that following 9/11 Bashir reached out to the United States with valuable intelligence concerning the Brotherhood and al-Qaida, and well into 2011 he indicated that he wanted better relations with the United States. There were also indications that he was willing to move toward improved human rights, and had the United States moved in this direction we would have had valuable leverage.
Bill Clinton had surprisingly cordial relations with Hafez el-Assad, with far more blood on his hands than did his son in 2011. The militias that we see as alternatives to the Assad regime are unstable and unreliable, and arming them has fueled an unnecessary and tragic civil war. At this late date, with no end in sight, we would do best to negotiate with Russia to end the fighting in Syria and rebuild the central government, with or without Bashir Assad.
Reverend Bruce M. Shipman lives in Groton but will soon be leaving for a new ministry as priest-in-charge of the Holy Trinity Anglican/Episcopal Church in Oaxaca, Mexico.
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