Iraqi artists in Syria get a rare chance to exhibit their work

I filed this web story for the UNHCR on the opening of an exhibition in Damascus of 20 Iraqi refugee painters. The photo is by Gabriela Brust.

Calling themselves the “Babylon Artists,” the group of painters – including four women – reflect the stories and livelihoods of Iraqi refugees in Syria and the wider region. Some works are rooted in traditional Arabic calligraphy. Others are purely abstract: from the heavy brushstrokes of red, yellow and green that meet in the centre of Wadhah Mahdi’s paintings, to the clouds of colour that characterize Majid Hashim’s work.

“I took my ideas from my country’s art history,” art teacher Hashim said, while adding: “There is a long history of the visual arts from ancient Iraqi culture, from the legacy of Babylon.” A native of the ancient city, he fled to Syria with his wife and two children in 2006 after they were threatened by militias.

Omar Odeh’s large abstract work, “Love Story,” reflects his optimism about the situation in Iraq. He and his family fled to Damascus three years ago to escape a wave of sectarianism that was sweeping Iraq. He recently returned to Baghdad to visit family and friends and described the security situation as “much improved.”

Unlike his artistic colleagues, Waleed Hassan was persecuted for his work by a group that objected to his representation of the human form in his art. In exile for seven months with his wife and two of his four children, Hassan uses colours and landscapes to remind him of a more peaceful Iraq.

He points to one painting of yellow-brown, red and blue and explains that it “is a memory of the marshes of southern Iraq, where people live above the water on small boats and simple houses.” Another of his works depicts the countryside south of Baghdad where he and his family sought shelter at the start of the Gulf War of 2003.

A third painting shows the historic central quarter of Baghdad. Two figures make their way through the market, but their form is elongated, making them look as though they are swaying in the wind. “Baghdad’s Old City does not exist as it once did,” Hassan said. “But with many of these paintings, we try to capture the memories.”

Filed under: Syria, Writing , exhibition, Iraqi artists, refugees, transitions, unhcr

Palestinian Animal Farm

George Orwell’s 1945 satiric novel Animal Farm was performed with a distinctively Palestinian flavor in a debut production this week at the Freedom Theater in the Jenin refugee camp, taking aim at internal politics and the alliance between Israel and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

In scene one of the play, Farmer Jones assassinates the animals’ leader. In scene two, the animals – a few horses, a donkey, a crow, a chicken and some pigs – rally around a revolutionary sow named Snowball, who leads an uprising against their oppressive master.

“Intifada!” the animals scream, using the Arabic word for uprising. Strobe lights flash and heavy metal music blares as they chase Jones from the farm.

Via.

Filed under: Israel/Palestine, Literature , Animal Farm, George Orwell

Harper’s Weekly Review

Which I read in an email digest for writing like this:

Pope Benedict XVI visited Africa. In Angola he warned against witchcraft, corruption, and condoms, and two girls were trampled to death at a stadium where he appeared. “I entrust them to Jesus,” he said, “so that he welcomes them into his kingdom.” Pygmies in Cameroon built a ceremonial hut outside the apostolic nunciature in Yaounde and presented the Pope with a basket, a cloth mat, and a turtle. A 34-year-old army-backed DJ, Andry Rajoelina, was inaugurated as president of Madagascar, dissolved parliament, and promised to hold elections within two years. A pink baby elephant was discovered in Botswana. A massive earthquake off Tonga triggered an underwater volcanic eruption that unleashed a 13-mile-high plume of smoke. “We are quite lucky,” said Tonga’s chief seismologist, “not to get a tsunami.”

Read more and subscribe here.

Filed under: America, Media , Harpers, Weekly Review

IDF Fashion (or an open plea to drop the myth that Israel’s military mourns every dead, targeted civilian)

Ha’aretz recently disclosed the racist “civilian” t-shirt design that Israel soldiers make after completing field duty or training. “Civilian” is quoted because that is the excuse the IDF spokespeople gave for condemning but allowing such things — because, as one soldier says in the article, “These are shirts for around the house, for jogging, in the army. Not for going out. Sometimes people will ask you what it’s about.” Really.

Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children’s graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques – these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty. The slogans accompanying the drawings are not exactly anemic either: A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription “Better use Durex,” next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter’s T-shirt from the Givati Brigade’s Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull’s-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, “1 shot, 2 kills.” A “graduation” shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, “No matter how it begins, we’ll put an end to it.”

…. The slogan “Let every Arab mother know that her son’s fate is in my hands!” had previously been banned for use on another infantry unit’s shirt. A Givati soldier said this week, however, that at the end of last year, his platoon printed up dozens of shirts, fleece jackets and pants bearing this slogan.

“It has a drawing depicting a soldier as the Angel of Death, next to a gun and an Arab town,” he explains. “The text was very powerful. The funniest part was that when our soldier came to get the shirts, the man who printed them was an Arab, and the soldier felt so bad that he told the girl at the counter to bring them to him.”

In light of much recent coverage on the criminal conduct of Israeli soldiers during the Gaza war — from “permissive rules of engagement” that encouraged civilian casualties, vandalism and property destruction, to disclosures that troops were told to think of the Gaza as a “holy war” — what’s to make of all this? A pitch of nationalist fervor overtook Israel after the 1967 war, leading in the following decade to the beginnings of the nationalist-messianic settler movement after the’ 73 war that has supported Israel’s West Bank settlement policy ever since at its most base level. The settlements are strategic — grabbing good land, securing water, denying the space for a viable Palestinian state –but within the ideology that legitimizes the dispossession of others and the seizure of their land through of a Zionist reading of history comes a similar mode of thinking that permits the kind of political imagination that likes these t-shirts.

Of course racism from the military is not new, in history or today — think only of the Americans in Iraq, the popularity of the word “Hajji” to describe any and all Iraqis that soldiers kill, detain, torture, or protect. But another point: Israel’s closest, most formidable enemies are Hezbollah and Hamas, two Islamist militias who tap into popular anger and senses of dispossession (whether among Palestinians in Gaza or Shias in Lebanon) and religiosity to build effective fighters.  If different embodiments of political Islam in this case, then, accounts for the makeup of two prominent “terrrorist” militias that fight Israel, how does Zionist ideology account for the conduct and structure of  the IDF?

Filed under: Israel/Palestine, Media , Haaretz, IDF, racism, t-shirts

Guernica is memorialized but who remembers Hariqa?

In 1925 the French bombed Damascus from the air for 48 hours, killing nearly 1,500 people and leveling whole historic neighborhoods. It was fifteen years before the Luftwaffe destroyed a town in northern Spain for Franco. Fifteenth century architecture was reduced to rubble – one contemporary photograph shows the ornate wall of a courtyard house teetering around ruins, its doorways opening up to a pile of stones.

Via MidEast Image: “photo by the Daily Mail published on 5/11/25, and titled:DAMASCUS BOMBED BY THE FRENCH,NATIVE QUARTER IN RUINS.” THE SMOULDERING RUINS OF THE NATIVE QUARTER IN DAMASCUS ,WHICH SUFFERED SEVERELY FROM THE BOMBARDMENT BY FRENCH ARTILLERY FROM ABOVE THE ANCIENT CITY”.”

Druze farmers in the Jebel Hauran south of Damascus had taken down a French surveillance plan in July and by the fall their rebellion ballooned to a widespread Syrian-Arab nationalist revolt against the French. The Druze had been “transferred” there from their home in Lebanon by French and Ottoman troops, following hostilities with Maronites in the 1860s.

For Michael Provence, who wrote an authoritative book on the subject with subtle references to the insurgency in Iraq, the 1925 revolt opened the Middle East to its first forceful articulations of Arab nationalism following the collapse of the Caliphate and the imposition of colonial order. Predating the Palestinian revolt of 1936-39, which Timothy Mitchell called “the first sustained anti-colonial rebellion in the Arab world,” (quoted from Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity) the Syrian uprising and the subsequent French devastation of Damascus translates the struggles of Syrian sovereignty and their primacy in the history of self-determination in Bilad ash-Sham.

The bombs landed hardest on the commercial hub south of the Damascus Citadel between the late-Ottoman-era markets of Hamidiyyeh and Madhat Pasha. When it was rebuilt, Damascenes called the area al-Hariqa, “the fire,” lit by French bombs. The name holds today, listed plainly on maps, an outlier of urban regularity hanging on the edge of the UNESCO-protected Old City.

Around an axis of a pedestrian plaza with a large central fountain extends a neat grid of commercial streets. On a map the box of Hariqa looks like its own walled area – a bit of European urban planning amid the jumble of lanes and alleyways otherwise obstructed only by Straight Street, the Via Recta, which St. Paul walked down.

Via MidEast Image: “Original photograph by Luigi Stironi, Damascus, of the aftermath of the French bombardment Sunday October 18th 1925.”

In targeting Damascus the French ensured they killed more than people, wiping out a piece of the city’s unique record of eastern Mediterranean residential architecture, An Ottoman yearbook in 1900 recorded nearly 17,000 houses in the province of Damascus, of which it’s estimated half still stand today (see Jakob Skovgard-Petersen and Stefan Weber, “Modernizing Private Spaces: The ‘Aqqad Family and Houses in the Late 19th and the 20th Centuries” pdf).

“In all the eastern Mediterranean – from Egypt to Greece – the Syrian towns of Damascus and Aleppo are the only large cities which preserve domestic architecture on such a scale,” Skovgard-Petersen and Weber wrote in a book on the restoration of one Damascene mansion, the Bait al-‘Aqqad, now the Danish Institute. “Other important cities, such as Cairo and Istanbul, have lost practically most of their residential architecture and preserved only those buildings considered historical monuments (mosques, schools etc., and some major residences).”

That the French destroyed a part of Damascus is not unknown history – it’s the subject of books, and a detail in general histories of the mandated Middle East. And yet in light of recent growing attention to the architectural preservation of the Old City, which more often these days means renovating a neglected Ottoman merchant house and turning it into another restaurant or boutique hotel that fabricates a memory-product of “Old Damascus,” the destructive remodeling of Hariqa eighty years ago assumes new meaning.

Look beyond the irony that the French blew it up and later became key players in UNESCO, which designated the Old City a World Heritage Site in the 1979. The Roman-era sewers of the Street Called Straight have been dug up and replaced in the last few years, prompting articles on the shoddy beautification – little more than new wooden doors – of the shops that line the cobblestones.

Via MidEast Image: “Photograph by Luigi Stironi 1925, of the Sidi al-Amud area of the old city of Damascus/Syria, bombarded by the French Mandate authorities in Oct. 1925… A Sign of the French Laffayette Gallery still standing in the middle of the road. On the left is the Quwatli House,one of the most spectacular of the old mansions of the old City. The Quwatli’s Mansion served as the residence for Ibrahim Pasha during the Egyptian period 1832-40,and later as the German Consulate.“

Dedicated voices call for preservation of Damascene architecture, for the lifting of stones one by one from a courtyard, cleaned, and placed painstakingly back in place, as they were in the last decade at Beit Jabri, among the most popular places for tea and shisha by a fountain in the Old City. (Ignoring the Shish Tawouk, which is pliable and comes with a side of spaghetti).

Out of the charms for Old Damascus a desire comes to preserve formal architecture and develop new historic space. An imagination for an Ottoman or pre-Ottoman past emerges, tied essentially to the realization of the courtyard dream – even if cement or poured concrete has been used between the old stones (as in a number of these hotel and restaurant conversions), even if the fountain has been lit and made into a swimming pool (as in the 200 Euro-a-night and up Hotel Talisman).

Pleasure capital shapes architecture. Like the saving of traditional houses in Marrakesh and Fez by ex-pat Europeans and astute Moroccan hoteliers, the preservation/restoration of the Old City of Damascus is central to the country’s arrival on the profitable travel pages of New York and London print. But keeping Hariqa in mind, minding that French bombs flattened a section of the city so hard that one word – Guernica – spurs a host of terrible associations, how does history fit into this grand development scheme?

Damascus burning in October, 1925, via MidEast Image

Filed under: Syria, Writing , al Hariqa, architecture, Damascus, old city, preservation

and in a US paper no less

The novelist Ben Ehrenreich on the opinion page of the Los Angeles Times:

It has been argued that Zionism is an anachronism, a leftover ideology from the era of 19th century romantic nationalisms wedged uncomfortably into 21st century geopolitics. But Zionism is not merely outdated. Even before 1948, one of its basic oversights was readily apparent: the presence of Palestinians in Palestine. That led some of the most prominent Jewish thinkers of the last century, many of them Zionists, to balk at the idea of Jewish statehood. The Brit Shalom movement — founded in 1925 and supported at various times by Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem — argued for a secular, binational state in Palestine in which Jews and Arabs would be accorded equal status. Their concerns were both moral and pragmatic. The establishment of a Jewish state, Buber feared, would mean “premeditated national suicide.”

The fate Buber foresaw is upon us: a nation that has lived in a state of war for decades, a quarter-million Arab citizens with second-class status and more than 5 million Palestinians deprived of the most basic political and human rights. If two decades ago comparisons to the South African apartheid system felt like hyperbole, they now feel charitable. The white South African regime, for all its crimes, never attacked the Bantustans with anything like the destructive power Israel visited on Gaza in December and January, when nearly1,300 Palestinians were killed, one-third of them children.

Filed under: America, Israel/Palestine, Media , Ben Ehrenreich, Zionism

al-Hariqa and Destructive Renovation

Al-Hariqa after French bombardment in 1925 [Via]

The neighborhood of al-Hariqa at the west end of town is the newest neighborhood in the Old City. A large square is lined with department stores and tailors, and a grid of streets create a neat box of a shopping neighborhood bordered by the late Ottoman-era markets of Souq al-Hamidiyyeh to the north and Souq Madhat Pasha to the south. Need curtains, foam pads, or bubble wrap cut from outsized rolls that stand on the sidewalk? Hariqa is the place. It remains a busy commercial area in Damascus today, and indeed it used to be the busiest of souqs in the city a hundred years ago.

Damascus in flames, 1925 [From The Great Syrian Revolt, via Google Books]

The change to the neighborhood’s built space was not the result of overzealous government renovation, whether contemporary or late Ottoman. The change came, instead, out of the rubble of French bombs. Following the outbreak of riots in the Jebel Druze south of Damascus that quickly spread to the capital in 1925, the French High Commissioner General Maurice Sarrail responded with an order to bomb the city for 48 hours. Some 1,500 people were killed; houses and other historic buildings, some dating from as far back as the 15th century, were flattened, and the entire commercial heart of the Old City south of Hamidiyya was destroyed. The “garden neighborhoods” of Salihiya and Abou Rumaneh at the foot of Mt. Qassioun were young Damascus suburbs then; Merjeh Square was the recently built, Ottoman administrative center of the city; the Old City was still the heart of Damascus.

When it was rebuilt, with its grid and modern block buildings, the commercial hub took a new name: al-Hariqa, “the Great Fire,” lit by French bombs. It keeps its name today, plainly written on maps.

A 15th-century house in Hariqa after the French bombs (Photo: IFPO Archives, Damascus) [Via]

In light of architectural preservation worries and a clamor to save the cultural and spatial integrity of the Old City, the destructive remaking of Hariqa confuses things. It sits between the two greatest late Ottoman remodelings of the Old City — Souq al-Hamidiyeh and Souq Medhat Pasha, at the western end of Straight Street. The covered souqs (Mandate-era bullet holes from strafing French airplanes are still visible in Hamidiyeh, pockmarked into arcade’s barrel-vaulted metal roof) replaced the medieval western gates of the Old City, and underline the Ottoman renovations that transformed Damascus in the 19th century. The city was not a backwater then, as some write, and the proof exists in the richness of Ottoman architecture: souqs, schools, palaces, hammams, and residences, all the product of a cadre of Damascene notables and Ottoman governors (a string of ‘Azems in the late 18th century) who wanted Damascus to resemble Istanbul, at least in its public buildings.

But the French obliterated parts of this Ottoman city, resulting in the European style of Hariqa today (a large public square, the axis of a grid of commercial streets). And there was international outrage. Time magazine reported on the “Syrian Scandal” of a League of Nations Mandate authority bombing the oldest continually inhabited city in the world:

“There has never been such a scandal in the history of France!” Premier Painleve, soundly harassed, tried to soothe his public: “Despatches have been greatly exaggerated. . . . Annoying events have taken place in our Syrian Mandate, but the Government is taking necessary steps to remedy the situation.” The “annoying” or “scandalous” events marked the bombing and shelling of Damascus, “oldest inhabited city in the world,” by order of General Maurice Sarrail, French High Commissioner in Syria. Impartial witnesses placed the human loss at 1,000 lives, the property damage at over $10,000,000. L’Echo de Paris cried, last week: “General Sarrail is a senile, stupid, brutal sadist … a criminal … a bloody tyrant!”

… for 48 hours French shot and shell poured into the city; French tanks dashed at full speed through the streets, firing point blank into bazars and houses; and French airplanes dropped bombs.

Al-Hariqa today [Via Flickr]

Remaking out of rubble is hardly unique. But in the case of Damascus and Hariqa it could have certain meaning. The intact but threatened Old City is an ever-growing tourist and elite attraction, a hub of restaurants and hotels that preserve the traditional Arab house while manufacturing an ideal of the Damascene past for consumption. The entire architectural integrity of the place is protected by Syrian and growing international initiatives — from its UNESCO World Heritage designation, most prominently — so one might be able to say that the country that destroyed part of it in the last century now champions its protection. This is not unique in the post-colonial world either.

Filed under: Photos, Syria, Writing , 1925, architecture, Damascus, French bombardment, Hariqa, old city

Globalization and the Messiness of Now

A conversation in the PEN America Journal between Amitava Kumar and Ilija Trojanow includes the following wonderful bit about the uselessness of Thomas Friedman and the 12th century trade routes of the Indian Ocean — brought up in a discussion of Amitav Ghosh’s In An Antique Land.

Trojanow: … So I suppose I have learned from Indian writers the width of freedom that one has as an artist in this world, so long as you refuse to acknowledge cultural boundaries that other people build up.

Kumar: That’s beautiful. Ghosh’s book In an Antique Land is a great example of that. It follows two parallel narratives, both describing Indians in Egypt. The first begins in 1148 and the second in 1980. In the first, a slave from India is serving an Arab master and going to Arabia. Eight hundred years later this document about him is discovered in the Cairo Geniza, in a synagogue, because the man was Jewish. Of course, the document doesn’t become intelligible until someone takes it to Princeton after the Second World War. And then a young scholar at Oxford, Amitav Ghosh, finds it. He sees this Indian name and thinks he’s entitled to visit the Geniza to research its origins. In going there and in learning the Egyptian language, he meets these new migrants, devout Muslims who act as his guides as he, a Hindu, pieces together the journey of the slave from India to Egypt. These migrants later leave to work in Iraq.

This enormous mix of things confuses us because we don’t have a sense of history. Read, say, Thomas Friedman, who says that the world is flat, and you’d think that globalization was suddenly discovered by Thomas Friedman when he woke up one day. But globalization did not happen yesterday, and global exchange and global commerce and the sharing of goods and bodily fluids across all kinds of boundaries happened in other centuries too, often in easier ways.

Trojanow: That’s one of the myths of globalization. Samuel Huntington is ignorant beyond belief when he says that, in today’s world, suddenly cultures are coming together. The Indian Ocean, for example, was one big area of interaction, throughout many, many centuries. It was much easier for someone, say, three hundred years ago, living on the seaboard of the Indian Ocean, to have cultural exchange with someone else than it is today. For an Omani trader, or a Persian trader, or an Indian trader, or an Indonesian trader, there were certain highways—very seaworthy routes—defined by the monsoon. And today it’s quite difficult for a trader from Bihar to go to Mombasa, for example. He needs a passport, which in India is not easy. Then he needs a visa, which is even more difficult. And then he needs to save money for a plane ticket, which is almost impossible if he’s a small-town trader.

Worlds separate as they seem to come together; foreign students and young Syrians in internet cafes in Damascus talk to friends and relatives across the globe on Skype and we think communication is the key here — the two are more and more alike, dressing more and more alike, riveted by their online social networks, talking the world over. But in the livelihoods of the foreigner and the local disparties grow — the foreigner might leave Syria often, for weekend holidays, to Beirut or the Dead Sea, or even farther south, to the country whose stamp will deny you reentry into Syria — while the latter maybe never leaves, because he is harassed at the airport, or simply cannot afford it, and most certainly cannot enter Palestine. Travel eases for some while it constricts for others, and the world doesn’t flatten.

Filed under: Literature, Writing , amitav ghosh, amitava kumar, globalization, ilija trojanow, India, PEN America Journal

The battle to preserve an ancient Syriac monastery (featuring the sacred digits of a 7th century abbot)

Christians have lived in these parts since the dawn of their faith. But they have had a rough couple of millennia, preyed on by Persian, Arab, Mongol, Kurdish and Turkish armies. Each group tramped through the rocky highlands that now comprise Turkey’s southeastern border with Iraq and Syria.

The current menace is less bellicose but is deemed a threat nonetheless. A group of state land surveyors and Muslim villagers are intent on shrinking the boundaries of an ancient monastery by more than half. The monastery, called Mor Gabriel, is revered by the Syriac Orthodox Church.

Battling to hang on to the monastic lands, Bishop Timotheus Samuel Aktas is fortifying his defenses. He’s hired two Turkish lawyers — one Muslim, one Christian — and mobilized support from foreign diplomats, clergy and politicians.

Also giving a helping hand, says the bishop, is Saint Gabriel, a predecessor as abbot who died in the seventh century: “We still have four of his fingers.” Locked away for safekeeping, the sacred digits are treasured as relics from the past — and a hex on enemies in the present.

A friend who visited Mor Gabriel in December recently forwarded the following on this recent story in the Wall Street Journal:

It is important that people know what’s happening and understand the history, and hopefully, we can contribute to the protection of an ancient site whose heritage, like so much in the Middle East, belongs
to the entire world.
South of the Euphrates, in upper Mesopotamia, on the border with Syria and Iraq, lies a region which Syriac Christians or the Suriani people call Tur Abdin, the Mountain of God’s Servants. This is the ancestral homeland of the Suriani, living descendants of the ancient Assyrians and Aramaeans, who embraced Christianity in the first centuries of the Common Era. Their liturgical language is Suryoyo or Syriac, a version of Eastern Aramaic, and their vernacular is Turoyo, or “the language of the mountains.” Traditionally farmers and traders, they have a rich history of artistic and literary production in the Syriac language, which holds a special place in Christian tradition since, of all the Semitic languages, it is the closest to the Aramaic spoken by Jesus of Nazareth and the first disciples. Those of you who know some Hebrew or Arabic will hear a familiar sound: hello is “shlomo aleicho,” and thank you is “taudi,” and in their liturgy you’ll frequently hear the blessing “amin baruch mor,” “amen blessed is the lord.”

They’ve suffered a great deal throughout their history. First, their church was declared heretical after the Council of Chalcedon in 451 which led to persecutions by the Byzantines; in the fifth and sixth centuries, the Persians swept through Mesopotamia and eastern Anatolia and massacred many Assyrians. With the advent of Islam, their situation improved, since the Muslims were more tolerant of minority Christian churches than the Byzantines. Then, the Crusaders came, and they suffered persecutions because they were considered heretics. The Mongols were perhaps the worst, and Timur also distinguished himself
by massacring many Assyrian Christians in order to avoid being associated with the “infidel” ways of his Mongol ancestors. The Ottomans improved their lot, but in the 20th century they suffered the greatest blow in their history: during the Armenian genocide, local Kurds branded them together with the Armenians and, with the help of the Ottoman army, killed up to 200,000 Suriani Christians as well as
Assyrians belonging to other churches. Few know about the Assyrian genocide, but the fate which they suffered was as bad as that of the Armenians, and 1915 was the beginning of the dispersions and exile
that have marked their history in the 20th and now the 21st century.
They refer to 1915 as Shato d’Sayfo, the year of the sword. Up to then, they had made up a substantial part of the local population, and both the towns of Mardin and Midyat had strong Christian communities.
Many Suriani fled to Syria, and Ataturk expelled their Patriarch from Mardin; the patriarchate is currently located in Damascus, and throughout Syria, the surname Mardini and Midyati is a testament to
the historical origins of the Suriani living here.

During the civil war with the PKK in eastern Turkey that raged in the eighties and nineties, many Suriani were killed or fled. They were caught in the crossfire and viewed with suspicion both by the Turkish
government and the local Kurds. It goes without saying that they suffered severely during this period. But the state too was hostile towards them. Not recognized as an official minority, unlike the Jews,
Armenians and Greeks, in the darkest days of Kemalism, monks were even jailed for teaching Syriac.

In a land that once had several hundred thousand Suriani, there are now only five thousand left, and yet, the indignities continue. I visited the monastery of Mor Gabriel last December when the abbot, Bishop Shmuel Aktas, told me of a land dispute with neighboring Kurdish villages, They want to take a large swath of land from this ancient monastery, which was founded in 397 C.E. by two Syriac monks,
Shmuel and Shemun, making it one of the oldest monastic communities in the world. But this doesn’t mean much to their neighbors, who would like to take a good portion of their land and allocate it to their
villages for development purposes. This is an indignity directed against minorities in Turkey and a crime against an ancient people and their culture. Things seemed to be getting better after the cessation
of hostilities with the PKK in 2000, and many Suriani returned from abroad. But now, one of their holiest sanctuaries is being threatened, and the signal from their neighbors is clear: that they aren’t welcome in Turkey, or, if they want to live in their land, they should be satisfied with the status of second class citizens whose culture isn’t respected. The case is currently before a local court in Midyat, and the judge’s final decision has been postponed until next month.

Please inform your friends and relatives; if you can, write to your congressmen and senators. Let the Turkish government know how important this case is and that the world cares about the rights of
minorities in Turkey. It would be a great loss for the world to see this ancient community suffer another blow in its long history of defeat and persecution, and the consequences could endanger their very
presence in their ancestral homeland.

Filed under: Syria , Mor Gabriel, Suriani, Syrian Christians, Turkey

No change

Chas Freeman’s chance to run the National Intelligence Council will never come, because Freeman withdrew his name under a smear campaign by Israeli lobbies in Washington and their eager acolytes in Congress, in print, and on television. Maybe some in the White House decided to embarrass themselves and sink their own appointment? Who knows what difference he would make. Would his astute, mild criticisms of American-Israeli policies and accurate readings of regional disgust with West Bank colonization have led in one way or another to, say, American pressure on Israel to stop settlements? Or to broker regional peace through the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative? To prep another Arab leader to act like Sadat and fly to Jerusalem, or, better yet, an Israeli prime minister to fly to Beirut or Damascus as a gesture of peace? The last is never happening, but we can dream right?

Either way, Freeman’s name is withdrawn and the powers that be in the corners of Washington that don’t have ballots keep a hold over American foreign policy. Among those politicians in AIPAC’s pocket who took such personal offense to Freeman’s appointment was Chuck Schumer, whose offense sent out this:

“Charles Freeman was the wrong guy for this position. His statements against Israel were way over the top and severely out of step with the administration. I repeatedly urged the White House to reject him, and I am glad they did the right thing.”

As Talking Points Memo summed it:

[Freeman] was a former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and is close to the Saudis. The real rub, the basis of the whole controversy, however, is that he has been far more critical of Israeli policy than is generally allowed within acceptable debate in Washington.

Freeman posted a message to Foreign Policy’s blog last night announcing his resignation. All the headlines now talk about his “blasting the Israel lobby on his way out.” Mabrouk, as he should. Especially heret:

There is a special irony in having been accused of improper regard for the opinions of foreign governments and societies by a group so clearly intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government – in this case, the government of Israel. I believe that the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for US policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics has allowed that faction to adopt and sustain policies that ultimately threaten the existence of the state of Israel. It is not permitted for anyone in the United States to say so. This is not just a tragedy for Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle East; it is doing widening damage to the national security of the United States.

Here’s to America’s shooting itself in the foot, again. The Israelis will make Avigdor Lieberman their foreign minister while Chuck Schumer and others hold the reigns on Middle East thought in Washington.

Filed under: America, Israel/Palestine , Chas Freeman, Israel lobby, National Intelligence Council

Because Rockets = Macaroni

“When have lentil bombs been going off lately? Is someone going to kill you with a piece of macaroni?” asked Congressman Brian Laird. It was only after Senator John Kerry, the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, raised the issue with Defence Minister Ehud Barak after their trip last month that Israel allowed the pasta in. Macaroni was considered a luxury item, not a humanitarian necessity, they were told. The total number of products blacklisted by Israel remains a mystery for UN officials and the relief agencies which face long delays in bringing in supplies. For security reasons such items as cement and steel rods are banned as they could be used by Hamas to build bunkers or the rockets used to target Israeli civilians. Hearing aids have been banned in case the mercury in their batteries could be used to produce chemical weapons.

From the Independent. Finally John Kerry says something, and I start feeling a bit better about that stint as a “Finance Volunteer” during the ‘04 DNC in Boston (though it was worth the free ticket to the convention the night some guy named Barry Obama gave the keynote address).

Filed under: America, Israel/Palestine, Media , blockade, Gaza, Independent, John Kerry, macaroni, pasta

Azem / Hijaz

The Azem Palace in the 1880s. Built in 1749-51 by Assad Pasha al-Azem, one in a line of Ottoman governors of Syria tapped from the various Azem families. “At the end of this Suq [Bezouria], is one of the most splendid houses in Damascus,with seven courts and saloons,gorgeously decorated; it still belongs to his descendant,” gushed Isabel Burton, wife of Richard Burton, the Victorian explorer who was made consul in Damascus in 1869. [MidEastImage]

And today:

Meanwhile the Hijaz Station (1908-1913), which today functions as a temporary bookstore and the eventual facade to a large commercial development (rumors of a large shopping mall/transit terminal), was in its heyday the grand traveler’s entrance to Sham. It was also designed by a Spaniard. A photo circa 1914-1918:

The architect Fernando de Aranda (1878-1969) also built the trade building al-’Abid in Merjeh Square and anticipated, in Stefan Weber’s estimatation, “the orientalizing colonial-style.” Which reminds me of Cairo: the al-Rifai mosque across the street from the 14th century madrassa of Sultan Hassan. Al-Rifai was built between 1869 and 1912, its design supervised by an Austrian, Max Herz, head of the Khedive-appointed, foreign-dominated Committee for the Conservation of Arab Monuments in Cairo. For more about all that, check out Paula Sanders book.

The Hijaz station in 2007, on my first trip to Syria:

Filed under: Egypt, Photos, Syria

A suggestion for the eventual ambassador

Cultural immersion / Nostalgia:

“Original 1859 Photograph of the American Vice Consul to Damascus Michael Mishaka holding a bible. He was a Protestant Christian.” [MidEastImage]

Filed under: America, Photos, Syria , Ambassador, Consul, Damascus, Diplomacy

It’s been raining but not enough for the Barada to flow like this again

No, Damascus no longer conjures running water. The garden districts along Mt. Qassioun now line a narrower and dirtier version of the LA river. “The Barada” today conjures a watery brand of Syrian beer and the green flowing stench of a former lifeline. A photo of the now-extinct Victoria Bridge in the 1870s, over the once-flowing river. Today Sharia Shukri al-Quwatli, a “broad avenue,” runs over what is left of this section of the Barada. From the website of the honorary consulate of Syria in Toronto.

Filed under: Photos, Syria , Barada, Damascus, Victoria Bridge, water