Experimental Blog # 216

Quotations from "The Home That Was Our Country ' - A Memoir of Syria by Alia Malek

"When authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya were overthrown in 2011, all eyes turned to Syria as if it would be next. But despite both peaceful and armed opposition, the regime that had ruled Syria for over forty years remained entrenched."

"The Ottoman Empire had captured the region{greater Syria} in 1516. < > Greater Syria is ancient, and it was home to some of the world's earliest civilizations. < > Since the third millennium BCE, many empires, dynasties, and caliphates had ruled Greater Syria. They read like a greatest hits of the ancient, classical, medieval, and Islamic eras: the Akkadians, Sumerians, Egyptians, Hittites, Mitanni, Assyrians, Babylonians, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Arameans, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Muslims{Umayyad, Abbasid, Mamluks}, Crusaders, and Mongols."

"When the Allies occupied the Ottoman capital, Constantinople{in World War I}, they began partitioning the territorial spoils according to agreements they had negotiated among themselves during the war. < > France would take what would eventually become Syria and Lebanon, and the United Kingdom grabbed Palestine{which included Jordan} and Iraq. In the separate Balfour Declaration{1917}, the United Kingdom had also encouraged the Zionists to seek a Jewish homeland in Palestine."

"Only in 1946, and with British intervention, did the French finally leave."
"With independence, Syrians were no longer unified by the pressing need to get rid of the French."
"The resulting movements and their leaders based their politics on ideology - whether that was socialism, nationalism, Islamism, or some combination."

"Alongside these political players was the military. < > the French had intentionally recruited for the new Syrian Army men with fewer opportunities, such as from the rural poor. They also sought minority men, assuming that they might be less prone to any kind of nationalism .."
"However, < > not all officers thought with one mind; among them, many were loyal to different ideological factions. Sometimes, that even meant being more loyal to military strongmen outside of Syria < > than to a class they were never part of inside Syria."

"...the ideologues became willing to work with the military in hopes of bringing about their envisioned changes. As might have been expected, eventually the men with guns could{and would} dump the philosophers. Thus, Syrians were introduced to the coup d'e'tat, the attempted coup d'e'tat, and the counter coup. While each coup that took place had different goals based on the philosophies of whoever was backing it, they all tended to follow a similar process."

"The Ba'ath Party was founded by two Syrians < > They named their party Ba'ath from the Arabic word for "resurrection" or "renaissance," and they envisioned a new society that transcended sectarian loyalties and the borders that foreign powers had imposed on the region."

"The most organized of the dissenters were the Islamists, which in Syria meant the Muslim Brotherhood. < > If the Muslim Brotherhood believed that Islam was both religion and state, the Ba'athists believed that religion belonged to God, while the country belonged to all{in theory}."

" ...on October 30, 1970, Hafez al-Assad staged the last coup in Syria, which he would maintain was not a coup but simply a "corrective movement."
"As much as Assad's authoritarian ways were resented, so were his Alawite roots. Anger against the oppressive regime was also driven by a class-based indignation that Syrian society's lowest rungs were now in charge."

Soon after the death of Hafez al-Assad on June 20, 2000, his son Bashar al-Assad became the new ruler of Syria.

"Tahrir means liberation, and Arab countries are full of Liberation plazas, boulevards, and buildings - though freedom has been in short supply in all of them."