This is my first post in my new hopefully shining blog despite the sad subject and the sad contents I am going to display. The tragedy of Syria and the Syrian people concerns me because I am a Syrian British, but mainly because I am involved in mankind and because every man’s death diminishes me, to quote the great poet John Donne. Therefore I do hope that you, my readers, will get involved too. In its essence, the Syrian Revolution is a mass movement of people marching under the banners of freedom, equality and justice.
Many people, governments and politicians are trying to discredit the Syrian Revolution against a repressive, ruthless and savage regime, but the destruction and wanton annihilation of towns, hamlets, farms and villages, not to mention Syria’s ancient heritage, in addition to the death of about 150,000 people, including many children, and the huge number of refugees must tell us something about the nature of a rogue security state which has launched total warfare against its people.
In view of the fact that I have been writing and commenting on The Syrian Revolution on Facebook since July 2011, I have decided to re-post some of my artwork, notes and articles to this blog, while supplying it with fresh material all the time. I think that travelling between the past and the present of the Revolution in order to bring the past to the present and the present to the past, will give it and us a truer perspective and preserve the best that it has had to offer, no matter what coarse it has taken and it is taking. Ideals and dreams about freedom, justice and equality must never die because they belong to us all and to humanity at large.
I can discern three stages or phases in the Syrian Revolution so far: (1) The stage of the Arab Spring and the peaceful civil protest, (2)the phase of predominantly peaceful demonstrations but marked by the emergence of the armed protest, especially after the fall of Baba Amr and the savage attacks by the Syrian regime on other cities like Deir Ezzor and Daraa in the summer of 2012. (3) the present phase marked by the shrinking of the civil protest movement in the face of the unprecedented savage assaults by the Syrian government on the civilians and the terrible destruction it is leaving in its wake. The armed revolution started to play an increasingly prominent role in deciding the future of Syria with the establishment of the FSA.
Sadly,the terrible abandonment of the Syrian people by the world and the inhumane heartless irresponsible flagrant contentions of geopolitics, combined with an amoral pragmatic global indifference is costing the Syrian people their country and their all. The vacuum created by the destruction of civil life, infrastructure and the disintegration of law and order, resulting from the war of the Syrian government against its people, has opened Pandora’s, thus giving the opportunity to global Islamic extremism to swarm and scramble into Syria to fill this gap, like Al-Qaeda and affiliates. The ill-equipped FSA on its own cannot defeat the Syrian Regime and Al-Qaeda combined.
The tragedy of Syria will live to haunt us all for a long time to come, while the horrific destiny the Syrian people and their children are compelled to suffer and will suffer for decades to come, including dispersion, starvation, drowning by sea, human trafficking humiliation, uprootedness and exposure to torture, rape, terrible diseases and disabilities; this pitiful, terrible destiny wrought by us who are watching and doing nothing is nothing short of one of the most horrifying crimes against humanity this century has witnessed or will witness. It is an indictment of us, our humanity, our ethics and civilization.
©Alisar Iram
The paragraphs in italics have been updated today, 15 October, 2013.
Photographs, unless belonging to others, images of works of art, articles, poems and notes by Alisar Iram are copyrighted and all rights are preserved.
Please note that I shall pay special attention to the annihilation, looting and pillaging of Syria’s heritage.
The contents of this blog are displayed either as posts or as pages. The titles of the pages appear in the black area above the posts under the main title.
alisariram 