Syria Support Movement solidarity with the Syrian people
Editorial by Judith Bello of Syria Support Movement, October 10, 2024
Earlier today, I published an article from an “Opposition” news source in Syria called Al Balad. I occasionally publish articles from these sites because they have interesting information hidden between the lines, which I highlight with my commentary. When Syria is not the central focus, this is a way to find interesting information that doesn’t rise above the threshold of global interest, but does tell you something about what is going on in Syria. The article was called “Syrians Returning from Lebanon Arrested by Regime” and admittedly, I should have changed the title. A fellow member of our board called and asked me to take the article down. That’s fair, I suppose, as many people who are accustomed to reading this type of news will take it at face value. But, I don’t want the point to be lost.
There were 2 points of interest in the article.
The first is assertion that nearly 400,000 refugees have entered the country from Lebanon in the last couple of weeks. Wow!! Syria is under sanctions that leave the people who live there with 3 or 4 hours a day of electricity per day, limit the amount of medical care available and cause poor people to live on very narrow diets. And yet, Syria has embraced their desperate brothers and sisters from Lebanon. Along with the Lebanese refugees, many of the Syrians who fled to Lebanon during the U.S. dirty war on Syria are also returning to Syria. This is fine. In fact, Syria wants their people to return home. The government and people are doing their best to address their economic problems and are striving for restoration, reconciliation and a return to normalcy.
This leads to the second part of the article which leads to contention, but also makes a very important point. Among the Syrian refugees returning, there are people who might be considered criminals who fled the war; soldiers who may have deserted during the war and left with their families, and also people affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood or active in terrorist organizations who murdered and pillaged across Syria during the war. To deal with this, the Syrian government has declared an amnesty for all but the most egregious acts. One often sees articles in the opposition press, in the European press, and also in NGO statements complaining that the amnesty is a lie and people are being arrested at the border, usually focused on a particular case or a few cases, but claiming that no one who has ever opposed the Syrian government is safe.
This article is one of those articles. However it ultimately makes absolutely the opposite point. It complains of the arrest of a particular individual. Then it says that there have been 9 cases of such arrests since the flood of refugees came from Lebanon through the Jdeidet Yabous crossing. In fact, in one case, the guy was detained for a day or two, and then allowed to return with his family to Lebanon where he has been living for at least 5 years, if not longer. What did he do before he left? We don’t know. But the U.S. paid opposition did a lot of very bad things to ordinary Syrians. Jdeidet Yabous is the main crossing where people are literally flooding across the border. A Syrian friend says that 400,000 refugees have entered Syria. This article says that 260,000 Syrians have returned to Syria since September 25, including 5,000 in the last 24 hours. So, if all 9 cases occurred in the last 2 or 3 days (its at least that much), then you are talking about .0009% or .0006% of the people who crossed the border. If these 9 cases are considered in relation to 260,000, then we are looking at .000035%, actually a little less but why quibble over details. Of course, the reality is somewhere in the middle, somewhere between .0006% and .000035%. Alternatively we can say that more than 1 in 1,111 or 1,666 people, and possibly as few as 1 in 29,000 people have been arrested as they fled back into Syria.
Now, the claim is that the amnesty is a “trap”, but looking at the numbers it is pretty hard to see it that way.
Human interest stories are important and they grab out attention, but they don’t always reflect the larger reality. I bothered to address this article and this issue because it seems to me that there is a steady stream of articles of this ilk denigrating the beleaguered Syrian government for being ungenerous and unforgiving. This, in the U.S., a country that imprisons and expels hundreds of refugees a day across it’s southern border; this from a country that has placed such onerous economic sanctions on Syria and Lebanon (and 40 others) that it is difficult for the government to fulfill it’s obligations to society because they are nearly completely cut off from the global trade network; this from a country that sells weapons to a colonizer on their border that routinely perpetrates violent attacks on their civilians and civilian infrastructure.
I won’t say this is a “joke” because it isn’t funny. However I will say that it is a deliberately misleading attack on people who are not our enemy, but merely inconvenient to our government’s imperialist agenda. Yet the demonization of a country like Syria or Venezuela or the Congo, is not only unfair and unreasonable, but it is used as a wedge to convince people that it is OK to persecute them and to steal their resources. And this wedge is also used to divide the antiwar movement and the peace and justice movement. It’s a shame.
