We are told that the media ‘desensitizes’ us to terrible events, that it so efficiently bombards us with stories of suffering that we are too wearied to sympathise with the victims. We are told, essentially, that it does its job so well that it does it badly. I think there is some truth in this; it is easy to find oneself thinking about conflicts as if they were only fictions created to satisfy our desire for narrative and debate.
It was only when I spoke to the victims of war themselves that I realised how often I fall into this mental trap. It was my good fortune this August to talk to two Syrian refugees, a student and a seller of fabrics. Their country’s collapse had brought them to a city with which I was falling in love: Istanbul. I met the first, whom for his own security I cannot name, in a hostel. We got talking and exchanged a few of those blithe, excitable questions that back- packers, like freshers, must be ready to fire off as soon as eye contact is made: “Where are you from?” I asked, “Damascus”, he replied. Conscious that the subject of his homeland was perhaps a sensitive one, I asked him if he could tell me more about the Syrian conflict.
He was still in school in the spring of 2011, when picket signs and microphones had not yet been made obsolete by government bullets and shells. He did not participate in the protests, but he did promote one on Facebook. He did not want the overthrow of the government: his was just one reasonable voice amongst many calling for reforms to the existing regime. But nothing incenses a bully like being told what to do, so he was branded a traitor by government officials, and only saved from indefinite detention by his father’s contacts within the regime. He then turned to blogging under a pseudonym, exalting the Free Syrian Army, but further confrontations with censors and teachers got him expelled, first from school, and then from the country. He now goes to university in Cyprus. He cannot return to his family. But he continues to blog.
He insisted, nevertheless, that he was lucky, that his experience of the war was slight and not particularly harmful. The sad fact is that, relative to the experiences of soldiers, let alone those Syrian civilians under the medieval do- minion of ISIS, he is correct: he was lucky. But then the absolute evil of the Assad regime could hardly be demonstrated better than by the relativism which makes exile seem a fortunate fate.
With disarming flippancy, he described the bleak moral landscape against which his own fate was set in such bright contrast, “I was playing football in Damascus… a plane was bombing the countryside and I couldn’t do anything.” We also often hear that we cannot do anything about the violence in Syria, that we can only watch the country fall apart. But this blogger, who had experienced what it is to be really ineffectual in the presence of evil, had nothing but scorn for the Western governments who pretended to feel the same. “People say it is only the extremist groups [fighting]. This is very painful for me, because my friends and I had a dream of a new Syria.” This dream died with the hopes of the FSA, but, he says, they could have come to fruition with the help of the West.
Less impassioned, but equally depressed by the war’s effect on his life, was the seller of fabrics I spoke to. Beforehand, he lived a comfortable life in Aleppo, but after protesters forced him to close his shop and as the demolition of his city began, he resolved to move to Istanbul. His view was less partisan than that of the blogger, “We had a very cheap life before the war,” he remarked. I asked which side he sympathized with; he replied neither. While he condemned Assad, he also thought the rebels too naïve, unable to realize that “it is easy to start a fire, but hard to stop one.” Thus, the conclusion to the war that he hopes for is less specific than the blogger’s; he only wishes that “the blood would stop”.
Though encounters like these do atomise your view of a conflict, they also made me wonder how much these men’s tales could tell us about the entire conflict. I am wary of claiming too much on the basis of two individual opin- ions, but I suspect that more Syrians, wearied by three years of fighting, disillusioned by the rebels’ metamorphosis into Islamists, would agree with the fabric seller. “All I wish is that the blood would stop”: if only it were that simple.
