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On 10/19/15 9:32 AM, Mark Richey wrote:
> You could say much the same thing about many regimes in the region,
> or elsewhere, such as Egypt, or Pakistan. How does that justify
> massive foreign armed intervention, together with violence
> particularly directed against ethnic and religious minorities? That
> is your implication. Have Libyans seen a more humane economic system
> put in place?
You're right. Iran, Russia and Hezbollah are to be condemned for
propping up a ghoul like Assad.
>
> Also, there is very little evidence that the jihadists are critics of
> the Syrian economic model. When interviewed, such as in the recent
> interview of the chief of al-Nusra, they only call for murder of
> Assad and Hassan Nasrallah, of Lebanon, and also of the Alawite
> population ('hundreds of missiles on Alawite cities.') in general.
> Pure sectarian/ethnic/religious hatred.
I advocate the approach of the grass roots movement that the FSA
defended, not any Salafist group. Here is an indication of the kind of
society they were trying to build before Syria's Pinochet decided that
the baby had to be strangled in its cradle:
http://harpers.org/archive/2012/08/welcome-to-free-syria/
Matar brought me to a mosque that sits next to one of the mass graves.
Inside, there were heaps of clothes, boxes of Turkish biscuits, and
crates of bottled water. An old bald man with a walrus mustache studied
a ledger with intensity while a group of old men around him argued about
how much charity they could demand from Taftanaz’s rich to rebuild the
town. This was the public-affairs committee, one of the village’s
revolutionary councils. The mustached man slammed his hands on the floor
and shouted, “This is a revolution of the poor! The rich will have to
accept that.” He turned to me and explained, “We’ve gone to every house
in town and determined what they need”—he pointed at the ledger—“and
compared it with what donations come in. Everything gets recorded and
can be seen by the public.”
All around Taftanaz, amid the destruction, rebel councils like this were
meeting—twenty-seven in all, and each of them had elected a delegate to
sit on the citywide council. They were a sign of a deeper transformation
that the revolution had wrought in Syria: Bashar al-Assad once subdued
small towns like these with an impressive apparatus of secret police,
party hacks, and yes-men; now such control was impossible without an
occupation. The Syrian army, however, lacked the numbers to control the
hinterlands—it entered, fought, and moved on to the next target. There
could be no return to the status quo, it seemed, even if the way forward
was unclear.
In the neighboring town of Binnish, I visited the farmers’ council, a
body of about a thousand members that set grain prices and adjudicated
land disputes. Its leader, an old man I’ll call Abdul Hakim, explained
to me that before the revolution, farmers were forced to sell grain to
the government at a price that barely covered the cost of production.
Following the uprising, the farmers tried to sell directly to the town
at almost double the former rates. But locals balked and complained to
the citywide council, which then mandated a return to the old
prices—which has the farmers disgruntled, but Hakim acknowledged that in
this revolution, “we have to give to each as he needs.”
It was a phrase I heard many times, even from landowners and merchants
who might otherwise bristle at the revolution’s egalitarian
rhetoric—they cannot ignore that many on the front lines come from
society’s bottom rungs. At one point in March, the citywide council
enforced price controls on rice and heating oil, undoing, locally, the
most unpopular economic reforms of the previous decade.
“We have to take from the rich in our village and give to the poor,”
Matar told me. He had joined the Taftanaz student committee, the council
that plans protests and distributes propaganda, and before April 3 he
had helped produce the town’s newspaper, Revolutionary Words. Each week,
council members laid out the text and photos on old laptops, sneaked the
files into Turkey for printing, and smuggled the finished bundles back
into Syria. The newspaper featured everything from frontline reporting
to disquisitions on revolutionary morality to histories of the French
Revolution. (“This is not an intellectual’s revolution,” Matar said.
“This is a popular revolution. We need to give people ideas, theory.”)
Most opposition towns elect a delegate to one of the fifty or so
district-wide councils across the country. At the next level up is the
Syrian Revolution General Command, the closest thing to a nationwide
revolutionary institution. It claims to represent 70 percent of the
district-wide councils. The SRGC coordinates protests and occasionally
gives the movement political direction: activists in Taftanaz told me
that they sometimes followed its suggestions concerning their publications.
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