Haytham Manna’s Lecture at LSE: Violence and Democratic Perspectives in Syria
‘I hate the Alawites and the Shiites. We are going to kill them with our knives, just like they kill us’. When I read this sentence in the very professional newspaper International Herald Tribune in an article about al Zaatari camp in Jordan, I asked 3 of my friends to ask 60 children in the same camp what is the name of three Shiites families in Daraa. After 20 days not one of the children asked had an answer!
How can you hate an enemy who you cannot personalize in your city? Has this child an ideologically advanced approach to identifying his enemy on a sectarian basis? What happened and why was a political pacifist movement for freedom and dignity transformed in less than one year into a dirty war?
The generalization of violence was the way of solution for the dictatorship. Isolated from inside and outside, the official propaganda was based on the conspiracy theory and the fabricated opposition armed groups. Up to August 2011, the Syrian government’s media had not any name to describe the armed ‘imagined’ groups.
For the majority of western media: Syrian Free Army is Beautiful, Jihadists in Syria are not dangerous, militarization is inevitable and negotiating a political solution with the Assad Regime is impossible.
For the ‘National Coordination Body for Democratic Change’, militarization means the political and financial dependence on the military opposition, the marginalization of democratic forces, and the reinforcement of sectarian extremist and black Islamism groups: Black like oil, black like darkness and black like exclusion.
In any society, social movement is strong if it remains attractive to the majority of its society. In Syria, from the beginning in Daraa, we did our best to reinforce the element of progress in the spontaneous movement: