The Syrian Revolt and the fate of my friend Amjad Baiazy

He seriously thought he could make a difference for the better. Now the Syrian plight for dignity is stuck in an impasse that manifests itself in a battle between government and opposition. Symbolically our friend Amjad has been imprisoned for almost a month now by the Syrian secret service. Little is known about his fate.

Meanwhile my facebook page shows a mix of messages, from the opposition camp’s revolutionary rhetoric to pro-government propaganda. Like two ghosts flexing their muscles, mirror images of each other, the two camps are heading for collision. The last days have shown significant muscle-flexing on the ground, with the army moving into Jisr Al-Shoghour, evoking a first major refugee flight.

The revolutionaries and the government in Syria and in the rest of the Middle East have in common that both lack a thorough plan and a productive attitude. The government’s plans have proven hollow promises. The opposition seems to lack the vision for a focused future perspective as well.

Because of this shared lack of vision, both the government and the opposition hide ever more in their deeply rooted sectarian and religious camps; and the possibility that the revolts will lead from bad to worse grows larger by the day. The call for a better future, which my friend Amjad voiced one-and-a-half month ago on the phone to me, now dies away in the dungeons of the Syrian secret service. Meanwhile the call for freedom heard at Tahrir square is deteriorating into a state of anarchy in which armed gangs kill policemen, after having done the same to innocent Alawites, who happen to belong to the sect president Bashar al-Assad belongs to. The army is rolling in with heavy gear and has effectively called a siege on northwest Syria.

The flight forward that Amjad embarked on, like so many others around the Middle East, increasingly proves itself as incapable of bringing about a successful change as the situation they were trying to escape from. The revolts seem to get stuck in two devilish dilemmas. The first dilemma is one of time: Syria is stuck between a problematic recent history that did not change anything for the better for most people, and an insecure future that will possibly lead to a civil war, reminding us of those that have been raging in Lebanon and Iraq in the last decades.

The second dilemma is one of choice, between two camps, the government and the opposition. A choice that is hard to make for the generally neutral Syrian population, as much as it is for the international community. The problem is that neither the government nor the opposition are to be trusted. The government is led by the interests of the secret and security services and the people around them, who are often Alawite. The opposition threatens to be hijacked by armed resistance groups, generally Sunni, with unclear but likely not only good plans regarding Syrian minorities.

The whirlwind moving through Syria and the wider Middle East is an explosive expression of spiraling economic stagnation, a stagnated juristic system and a thoroughly corrupted society. This situation stems not only from a government which is authoritarian to the bone, but as much in a society of groups that have never learned to co-exist peacefully, and have now resigned themselves to primal eye-for-eye, tooth-for-tooth mentality.

The same dilemmas echo throughout the hollow phrases and action of government and opposition. The government’s lack of a solution expresses itself in the desperate attempt to torture the problems away, of which our friend Amjad Baiazy is most probably already the victim. President Bashar al-Assad is lost between the necessity to crack down on every threat to his regime, and the necessity to make sure that the majority of Syrians will not abandon him completely. This balance continues to shift and the president seems not to have events in his hands anymore.

Some opposition groups are trying to break through today’s impasse by killing anyone associated with the government they can lay hands on, be they policemen or simply Alawite. Peaceful people like my friend Amjad Baiazy are now locked up in a cell of the Syrian mukhabarat because they thought this was their chance to really change something in their country.

As it now stands, president Bashar al-Assad is stuck in his fortress in a web of power, as our friend Amjad Baiazy is stuck in his web of impossible hopes in the dungeons of a secret service prison. This way, the until recently still proud Syrian society is falling victim to the tragedies unfolding. The international community, and I with them, are left in despair for our friends.

Ruben Elsinga is holder of a MSc. in International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He has lived in Damascus, Syria for one and a half years, where he worked at the Netherlands Institute of Academic Studies. Also check out Ruben’s personal blog www.rubenelsinga.wordpress.com.