Once in a life time

Syria is definitely a once-in-a-life-time destination. I wish I meant that in a good way, but I don’t. What I mean by this particular once-in-a-life-time destination is that I never want to go back there. It is way too communist for my liking. To clarify, communist is not a positive word in my vocabulary. My communist is not romantic at all and it has nothing to do with equality, fraternity and freedom. Instead, I heavily associate it with red tape, frowning police and customs officers whose sheer existence is justified by foreigner infiltration paranoia and finally, an acquiescent population, without exposure to anything that may shake them out of their passivity. Syria was way too close to home. And Cuba to a certain extent. The most striking similarity was with Milosevic’s home, with its mix of nationalist and socialist politics, rather endemic to the intersection between Europe and Asia, the occident and the orient, which somehow always offers fertile soil to such movements.

Totalitarian regimes have always made me uneasy. Bashar Al’Assad’s smiling and waving photos everywhere, and his British wife, of Syrian origin, wearing a knee length skirt, while the major part of his country-women walk around covered head to toe. The government’s flirtation with radical Islam, as a method of social control, stood in stark contrast with its concurrent repression of clerical movements. To me, it showed its most striking face in Hama. This city in northern Syria was literally flattened down by Hafez Al’Assad’s tanks in the beginning of 1980s, with over 60% of its population brutally killed due to an Islamic rebellion, and thousands of others put into his notorious prisons which used methods of torture possibly only comparable to the times of inquisition. Today, a massive statue of Hafez Al’Assad, holding his hand up in salute, stands in the centre of the city, as if telling them, just you dare again. It was the final missing piece of my puzzle of Syria, which persuaded me that it is never about an ideology per se, but always about power.

Syria gave me a constant feeling of repression, inability to breathe, anxiety about the future. Whatever I tried to talk about that remotely resembled politics, even if I simply asked, do you guys have trade relations with Iraq, I would be advised to keep my mouth shut, and not to bring such topics up, and to simply enjoy myself. But, I wasn’t sure how to enjoy myself, being suffocated by factory and car pollution, coupled by desert sand, Big Brother’s presence everywhere, and the feeling that a part of one of the many badly maintained buildings in the old city of Damascus would come crumbling down and leaving me dead on the spot. The shopping didn’t help either, since I could mostly choose between the made in China or made in Taiwan products I have seen all around the world, for which I was assured they were unique and made of special Syrian stone. I guess I could have escaped the reality by submerging my thoughts into ruins, i.e. the archaeological remains, because after all, this is what you are expected to go to Syria for. I have never been into archaeology much, and this trip has strengthened my theory that this science, if I may even call it a science, has become a big business, with companies and organisations competing to acquire financial resources to preserve the world heritage, while mass-producing stories on who used to live where and in which circumstances. The most interesting was the attitude of the Syrians towards the ruins, as if it was them who built it all 2,000 years ago, and not some other peoples and civilizations who happened to live on the same land which Syrians live on now.

There were nice and interesting things about Syria too. I will tell you about them next time, when my negativity evaporates. For now, I wonder how my attitude towards Syria would be shaped if I was not interested in politics and if I was not paying attention to Syria’s government, its repression of its people and its relations to other Arab countries. Can it be that my Serbian almost genetically conditioned political stance on society has made it impossible for me to look beyond?