Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria. Charles Glass
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of the revolution, then abandoning the populace to its fate when the regime counterattacked.
Like Vichy France, Syria today is divided into supporters of the regime; résistants; and the attentistes, who await the outcome before choosing sides. Most of those I spoke to in all three camps rejected military intervention by the United States, Britain, France and, especially, Turkey, to solve their problems. The Armenian Catholic archbishop, Monsignor Maryati recalled, “Relating to Turkey, many Armenians in Aleppo came from the massacres in Turkey and were forced to leave their country in 1915. They found in Aleppo a secure shelter. They have the rights of any Syrian. They became part of the Syrian identity. They had many martyrs who defended Syria. Psychologically and spiritually, we have some worries—especially intervention by Turkey. We are afraid to be forced into a new emigration.” Even the non-Armenian bishops who spoke to me in Aleppo and Damascus dreaded invasion by the Turkish army. Turkey, they pointed out, does not allow churches to conduct services freely as in Syria and prevented Arabs in Hatay Province, part of Syria until the French gave it to Turkey in 1938, from speaking their language. In Syria, they can speak whatever language they want. In Aleppo, Muslim children are the majority in most Christian-run schools where teaching is in French. As the Armenians fear the Turks, Alawites and Christians fear Sunni Salafists who chant,
Messiahi alla Beirut (Christians to Beirut),
Alawiah alla tabut (Alawis to the coffin).
Syria’s anti-imperial history dates from its violent rejection of the French occupation of Syria from 1920 to 1945, when the French destroyed much of Damascus and other cities to maintain their rule. The near-universal view is that the United States, which until 2004 shipped suspects to Syria for special treatment, objects less to the regime’s repression than to its alliance with Iran. If the United States and Israel are contemplating an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, it would make sense to sever the link between Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Some Syrians fear the revolution has become a tool of the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel to defeat Iran. That was not why the uprising began nor why so many have become part of it. The perception that outside powers are changing the revolution’s objectives can only rob it of popular support, particularly at a time when the regime has the upper hand militarily and opponents resort to sending car bombs into security buildings and busloads of policemen that kill as many civilians as soldiers.
One Christian said to me in a whisper, “I shit on this revolution, because it is forcing me into the arms of the regime.”
Charles Glass
Dauphin, Alpes-De-Haute-Provence, France
Three dogs pulled and tore the flesh from the corpse. The lamb’s rib-cage was already bare, and still they clawed at the body and snatched lumps of meat with their jaws. They had opened the animal up from its soft stomach, and the wool was stretched aside to expose the food within. The entrails were mostly eaten, but the lamb’s head was untouched. Its eyes were open and blank. The dogs’ paws, their jowls and the hair around their eyes were stained, like the ground, dark red. One dog growled for a moment to warn another not to tread on its portion of the dead prey. Then it silently rejoined the feast, the grim work of devouring what each could of the lamb before they abandoned its carcass to the flies.
The black and white mongrels and the lamb were the only signs of life or death in the barren limestone hills. We were on the highway to Alexandretta, and the driver had stopped the bus and gone into a solitary hut just off the road. No one asked why. This was not, I would learn, unusual. Buses did not keep schedules here, and drivers made their money from more than the transport of passengers. They delivered food and parcels, they carried letters, they smuggled gold, cigarettes, coffee, refugees, drugs and weapons across borders. “A bus like this,” one man explained, “can support a whole family.”
Several passengers including myself had used the unscheduled stop to get out and stretch our legs. The sun was going down. I walked several yards from the bus to be alone. I was watching the dogs when another passenger approached me. “Do you have a degree?” he asked me in English. His accent was slight. He seemed to be in his mid-forties. He wore a grey zip jacket, khaki irousers and old, unpolished shoes. On his lip was a thin moustache.
“I’m sorry … ?” I said.
“A degree in something, from a university?”
“Yes, in philosophy.”
“Falsafi,” he said in Arabic. Then in English, “That’s very good.”
“And you?”
“Mechanical engineering.” “Something practical, not like philosophy ...”
“I have a textile factory in Damascus,” he said. “I’m here to buy materials.”
“Are they better here in Turkey than in Syria?”
“Ha,” he laughed. “You cannot find them in Syria. Anyway, this is Syria.”
“Surie al-Kubra?” Greater Syria, I asked in Arabic.
He laughed again, patting my back. “You speak Arabic?”
“Only a little.”
“Smoke?” He held out an open pack of Marlboro. “You have a family?”
I nodded.
“I have three children,” he said proudly.
The Syrian textile manufacturer had established that, for the duration of the bus journey, we belonged to the same tribe. We were both non-Turks, both had university degrees and both had children. It was bond enough to keep loneliness and the dogs at bay on the dark, perilous road, in a bus crowded with forty strangers, in a land that was not ours. The driver came out of the hut, carrying a small package. We followed him onto the bus. Without discussion, the Syrian took the empty seat next to mine. The bus coughed and bumped its way towards Alexandretta, while the Syrian and I talked into the night.
It was nearly midnight when we reached the edge of Alexandretta, a port town whose form it was impossible to distinguish beyond the glare of the highway and car lights. When we passed a sign which said in Turkish and English, “Iskenderun, pop. 173,700”, I asked the driver to stop. Handing me down my bags and typewriter, the Syrian told me to call him when I reached Damascus. I agreed, knowing it was unlikely. We would not need each other there, where he would be home among his people, where I had friends, where our common levels of education and fatherhood counted for nothing. Alliances here lasted only as long as the need for them, a truth we implicitly shared as he reached his hand out the window to shake mine in farewell. Now alone at the side of the road, I watched the red lights of the bus disappear into the warm Levantine night.
The first strains of the music woke me early. The only sound which should have disturbed the peace of Friday, the Muslim sabbath, was the muezzin’s call to prayer. The sound coming through my window was from a brass band, whose music sounded like a cross between a Handel anthem and a John Philip Sousa march. I went downstairs to the lobby of the Hatayli Oteli and looked out the front door towards the seafront. A parade of what looked like half the population of Alexandretta was marching along the corniche like irregulars at the end of a long campaign. Women carried wreaths and men wore ribbons, and all walked out of step with the triumphal music.
Was this, I wondered, Turkey’s national day? Had democracy been restored? Perhaps war had been declared? I asked the porter what was happening. Discovering we had no common language, I pointed at the parade and tried to look puzzled.
“Polis Bayram,” he said. “Bayram” was Arabic, and apparently also Turkish, for “feast” or “holy day”. “Polis” was Turkish for “police”, and pronounced the same way. I learned later in the day that Turkey was celebrating the anniversary