In an Instant

We stood....opposite each other briefly....no sense or logic dictated our meeting....we met...coupled for a few moments...senses overwhelmed momentarily and then we parted.
That was all it ever was.

And then....

Chaos.

Confusion and blood covered those tentative tracks, all good intentions buried and neither of us see a way out now. Whatever drove us to this point in the first place? Flesh and flesh had once united and we were one.

Would you destroy yourself?

Not Esoteric

You must forgive me for a rather benumbed sentiment. Sometimes, it is easier to focus on the more mundane than it is on the horror of what is unfolding around us. 
Tonight I saw an article about a girl being tried under Egypt's Blasphemy laws....it made me laugh to begin with, why should there be such a thing as blasphemy laws? Is it not blasphemous to kill, to hate to cause other people suffering? I suppose not, especially if that is now the status quo.
Looking at the offending photos, it struck me as a rather inexpert attempt by an ingénue, and actually it is the reaction of media and other people that creates more of a debate. There's so much hypocrisy in that reaction, so much denial of what people prefer to do in the shadows, whilst maintaining this apocryphal sense of conservative respectability. 
I never understood why one need be so duplicitous in their actions, what shame is there in doing something (whether you stand by it or not) and being transparent in your successes and failures? Why this perpetual need for shame?
In Europe, there has been a certain transparency (albeit not extending to every aspect of life) for the better part of the 20th and 21st centuries and I wonder if that has been in tandem with the waning role of religion in our society? It seems to me that whether it be Christianity or Islam, religion promotes guilt and with that judgement and criticism of those around us. In some ways that seems to increase immorality rather that remedy it. But that leads to a far more esoterical discussion than I am able to deal with right now!

L’enfance d’un chef

Il lui arrivait parfois de regretter ses complexes: ils étaient solides, ils pesaient lourd, leur énorme masse sombre le lestait. À présent, c’était fini, Lucien n’y croyait plus et il se sentait d’une légèreté pénible. Ça n’était pas tellement désagréable, d’ailleurs, c’était plutôt une sorte de désenchantement très supportable, un peu écœurant, qui pouvait, à la rigueur, passer pour de l’ennui. «Je ne suis rien, pensait-il, mais c’est parce que rien ne m’a sali. Berliac, lui, est salement engagé. Je peux bien supporter un peu d’incertitude: c’est la rançon de la pureté.»

Jean-Paul Sartre

You're not Absolem. I'm Absolem. Stupid girl!

C: Who... are... you? 
A: Why, I hardly know, sir. I've changed so much since this morning, you see... 
C: No, I do not C, explain yourself. 
A: I'm afraid I can't explain myself, you see, because I'm not myself, you know. 
C: I do not know. 
A: I can't put it any more clearly, sir, because it isn't clear to me. 

Real Aristocracy....

Real aristocracy consists of people who have enough inner resources with which to escape from any situation in which they feel trapped and be free again!

-Francoise Gilot

Dreams of the Fairytale

I was once that dark haired child that danced and sang and lived in a world of fairy stories and make-believe, maybe because my mother told me I looked like snow white and I believed her.

Once upon a time as a queen sits sewing at her window, she pricks her finger on her needle and three drops of blood fall on the snow that had fallen on her ebony window frame. As she looks at the blood on the snow, she says to herself, "Oh, how I wish that I had a daughter that had skin white as snow, lips red as blood, and hair black as ebony". Soon after that, the queen gives birth to a baby girl who has skin white as snow, lips red as blood, and hair black as ebony. They name her Princess Snow White.

That little girl, who still lives inside me, spent hours telling herself stories, dreaming up castles, princes, mythical creatures and as she grew older that didn’t change- perhaps she no longer dreamt of living in a castle, of meeting Prince Charming or escaping into the waves on a white unicorn but nonetheless, she continued to dream, to ride away into a world of make-believe.

as she rode they thinned out more and more, the beeches and oak-trees and bushes of golden gorse giving place to solitary groups of wind twisted pines, with here and there boulders of grey rock pushing their way through the tussocks of heather. To the cold fresh tang of the frost there was added now the salt tang of the sea.

Sometimes those beautiful stories and enchanted forests would be hacked away by black nightmares of real life and that dark haired child would want to run away, dancing further and further into her imagination, sliding between trees and swimming across glass lakes to a world more beautiful than the one before her, sometimes the dreams would slip away and reveal a world brighter and more brilliant than that she could ever have conjured and she would leave her magical kingdom to follow the track of adventure, to experience sights and sounds and smells of a new kingdom, one that would enrich her own walls of imagination and she would sometimes dance and sing and let the joy she'd carried into her heart overflow into the world.
Sometimes, she'd stop in hertracks, faced by the nightmares of 'real' life, and retreat to her own world where she knew she would always be safe.Grasping hands and fingers would pull and drag at her body, willing her back into their world of horrors and sometimes she could be brave and return to face the demons and fight battles as she had done years ago with dragons and witches.
She longs for a companion, someone to share in the dance, the song, to make love with under a sky full of stars, moons and planets, to melt away into a wash of colours; someone who would not laugh as they lay back and point out pictures in the clouds.
As she grew older, she started working on that mud brick wall between the two realities, a wall that would keep the monsters out of her world and stop her dreams and mythical beasts straying into the nightmare and she musters up courage to hop onto that wall and face the shades of grey ahead.
I say to myself: they are two “me’s”: the dreamer and the observer. They communicate and accept each other. Each one serves a different purpose: one is the sweetness of the dream, the other is the bitterness of life.

The Evil of the 'cause'

"'You mean you don't want to fight the occupation of your country?' She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists ad shouting identical syllables in unison."
Milan Kundera

Whether we chant for revolution or for the continuation of a regime or ideology- nothing encapsulates the destruction of the soul more than that collective madness they so often label a 'cause'

- and so we conquer our fear

"The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.

The more indifferent people are to politics, to the interests of others, the more obsessed they become with their own faces. The individualism of our time.

Not being able to fall asleep and not allowing oneself to move: the marital bed.

If high culture is coming to an end, it is also the end of you and your paradoxical ideas, because paradox as such belongs to high culture and not to childish prattle. You remind me of the young men who supported the Nazis or communists not out of cowardice or out of opportunism but out of an excess of intelligence. For nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of nonthought… You are the brilliant ally of your own gravediggers.

In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty.

How to live in a world with which you disagree? How to live with people when you neither share their suffering nor their joys? When you know that you don’t belong among them?... our century refuses to acknowledge anyone’s right to disagree with the world…All that remains of such a place is the memory, the ideal of a cloister, the dream of a cloister…

Humor can only exist when people are still capable of recognizing some border between the important and the unimportant. And nowadays this border has become unrecognizable.

The majority of people lead their existence within a small idyllic circle bounded by their family, their home, and their work... They live in a secure realm somewhere between good and evil. They are sincerely horrified by the sight of a killer. And yet all you have to do is remove them from this peaceful circle and they, too, turn into murderers, without quite knowing how it happened.

The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order. Or to put it the other way around: the desire for order is a virtuous pretext, an excuse for virulent misanthropy.

A long time a go a certain Cynic philosopher proudly paraded around Athens in a moth-eaten coat, hoping that everyone would admire his contempt for convention. When Socrates met him, he said: Through the hole in your coat I see your vanity. Your dirt, too, dear sir, is self-indulgent and your self-indulgence is dirty.

You are always living below the level of true existence, you bitter weed, you anthropomorphized vat of vinegar! You’re full of acid, which bubbles inside you like an alchemist’s brew. Your highest wish is to be able to see all around you the same ugliness as you carry inside yourself. That’s the only way you can feel for a few moments some kind of peace between yourself and the world. That’s because the world, which is beautiful, seems horrible to you, torments you and excludes you.

If the novel is successful, it must necessarily be wiser than its author. This is why many excellent French intellectuals write mediocre novels. They are always more intelligent than their books.

By a certain age, coincidences lose their magic, no longer surprise, become run-of-the-mill.

Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence."
— Milan Kundera

Media Games

This morning, I woke at 4.30am and very foolishly reached habitually for my iPhone so I could check twitter for the latest news before going back to sleep.

I was jerked awake by what I read- helicopters circling Damascus, armed vehicles escorting the President and his family to the airport, the Revolutionary flag being raised over the Syrian State TV building, bloody clashes between loyalists and revolutionaries. It was almost like I had awoken into a nightmare.

In a frenzy of fear and agitation, I trawled the web for some more reliable references to the 'fall of Damascus' but was unable to find anything on any mainstream media site including al-Jazeera.

I continued to follow the increasingly alarming messages on twitter until I judged it a reasonable time to call Damascus and start screeching down the phone....scenarios of my friends and loved ones being strung up, dragged out of their beds an beaten flooded my mind but I knew I was simply scaring myself. N answered my call, sleep very evident in his voice, wondering why I was calling so early and I explained what I had been reading, he laughed and assured me all was well but would call me later when he'd found out more.

When he hung up, I was able to go back to sleep for a while but was still plagued with nightmares.

Later, I switched on al-Jazeera to see reports on what was 'happening' on Damascus- albeit they were not as sensationalist as those reports I'd seen on twitter but disturbing enough to cause family and friends from all over the world to call N to find out if all was well. He later called me and confirmed all was quiet- even in the supposed epicenter of Kafr Souseh.

But that led me to ask: who would be circulating such alarming and utterly untrue reports? What is the aim?

It would seem that the forces of the Arab Spring have employed the use of the media (particularly social media) to promote the cause and also to spread what can only be called propaganda- when Syrians claim that their president is beating a retreat to the airport or Libyans announce that they captured Saif el Islam Gaddafi and family then this represents a kind of propaganda which actually we are not strangers to- take the reports from the front in the 1967 Arab Israeli war which promised the Egyptian people that advances were being made and victory at hand. In Europe one only need look to the first and second world wars to see both the Allies and the Germans used false reporting via radio to boost morale.

Perhaps we are naive to assume that just because we live in a more technologically advanced age, where news can be transmitted instantly and media organizations have set 'standards' that people will report objectively an not use the media for their own purposes.

Unfortunately, due to increased technology and multiplied media resources it is invariably hard for the individual to sift through all the information we are bombarded with minute by minute but it is also hard for media professionals to decide on which 'eyewitness' reports to believe and which to discount- and therein lies the problem.

- and so we conquer our fear

Wake up UN Security Council?

Syrian activists on Twitter are starting a campaign today with the hashtag #WakeUpUNSC. I have been invited, along with others, to create my own tweets with this tag, in an attempt to make this trend worldwide and presumably this is intended to catch the eye of those with influence enough to get the UNSC to wake up.

Now, asides from questioning whether this will actually achieve anything, there is a more important aspect to consider and those are the implications of foreign intervention. This is a sore point, especially in the Middle East, where foreign intervention has led to a reinstatement of de facto colonialism. Iraq represents an extremely valid case in point. The Washington Post estimated the true cost of the war with Iraq to have been $3 trillion, a number which seems inconceivable but when you look at what it has achieved, one can only lament at whether it was worth the human life and suffering that ensued.

Even sanctions on Iraq in the 90s, had disastrous consequences on the development of the country as John Pilger reported:

"The change in 10 years is unparalleled, in my experience," Anupama Rao Singh, Unicef's senior representative in Iraq, told me. "In 1989, the literacy rate was 95%; and 93% of the population had free access to modern health facilities. Parents were fined for failing to send their children to school. The phenomenon of street children or children begging was unheard of. Iraq had reached a stage where the basic indicators we use to measure the overall well-being of human beings, including children, were some of the best in the world. Now it is among the bottom 20%. In 10 years, child mortality has gone from one of the lowest in the world, to the highest."

One could argue that by effectively disabling a country in such a way, this is serving certain interests which seek to render the region completely impotent, starting with those rich in natural resources and finishing with those of strategic importance.

This post is simply a jumble of my own personal thoughts and reactions but I can only end on the fact that inside Syria itself, though, there has been no call for external military intervention – the people are opposed to any foreign meddling. The very thought of being showered from the sky with bombs and watching your home explode around you seems to me the darkest nightmare anyone can envisage so why are those on the outside wishing it on their brothers and sisters within?

Some Thoughts on Marriage

Arab culture may well have failed by not updating it's beliefs and cultural practices to suit the times we live in. One excellent example of this hypothesis is marriage.
In many Arab countries it is deemed better to marry someone from the same family or clan- often a cousin or other indirect relative, this is done under the premise that a family or clan member will have more in common, their upbringing and attitude to life will be more similar and they are guaranteed to be a 'good' person.

But does this thesis stand in a world where pre-marital relations no longer suffer the stigma they one had? Surely living with someone and intimately aquatinting yourself with their habits, ideas and beliefs is more reliable than taking the word of some distant relative that happens to share the same name?

The traditional retort to that is not all religious persuasions support the idea of premarital relations but that too should be put into it's context: before a time of contraception, families needed some way of assuring that the product of those close encounters would not end up unprovided for. And so the institution or legal agreement of marriage took place. One may go further as to day that it harnessed men's carnal urges into a more pragmatic alliance of families and interests- sex on the proviso that you brought something to the family and the girl. Surely we've moved on from that?

Bohemianism

To take the world as one finds it, the bad with the good, making the best of the present moment—to laugh at Fortune alike whether she be generous or unkind—to spend freely when one has money, and to hope gaily when one has none—to fleet the time carelessly, living for love and art—this is the temper and spirit of the modern Bohemian in his outward and visible aspect. It is a light and graceful philosophy, but it is the Gospel of the Moment, this exoteric phase of the Bohemian religion; and if, in some noble natures, it rises to a bold simplicity and naturalness, it may also lend its butterfly precepts to some very pretty vices and lovable faults, for in Bohemia one may find almost every sin save that of Hypocrisy. ...
His faults are more commonly those of self-indulgence, thoughtlessness, vanity and procrastination, and these usually go hand-in-hand with generosity, love and charity; for it is not enough to be one’s self in Bohemia, one must allow others to be themselves, as well. ...

What, then, is it that makes this mystical empire of Bohemia unique, and what is the charm of its mental fairyland? It is this: there are no roads in all Bohemia! One must choose and find one’s own path, be one’s own self, live one’s own life.

~Gelett Burgess

Music of the Revolution

Negative Capability

"I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason - Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration."
~John Keats

Aye, on the shores of darkness there is light,
And precipices show untrodden green;There is a budding morrow in midnight;
There is a triple sight in blindness keen;

The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood: An Exaggeration of power or the future of a country?

After years of being side-lined, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood has suddenly come back into focus due to the recent unrest in the region and the sudden activity of the Syrian opposition. An assessment made by the US Embassy in Damascus and leaked by Wikileaks concluded that the Muslim Brotherhood posed no immediate threat but does this change five years on against the backdrop of regional crisis and unrest?

Recently President Bashar el-Assad offered political detainees, including the Muslim Brotherhood, amnesty in an attempt to dampen the unrest which has beset the country for three months, a gesture that would seem to suggest an acknowledgement of the power of the opposition movements working against the regime.

But exiled Muslim Brotherhood leader, Ali Sadreldin el-Bayanouni said that there are not many details yet about the amnesty except that it covers all members of political movements including the Muslim Brotherhood, but law no. 49 (which provides for a trial for any person proved to be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood) still exists and remains in force. "Therefore, the step of this amnesty is imperfect and incomplete," he concluded.

Al-Bayanouni also considered that this decision is a step to circumvent the demands of the demonstrators, and that it does not mean anything in light of the bloody confrontations that are being carried out by the Syrian regime against the Syrian demonstrators.

Spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, Zuheir Salem, noted that “The amnesty is useless as this decree is confiscated by the law No 49 promulgated in 1980. It criminalises the Muslim Brotherhood without any charges”

Indeed, a closer look at the terms of the amnesty granted by Bashar el-Assad would seem to reveal a misuse of the word, the term actually referring to a sentence reduction for some crimes. Syrian political analyst at Chatham House, Rime Allaf, told me this was another empty gesture from the regime designed to placate the protesters and majority Sunni population but did not equate to a recognition of any authority held by the Brotherhood themselves.

So, is the Muslim Brotherhood as influential in Syria as some opposition figures claim them to be? Cables sent by the US embassy in Damascus to Washington would seem to suggest that “While there has been a rise in Islamism (with some fundamentalism) in Syria in the past 20 years, we assess that the potential political influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria has been exaggerated.” The cable goes on to note that “ the most striking constraint on the potential appeal of any repackaged Muslim Brotherhood grouping is the heavy minority make-up (35 percent) of the Syrian population that is generally opposed to any Islamist domination.”

But despite a large minority group, Syria is largely Sunni Muslim and evidence has shown a steady turn towards Islam in the absence of political alternatives. Following the massacre of Hama in 1980 and the crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, the government launched a conciliatory campaign of promoting its own brand of Islam- It encouraged the building of some 80,000 new mosques. It also established the ‘Assad Institute for Memorizing the Koran’ in various cities and governorates, and over 22 higher-education institutions for teaching Islam. The government also encouraged setting up regional Sharia schools, in the governorate of Al-Jazeera, the Al-Khaznawi school was founded; in Aleppo the Sheikh Ahmed Hassan and Sheikh Abu al-Qaaqaa schools; in Damascus the Abu al-Nour complex and the Sheikh Mohammed Said Ramadan Hassoun and Sheikh Mohammed Habash study circles. Also in Damascus, the government created the Sheika Munira al-Qaisi complex, named after a famous Damascene lady, in which about 25,000 girls are enrolled.

These religious institutions, which total 584 in number, provide health care and food assistance to the public, and 280 of them offered comprehensive daily services to about a million people - and to about two million during the month of Ramadan. They also offer public religious instruction, either through daily lessons or through Friday prayer sermons. In order to bolster its Muslim credentials, the regime suppressed secular leftist groups, with the aim of upholding the Baath Party as the only organization worthy of that description in Syria. The government’s support for an ‘official’ Islamic ideology and the younger generation’s disenchantment with politics led many to turn to religious schools and mosques, both as a reaction against official policies and as a means of coming to grips with the economic and social problems besetting them. The annual population growth rate in Syria has dropped from around 3.4 percent a decade ago to around 2.4 percent today. However, those born during the population boom of two decades ago are the youths of today. Some 220,000 individuals are entering the labour market every year, and the government is incapable of providing work for them. According to official statistics, there are a million unemployed in Syria, about 500,000 of whom are registered at the government's employment bureaus. The danger, however, lies in the fact that 80 percent of these are between the ages of 15 and 24. When limited to the ideology of a single political doctrine and facing socioeconomic setbacks, many young people turn to religion, which, at least, offers solid solutions and spiritual comfort.

External regional and international factors, also contributed to the growth of Islamism in Syria, since during each of the past three decades major events helped further entrench Islamic dogma. The fight against the Muslim Brotherhood coincided with the onset of the Islamic revolution in Iran at the end of the 1970's, and, subsequently, the Syrian government allied itself with Tehran against an Iraqi regime with which, in theory, it shared the same secular nationalist Ba’athist doctrine. Later on, at the end of the 1980's, the U.S.S.R. and the Eastern Bloc, which supported the Syrian regime, collapsed. This not only weakened Syria's strategic alliances, but also helped undermine the credibility of Socialism and its achievements. The end of Communism, the failure of Socialist regimes to offer solutions to the economic and social ills of their own societies, and the failure of powerful ruling parties to accomplish much externally or internally, coincided with the mounting successes of Islamic parties. The Syrian public watched closely the achievements of Hamas and Islamic Jihad during the two Palestinian intifadas. This helped bolster Islam in Syrian society and this was further promoted by the role played by Hizbullah in ousting Israel from Southern Lebanon also helped entrench a belief that "Islam is the solution."

But does this mean that Syria is heading for an Islamist takeover? Make no mistake, there’s a possibility of an Islamist takeover and an ethnic conflict in Syria, but a number of factors suggest otherwise.

As mentioned, the regime’s promotion of an ‘official’ Islamic ideology and brutal suppression of Islamic opposition would suggest that any Islam based opposition movements, including the Muslim Brotherhood, would be very disorganized.

President Assad’s efforts to court moderate Islamists –associated with the Sunni merchant class- has very much allied them with the regime. The government has been strongly anti-American, anti-Israel, allied with Iran and supportive of Hamas and HezbollahIndeed, the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood declared a few years ago that it was not permissible to oppose the Assad regime because of these policies and Hassan Nasrallah’s recent speech showed no condemnation for the atrocities committed by the regime in suppressing the protests.

Most importantly, Syria is a very diverse country. While countries such as Egypt are about 90 percent Sunni Muslim, the figure for Syria is about 60 percent. There are Alawites, Christians, Druze, and Kurds, of which only the Kurds are Sunnis and they have a lot of nationalist feeling against the regime.

The Sunni Muslims, the constituency for revolutionary Islamism, also provide a large part of the middle class, secular-oriented, pro-democracy movement, thus providing a strong alternative leadership. That middle class would seem to be a pro-democratic, relatively more urbanized population.

It would seem that Syria is certainly headed for more turbulent times but whether the Muslim Brotherhood will have a role in any future administration is greatly dependent on the outcome of the current wave of unrest. Will Syria be heading towards an Iraq or Lebanon style of chaotic sectarianism or will opposition figures, including the Brotherhood, be able to harness the momentum created by weeks of violence and provide a cohesive and reasoned alternative to the Assad regime?

Observations from Syria

I arrived in Syria on the day of President Assad’s disastrous speech to the Syrian Parliament, the day that both supporters and critics were shocked at his blasé attitude to those who had fallen in Deraa, just a few days before. Coming from the UK, I didn’t know what to expect- a country on the brink of revolution? Guards and secret police at every corner? Tanks outside the airport? A friend of mine, Muhammad Radwan, had been arrested a few days earlier and so, I half expected to be escorted away for questioning upon landing in the city; however, things are rarely as we imagine them to be. My first few weeks in Damascus were extraordinary in their very ordinariness, café culture was still thriving, tourists (albeit fewer than usual) were still pouring in to enjoy Syria’s historical and cultural riches and young Damascenes continued to pack the capital’s bars and discothèques.

Although a certain shadow of uncertainty did darken everyone’s thoughts and with each passing day, news from cities such as Dara’a, Lattakia, Jableh, Hewran, Homs and many, many more became increasingly bloody and alarming. To date, Damascus and Aleppo have remained relatively calm throughout and many have told me that they did not believe this was a revolution but a ‘foreign conspiracy’, others refused outright that their country should be dragged into what they saw would become a bloody mess, a civil war even. One woman said that the government should hit hard ‘massacre them….these bastards trying to destroy our country’. I was surprised by such attitudes; this was not the Syrian elite talking but ordinary middle to lower class men and women.

Following ‘Great Friday’, in fact the bloodiest Friday since the uprising began, the anti demonstrator rhetoric seems to be escalating, fingers being pointed at al-Jazeera for biased reporting and Syrians increasingly concerned by the sectarian element that has come to play. Over the past few days, official and unofficial checkpoints have been set up around Damascus and at one of these a man was brutally beaten by the very same demonstrators asking for rights and humane treatment from their government. His crime? Born and bred in Damascus to an Alawite father and Sunni mother, when he tried to pass the checkpoint back home into Damascus, he said he was a local and when the ‘guards’ at the checkpoint identified his surname as Alawite, they decided to teach him and his kind a lesson.

Christians have been similarly intimidated with notes left in the church collection box with the simple threat ‘you’re next’ and services interrupted on Easter Sunday by armed gangs.

Despite analyst’s attempts to play down the sectarian threat to Syria, whether it be real or unreal, minorities in the capital are worried about the implications of a Sunni overthrow of the regime. One woman told me that never before in her life had she felt that being Christian set her apart from her compatriots. She said Syrians had been able to wear what they wanted, had been able to worship in a mosque or, in a church or, not worship at all and no questions were ever asked. Now she felt that she had to be careful who she spoke to and what about. With, Lebanon only a half an hour away from Damascus, it is not surprising that Syrians look at the many similarities and fear that a similar situation could unfold.

Another theory, proposed by some Syrians, is that of a military coup d’état- an attempted overthrow of the undermined Bashar by his own army. Analysts and observers outside the country have noted the younger Assad’s comparatively more liberal style, his efforts to open up the country economically and crack down on the all pervasive and much feared intelligence service or, mukhabarat. The economic liberalisation which has meant an expansion in Syria’s private sector and a scaling back of the public sector has proved very popular with the urban upper classes; but spelt disaster for the lower classes, who have watched as the socialist social contract put in place by Hafez el-Assad slowly disappears from beneath them. Clearly, this has caused much anger and frustration for the majority of Syrians, thirty percent of whom live below the poverty line. This frustration can only have been magnified by the elite of Damascus and Aleppo who enjoy the good life, shopping in trendy malls that have sprung up throughout the country, enjoying their flashy cars and dining in five star restaurants. This level of inequality, under any circumstances, would have led to a social uprising sooner or, later. But there is also a likelihood that it has been exacerbated by elements within the army and intelligence, who have been affronted by the younger Assad’s audacity in forgetting his family’s allegiances and Alawite sectarian ties.

Although under-reported by the western media, many Syrians have noted an inexplicable lack of co-ordination in the ground-attacks being carried out on both civilians and soldiers, verging on chaos. On the day I finally left Damascus, I was surprised to find the airport road completely lined by army personnel and heavy artillery. My car was stopped at many checkpoints, security men asking for my ID and shouting to each other “Sooriya el-Assad” (Assad’s Syria) and “Allah, Sooriya, Bashar wa bas” (God, Syria, Bashar…only). I had never seen Damascus like this. I eventually found out that the army presence was in response to an earlier incident where a jeep carrying Lebanese number plates had raced up the length of the airport road, zig-zagging from side to side, spraying the road with bullets. A friend who had been driving on the road was forced to swerve to the side and throw himself into a ditch.

If we assume that democracy protesters would have no interest in causing such chaos and the official army would certainly not wish to disrupt the main road leading to Damascus International Airport then one can only conclude that this, and other similar incidents, have been carried out by the ‘conspirators’ that Syrian TV have so zealously been pointing a finger at. The question now is simply: Are these conspirators foreign or, Syrian? If the latter, this is certainly a much more sinister possibility, signalling the likelihood of civil war.

The Army- a force to be reckoned with.

This morning a friend posted a link to Jonathan Wright's article about the power of the Egyptian military, with the comment that whilst he did not ordinarily like Wright, he found the article to be right on target. Wright goes through a number of 'myths' which he believes attribute much more power to the army than what is realistically the case. I'm not sure what he based his arguments on but here are some of the most damning which would suggest that he's either never been to Egypt or has been taking it easy in some expat haven:


- the myth that all or most provincial governors come from the military. In fact, in line with the shift of emphasis under Mubarak from external to internal security, almost all provincial governors have been former police generals since the 1990s, with the exception of those in border provinces such as North and South Sinai, Mersa Matrouh, the Red Sea and so on. This confusion may have arisen because so many have the rank of liwa (major general), which in Egypt is common to both the army and police.
- the myth that the military had a hand in routine policy making throughout the Mubarak era. Proponents of this theory need to give us examples of junctures where the military had any input into policy that was not directly relevant to their sphere of activity. When Mubarak faced an insurgency by the Islamic Group in middle Egypt in the 1990s, he relied solely on the Interior Ministry to deal with it and almost all the victims on the government side were policemen. The army stayed aloof. When Mubarak began serious ecoonomic liberalisation under Prime Minister Nazif from 2004 onwards, there is no evidence that the military made any contribution, either in favour or in opposition. Speculation that the military would have vetoed the succession of Mubarak's son Gamal to the presidency remains pure speculation, since it was never put to the test. Even in the case of Egyptian policy towards Gaza and Hamas over the last few years, there's no reason to believe that the decisions were not taken by Mubarak, Omar Suleiman and other Mubarak aides, and that the military merely followed the presidential orders.


Working for State Media, means that one has to interview a lot of provincial governors. I'd say I interviewed them all by now and I think almost all of them were of a military background.

• North Sinai's Muhammad Mowafi- former director of the Military Intelligence Service
• Suez- Sayf el-Deen Galal -Military General 3rd Field Regiment
• Luxor- Samir Farag- also a former director of Military Intelligence
• Alexandria- Adel Labib- former Police
• Ismalia- Abdel Galeel el-Fakharany- Military General 2nd Field Regiment
• Aswan- Mostafa el-Sayed- Military General 2nd Field Regiment
• Asyut- Nabeel El-Izzaby- former Police
• Gharbiya- Abdel Hameed el-Shinawy- former Police
• Kafr el-Sheikh- Ahmed Zaki Abedeen- former military engineer
• Wadi el-Gideed- Ahmed Mokhtar- ex head of military training academy

It is interesting to note that only governors of Cairo, Giza and 6th October (no doubt the areas that outside observers are most interested in) were civilians.

Similarly we only need to look at the profiles of some of the new players in the 'new' regime such as Tantatwi, Suleiman, Shafik or Wagdy to get an idea of how things are going and to take note of the fact that more reformist, non-military personae such as Rachid, Nazif and Darwish have been forced out to get an idea of how things are going.

UPDATE: These are points made by Shimaa Gamal
-the military has always been a state within the state
-many ex military personnel are in charge of public services- they just don't use the military rank
-even public sector companies are still headed by ex military, this also applies to private sector.
-the army has always played the protector of the public. Every crisis the army jumps in. e.g. the bread crisis

Egypt- The Eternal Female

“This is a letter to all of my friends and colleagues who sent warm and kind words of encouragement to me , my family and all of the Egyptians at these very tough times. What has happened in Egypt the last week or more is unprecedented and is a wonderful and revitalizing experience for all Egyptians who love this country. This is our first real people revolution and it is fueled by wonderful and great young men and women from all walks of Egypt. The liberation square has become a symbol for all our sufferings and also our victories. I cannot claim that I have suffered as many Egyptians did and many of the young revolutionaries asked me why am I supporting them although I have been benefiting (their words) or have not been harmed by the old regime. My only answer was that I loved Egypt and that to be loyal and patriotic to this country means that you want the best for her and you want her to be free and her people to be liberated and treated as humans. For me Egypt is a she, a her and the mother of all Egyptians and the matriarch that has kept us all in her bosom and nurtured us whether we were grateful or not. And what the regime of husni Mubarak and the security apparatus headed by the war criminal habib al adly have done to us and to the people of Egypt for 30 years is unparalleled in any other country. The humiliation and destruction of the Egyptian character and the spirit of the people in a calculated and organized way took place for 30 years in a relentless and very evil way. Egyptians stopped laughing or smiling from their hearts, you could see and touch helplessness and hopelessness among the old and the young. Phenomena such as sexual harassment, looting and predominance of thugs spread because they were encouraged by the security that wanted to break the pride and self respect of all Egyptians. The murdering and killing was not only of peoples bodies and lives but of their souls and spirits. Corruption and lack of ethical fiber and self respect became the norm, became the traits most respected. I am as you all know quite mature (i.e. old) and have been here since the 60s and I have worked with the people and in the streets and was naïve enough to try to enter politics believing that this country needed those who loved her and who would give more then they would take. I was burnt and burnt hard and not only from the government but from the pretenders or those who played the roles of defenders of human rights or of the people but who in many cases found it lucrative to play that role. My mistake was that I always followed my conscience and what I thought was right and was neither extreme left nor extreme right. What happened in Egypt during the last 5 years at least what I found out broke my heart and I started thinking and acting seriously to leave the country to go and live somewhere else. I did not feel there was any hope left. But then on the 25th and when I was home and discovering the internet world , face book and you tube for the first time in my life, I also rediscovered Egypt, the Egypt I have read about and dreamed about. The brave and noble youth of Egypt have resurrected our pride and soul. They have revived the real spirit and soul of Egypt. They have taken away our shame of being so spineless and useless for decades. They have and for the first time in our history carried a real people's revolution at least during my life time. They managed to reveal the true face of our security and police forces, those traitors who abandoned their posts and allowed our children and families to die, be attacked and vandalized. Many of the looters and thugs were reported were associated one way or the other with the police. They did not mind that mothers, elders and children be terrorized in a an effort to abort the revolution and scare all of the liberation square heroes away from their main battle. They did not care and frankly this is what the last regime had shown over and over again, that they do not care for us, for the Egyptians or for Egypt. That is why they should not stay, they should go , they should not be allowed to rule or govern as they are in reality traitors who hate us. No one who loves his country and its people would have allowed the scandal and shameful behavior of the security forces not only in murdering and torturing the protesters but more so in terrorizing the kind people of Egypt by opening the prisons, and sending their own thugs to steal, loot and vandalize shops, homes and the nice and simple Egyptian families. Now at this moment and after the maneuvers of the state , a peaceful transition of power is becoming less of a reality and clashes between the youth of Egypt, the real revolutionaries and those pushed and prompted by the state and the NDP is going on now. I just learned that the liberation square is completely blocked and the army tanks are around it and also blocking any means to go in or out. The state TV is sending wrong images and stories and lying to the people of Egypt, the regime and its NDP are sending thugs and some paid youth to start fights with the heroes of the liberation square and our youth are in deep danger. They are being under siege now and are being attacked by disguised thugs and security forces, the army has blocked all inroads to the liberation square and the mercenaries of the regime are beating and attacking women, girls and young men whose only demand was freedom and liberty. If we can reach all Egyptians everywhere and tell them that the revolution is not and will not be over, I met several young people and they said that they are willing to die for Egypt in the liberation square but we do not want to sacrifice those clean souls. Please lets all see a way to save them and tell all of Egypt that the mercenaries of the regime are the ones taking to the street now and that no one should give up the demands for a better and more liberated and free Egypt. Please do not believe the state TV for there are no outside forces or traitors among the revolutionaries who wanted our pride and self worth and respect to return to us.”

Email from Dr Iman Bibars- Ashoka Foundation