The Ghosts of Assad

Children in Aleppo with a pile of burning tyres behind them, which they are setting alight to create a smokescreen against the bombing runs of the Assad regime and Russian planes. Photographer unknown.

The Ghosts of Assad

A Review of Francesca Borri's Syrian Dust: Reporting from the Heart of the War

By Michael Deibert

The blood-spattered, dust-covered face of Omran Daqnees, pulled from the rubble of his family’s home after a bombing in the Syrian city of Aleppo, wrenched the world’s collective conscience last month. Once the flourishing capital of Syria’s most populous region, Aleppo has been in a state of war since July 2012. The so-called barrel bombs of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad - fiendish contraptions filled with explosives, shrapnel and sometimes chemicals - have killed thousands of people in the city, and have now been joined by more technologically advanced though no less lethal air assaults by the jets of Assad’s Russian backers.

This year, the relentless carnage of Syria’s five-year old civil war - pitting the Assad government and its allies in Russia, Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah against a flailing panoply of rebel groups including the so-calles Islamic State (ISIS), the until-recently Al-Qaeda-affiliated Al-Nusra Front, the Free Syrian Army (now believed to be all but defunct), various Kurdish militias and others - continued under the world’s impotent gaze. Death rained down on cities like Aleppo and Daraya (the latter finally falling to the government in late August) as ISIS-inspired attacks fanned out to Bangladesh, Belgium, Turkey and elsewhere, building on the horror of last year’s assaults in Paris. 

But in so many ways, and not just in young Omran Daqnees’ traumatized, terrified gaze, Aleppo, broken, bleeding Aleppo, has remained the centre of it all. And Syrian Dust (Seven Stories Press), the excellent book by Italian journalist Francesca Borri recounting her reporting from the city between 2012 and 2013, presents a vital primary source recounting a siege that has over time became one of the 21st century’s great crimes.

Who would defend the people of Aleppo after their government began killing them four years ago? In Borri’s account, the Free Syrian Army is depicted as something of  a joke of flip-flop wearing teenagers and regime defectors. Al Nusra is better-armed,  but consisting of so many foreign nationals, their lingua franca is English. And thus a terrible dynamic develops, whereby a disparate armed insurgency fights a seemingly endless stalemate with a dictatorship capable of any atrocity. 

“In theory, there are four fronts,” Borri writes. “But the truth is that there is only one front here: it’s the sky. And those who have nothing but bullets to use against the fighter jets haven’t got a chance. Without intervention from the West, as in Libya, the Syrian Free Army can’t win.”

That intervention never came, at least not in the way that Borri means it, but plenty of people did find opportunity in Syria’s agony.

There are the cynical exile opposition politicians who appear in squalid refugee camps to seek support and “distribute a few biscuits like a tourist feeds the pigeons at Piazza San Marco.” There are the Saudi rebels backers who appear and literally buy child brides from starving refugees huddled along the Turkish border. There are Borri’s own journalistic colleagues who, for the most part, far from being united by idealism, mostly appear driven to seek out the most garish and bizarre elements (“find me a drunken child soldier!”). Reporters level misogynistic advice with one hand (with one self-mythologizing reporter informing her Aleppo is “no place for a woman”) and engage in potentially lethal backstabbing with the other, with Borri allegedly once being directed towards snipers, and another time being ratted out to rebels by an ostensible colleague envious for a scoop.

And in the meantime, “you wait and you die in Aleppo, that’s all,” she writes, going on to pen that for those remaining in the city beneath Assad's planes

These are the cruelest moments, because the mind is still lucid. And as the pilot chooses his target, while maybe it will be you, all you can do is huddle there, your back against a damp wall, and stare at the floor along with everything you’ve left undone in your life, everything you put off, as you look around, now that maybe your number’s up, and even if you had something to say, here among these strangers, anything you could utter, any name, any wish, any regret whom could you say it to?

The book has its weaknesses, both in its sometimes meandering digressions into the author’s previous life working in Israel and Palestine, and in its one big omission in the lack of an real discussion of the rise of the Islamic State (there are a number of references to Al Qaeda but almost none to ISIS). But this is perhaps the result of the book’s being published first in Italian in May 2014, just as the terrorist group was becoming the major player in the conflict

But Syrian Dust’s true strength is its depiction of the terrified, terrorized lives of the Syrians living under the Assad regime’s brutal and relentless barrage. Borri tells us the story of a 25 year-old mother reduced to living in a drainage pipe with her 3 children who ventures out to buy bread with her youngest and is shot by a sniper, leaving her other two offspring “wasted away in poverty until a mortar pulverized them.” In Moadamiya “only six miles from the centre of Damascus...where bankers play tennis at their clubs...it looks like Somalia, with those bodies that are all bones.” During the siege of Al-Qusayr, she receives frantic texts from those inside the city: “Where are you? They’re killing us all!”

At the end of the book, comparing the city to Dresden after World War II, she writes simply and devastatingly “Aleppo no longer exists” and that “everything I may write, no matter how good, whatever life I may risk, this war and every war will go on.”

And go on it does.

There was another child pulled from the rubble in Aleppo the same day as Omran Daqnees: Omran’s brother, Ali.

He had been playing with friends in the street when the bombs began to fall. Like most of those in Aleppo’s agony, there was no photo to mark that moment or aftermath, nor did the world’s news sources and social media rouse themselves to a cri de cœur to mark his short life.

And like so many in Aleppo, as the world stood by, he died.

Michael Deibert is the author of the forthcoming Haiti Will Not Perish: A Recent History (Zed Books).

Paris, je t'aime

20 November 2015

Paris, je t'aime

By Michael Deibert

Huffington Post

(Read the original article here)

Eight months after the terrorist attacks in Paris in January of this year -- attacks during which the Kouachi brothers killed 12 people at the offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and Amedy Coulibaly murdered an unarmed police woman and four patrons at a Jewish supermarket -- something strange happened.

When the literary group PEN announced that it would be honoring Charlie Hebdo, who had attracted the ire of religious fanatics for its drawings of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, with its Courage Award, a group of writers sent a letter to the body to protest this distinction. The letter had been spearheaded by the authors Teju Cole and Francine Prose, who both teach at my former alma mater of Bard College, a place which, at least when I went there, adhered to the rather more open dictum of Walt Whitman which called on artists to unscrew the locks from the doors, unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs.

While adding the rather ludicrous caveat that "the murder of a dozen people...is sickening and tragic" the letter attacked Charlie Hebdo for engaging in "expression that violates the acceptable" and accused the publication of "being intended to cause further humiliation and suffering" to "the section of the French population that is already marginalized, embattled, and victimized, a population that is shaped by the legacy of France's various colonial enterprises." The letter also said that, by bestowing the award, PEN was awarding a publication "that intensifies the anti-Islamic, anti-Maghreb, anti-Arab sentiments already prevalent in the Western world." So, to put it more succinctly, the journalists at Charlie Hebdo had been imperial valets who had brought it on themselves.

(Cole had written an earlier piece for the New Yorker that rather speciously claimed that Charlie Hebdo had "gone specifically for racist and Islamophobic provocations.")

In addition to Cole and Prose, among the largely Anglophone signatories were Russell Banks, Eric Bogosian, Peter Carey, Junot Díaz, Francisco Goldman, Rick Moody, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Ondaatje, Luc Sante, Charles Simic and, strangely, the New York Times opinion page editor, Clay Risen.

I don't think I had ever been ashamed to be a writer until that moment. It was a scandalous display born out of ignorance of the role of Charlie Hebdo, the function of satire, and the history of modern France as a whole. It was obvious from the nature of the letter that few, if any, of the signatories had probably ever read Charlie Hebdo before the attacks, and had instead formed their opinion on a handful of out-of-context cartoons culled from the publication's 40 plus year history.

The authors seemed oblivious to the fact that satire's function is to sting, not cause guffaws, and that by far the most frequent targets of the publication's cartoonists -- artists such as Jean Cabu, Stéphane "Charb" Charbonnier and Georges Wolinski (all slain in the attack) -- were France's rancid political elite and, especially, the right-wing Front National founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen and now run by his daughter, Marine. One of the cartoons most often used to demonstrate Charlie Hebdo's supposed racism, that of French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira, a women of Afro-Guyanese descent, as a monkey, was in fact mocking far-right attacks against her, not Taubira herself. [For her part, Taubira gave a moving eulogy at the funeral of Hebdo cartoonist Bernard "Tignous" Verlhac.] The signatories simply threw to one side the publication's long history of attacking Catholicism, Judaism and, indeed, organized religion of any sort. They seemed unaware of the series of articles Charlie Hebdo's slain economist, Bernard Maris, had written on the effects of austerity on Europe's most vulnerable, especially in Greece, or that the magazine had spoken out in furious dissent against the 2008-2009 and 2014 Israeli assaults on Gaza.

As the French academic Olivier Tonneau wrote shortly after the attacks in response to the venomous social media slander against the paper's slain staff, "if you belong to the radical left, you have lost precious friends and allies."

(Nor were the PEN signatories alone in libeling the dead. The U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote that Charlie Hebdo was "not just offensive but bigoted" and engaged in "a stream of mockery toward Muslims generally" and "the vast bulk of their attacks are reserved for Islam and Muslims.")

Now, 11 months after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, in La Ville Lumière 129 more lay dead. They were black, white, brown (black, blanc, beur in the French phrase), men, women, Christian, Muslim, atheist, straight, gay. They were committing no other crime than sitting out to have a drink on a warm autumn night, going to see a football match or going to see a rock band play. That scurrilous display of those writers can't help but return to my mind.

Today, it is the false narrative, advanced by both left and right, that last week's attacks were the result of France's so-called "Muslim" problem, with a focus on the supposed radicalization taking place in the banlieues, as the poor, heavily-immigrant suburbs which ring many French cities are known, and a blow struck against the "white" city of Paris.

Having come to France through a somewhat roundabout route of years working in Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and having only lived in heavily-immigrant neighborhoods (Château Rouge in the 18th arrondissement and Bagnolet, just beyond the périphérique ring-road from Paris proper), I have perhaps a different perspective on this than some foreigners. I've spent a fair amount of time in the banlieues of Paris, and covered the November 2007 riots in the suburb of Villiers-le-Bel from the ground. Though they have plenty of problems -- unemployment hovers around double the national average, with that for 21- to 29-year-olds ever higher -- a propensity for radical Islam is not one of them.

The so-called "problem youth" I met in places like Villiers-le-Bel and Clichy-sous-Bois (itself the site of riots a decade ago), were about as far away from Islamist as one can get, drinking alcohol, smoking hash, racing up and down the boulevards on their scooters to a soundtrack of French and American hip-hop music.

The pool of these people who would gravitate towards radical Islam was -- and is -- very small, and those who become jihadis are the same ones who would go shoot up a school or movie theater in the United States without the religious trappings, alienated losers with no life and few opportunities, scorned by many, often including their own families, not because of their ethnicity or religion, but because they are viewed as dangerous malcontents. Somehow a burqa-clad Marianne, the female national symbol of France, does not seem a realistic fear to me.

That isn't to say religion plays no role in France's current anguished self-examination, but to see this series of attacks on Paris -- which ISIS in its "communiqué" referred to as "the capital of prostitution and vice" with all the venom of a nerd being left alone at the school dance -- as a political statement by an oppressed minority is thoroughly absurd. Among the Muslims who have emigrated to Europe and their offspring, there are good people and bad people, strong and weak, secular and fundamentalist.

They are, in short, like people everywhere else. The image, somewhat massaged by both apologists of the left and blowhards of the right, that France's Muslims are bearded salafists heading to the mosque to listen to some deranged imam's calls for jihad, scorned by society, is so far off the mark as to enter the realms of science fiction, as is demonstrated by how many Muslims caught the terrorists' bullets while out at the bars last Friday night.

The immigrant and Muslim communities of France and especially Paris are an integral part of the city and help give it much of its pizzazz and joie de vivre. In my heavily-immigrant neighborhood of Château Rouge, virtually all the bars were owned by Algerians and Tunisians, who were quite happy to quaff a pint at the end of the day. And though France's anti-freedom of expression "hate speech" laws can often be selectively enforced (witness the case of the anti-semitic comedian Dieudonné, which I wrote about here), none of that exculpates such an attack, nor does it excuse discourse on France by a clutch of writers who barely know the country at all.

There has been a bizarre grief contest on social media suggesting, alternately, that if one mourns the dead in Paris and the attacks against the city, one could somehow not mourn recent terrorist attacks in Lebanon and Turkey, those dying in the civil war in Syria, or those being killed by Boko Haram in Nigeria, and that the media had "ignored" such stories, even though they all have received -- and continue to receive -- extensive coverage in every major paper in Europe and North America. Perhaps if people spent less time circulating fake Buddha and Bob Marley quotes they would have noticed.

A Brazilian friend of mine currently based in India (a country that knows a little something about religious-inspired terror) introduced me to the perfect term for both the critics of Charlie Hebdo and those whose mockery and critiques of the genuine pain of so many after the Paris attacks appeared to reveal nothing if not a collection of curdled souls: Catastrophe sommeliers.

After any major example of man's inhumanity, religious fanaticism or simple tragedy, they would appear portentously at the world's side, napkin draped over their arm to decide who, what, where and for how long it was proper to mourn, or whether one was allowed to mourn at all.

And as for me? It would be nice to move back to Paris someday, if I can ever get the money together. In terms of the letter-signers, Michael Ondaatje used to be one of my favorite writers, and I rather liked Francisco Goldman but I'll never buy another book by either man again, and am thinking of getting rid of the ones I have. Most of the rest always struck me as wildly overpraised, so no great loss there.

Though Paris is in deep mourning and will likely remain so for some time, a nation that survived the horrors of a Nazi occupation, World War II and the slaughter of the Paris Commune will certainly wash off the blood, shake off the broken glass, kick the shell casings into the sewer where they belong and get back to doing what it does best, acting as a crossroads for men and women of all faiths and all backgrounds to sample its various charms.

Behind the Bataclan concert hall, where 89 died, an image has already been posted up of five people raising a glass of wine in mute salute under the words Paris encore debout (Paris is still standing). Charlie Hebdo's cover after the attacks was a beret-wearing French caricature guzzling bubbly, which then pours out of copious bullet holes in the figure's body, along with the words ils ont les armes, on les emmerde, on a le champagne (They've got the weapons, fuck 'em, we've got the champagne).
The spirit of Paris, of Charlie Hebdo and the spirit of those lives -- so many of them so young -- snatched away last week can never fully leave us. They will be with us as people drink and eat and laugh and flirt on the cafes along the Canal Saint Martin, the sunlight filtering down through the leaves of the trees as their branches move in a delicate ballet from even the faintest breeze.

They will be with us as people from dozens of countries gather at the Marché Dejean in my old neighborhood to sell their wares and to seek new opportunity in their adopted land. They will be with us in the crowded basement clubs in Oberkampf where people know what it is to be young and full of possibility.

They will be with us as one looks down from the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur in Montmartre at dusk and sees a magnificent, multicultural city spread out beneath them, a thousand possibilities therein yet to be discovered. And they will be with us wherever people feel their hearts are free, and full of love for their fellow human beings.

It is a love that those who attack this beloved city and its culture, whether with kalashnikovs or keyboards, would be fortunate to one day know.