Syria

We have recently been spending a lot of time with Syrian refugees. It has made me realise that I'm pretty ignorant about their country and that needs to change if I'm to understand them better. So I read this book by a journalist who has been going in and out of Syria since 2012. It is a very hard book to read, filled with horrendous accounts of what the people of this country have been going through. But I feel that even this week I've been able to understand better- for example- a friend whose father and brother were taken and imprisoned and who feels hopeless about the future. 

The following really struck a chord with me about how, as Westerners, we can share in the lives of the people we love but when it comes down to it, we are very separate. We can return from the camps or unfinished buildings which refugees live in, to our comfortable houses; we have passports with which we can leave the country at short notice; our children will always have better chances for their education and future:

When I think back on my time in Aleppo, the strongest memory I have is of watching the baby die. I have my own child at home. He is healthy and lives in the first world; he drinks milk and eats cookies before bed, studies by an electric light, goes skiing, plays with Lego. He does not know war. His heroes are the heroes of Star Wars – the good and evil, the Jedi and the Senators, Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. His heroes are not jihadists, fighters, or people who get through the front lines bearing humanitarian aid. The suffering of children is particularly painful for anyone, but for me, as a mother, when I look into the eyes of the mothers whose children are helplessly dying, I feel like a fraud. I watch this, then I can go home.

I know that we [the international community] have done nothing [to stop the war]. And this is the worse part of it – when you realize that what separates you, someone who can leave, from someone who is trapped in Aleppo, or Homs or Douma or Darayya, is that you can walk away and go back to your home with electricity and sliced bread; then you begin to feel ashamed to be human.

On torture:

The lowest depth that a human being can reach is to perform or to receive torture. The goal of the torturer is to inflict horrific pain and dehumanize another being. The act not only destroys both parties’ souls – the victim’s and the perpetrator’s – but also the very fabric of a society. By subjecting men or women to enforced violence, sexual violation, or worse, you transform them into something subhuman. How does someone return to the human race after having been so brutalized?

On war:

And how brutal war is, and how it comes down to the basics – that politicians argue but soldiers fight. And soldiers are always someone’s child, and that child is getting hurt. That child is getting killed.

On how, in war, life changes so quickly:

The celerity with which life as you know it breaks down is overwhelming. The beautiful people stop coming. The water stops, taps run dry, banks go, and a sniper kills your brother. There is nowhere to seek recourse, and barely time to grieve before you see a helicopter flying in the sky and hear the thwack of another bomb. You get used to hallucinations appearing in broad daylight. The dead and mangled return to you, over and over, and not just in dreams. Once you see one dead body – the shoes ripped off from the force of an explosion – you never forget what it looks like. 

But what you don’t expect is that ordinary things – those things that you take for granted in life – disappear too. The man who collects the rubbish no longer comes because there are no functioning civil services. The nurses who draw blood disappear because the hospitals are bombed. Your daily newspaper, your coffee shop, then – eventually – every bit of normality you know is gone. What you yearn for more than anything is for the ordinary to return. The simple pleasure of going to a shop to buy apples ; to smoke a cigarette languidly in a café; the ease of a university student driving from one side of the city to the other to get to her psychology or macroeconomics class without encountering a round of gunshots.