Last Saturday anti-fascist activists lobbied the Greek Embassy in London, ahead of tomorrow’s trial of Savas Michael-Matsas and Constantinos Moutzouris on trumped-up charges brought by a Greek judicial system keen to placate the fascist Golden Dawn.
Savas is a Jewish scholar internationally renowned in the field of philosophy, Marxism and literature, as well as General Secretary of the Greek EEK (Revolutionary Workers Party). He is charged with 'defamation' and 'incitement to violence and discord' for uttering the slogan 'smash fascism', as well as 'disturbing the civil peace' for mobilising for an anti-fascist demonstration, following a vile anti-semitic campaign from supporters of Golden Dawn.
His fellow accused, the former rector of the National Technical University in Athens, is charged with allowing the independent news portal Indymedia to be run from the university campus!
These charges are a result of a legal complaint against all the parties of the left – including the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), the left alliance SYRIZA, the anticapitalist alliance ANTARSYA and also the EEK – as well as immigrant associations and independent activists – made by Golden Dawn back in 2009 following the left’s active response to their attacks on immigrant communities.
The complaint was then resurrected by the right-wing Samaras government in 2012 and the police began interrogations of those named in the complaint. In June 2013, of the 80 people accused, just two were selected.
Resisting fascism is not a crime. Solidarity with the Greek anti-fascists!
Campaign group No Dash for Gas established a camp called Reclaim the Power, with workshops and direct action training.
'We are facing a climate crisis, economic crisis and social crisis. We want a clean and fair future where people come before profit. Come to share your ideas. create, imagine, resist', read the open invitation.
The camp demonstrated ways of sustainable living, such as compost toilets and solar power.
Plus workshops and exhibitions on interlinking issues such as fuel poverty in the UK and international struggles against energy companies.
As well as direct action training; in this case, 'police' versus protesters.
Journalists from the world's media broadcast live updates from the gates and campers spread the word on social media.
For the last few weeks tents have lined the roadside next to the drilling site managed by energy company Cuadrilla.
On Sunday thousands marched through the beautiful area, including local residents and people from other regions of the UK threatened by fracking.
Tributes to those arrested earlier.
The crowd broke away from the police-designated protest area to form a human chain around the rig.
Since then there have been a series of actions; at the home of ex-Tory Minister Lord Howell, who said fracking should go ahead in the ‘desolate’ North of England; at the head office of Cuadrilla; at the home of local Tory MP Francis Maude; and at the entrance to Cuadrilla's PR firm Bell Pottinger.
Send us your pictures and find out more on the Reclaim the Power website.
I know it’s 21 months away from the general election, but here in Brighton & Hove, the lines of divide between the parties are falling into a regular pattern. On four hotly contested political issues in the last few months, the same divides have emerged:
Bedroom tax: Brighton & Hove’s Green-led council was the first to say it would not evict people for non-payment of arrears arising from the bedroom tax. The Green Party nationally was unequivocal in opposing the bedroom tax and arguing the need to scrap it. Locally, of course the incumbent Tory MP supports the bedroom tax. The local Labour Party candidate, Nancy Platts, opposes it. But her national party refuses to promise to repeal it if Labour forms the next government.
‘Zero-hours’ contracts: Last week, the coalition government announced a ‘review’ of the use of ‘zero-hours’ contracts after reports that one million people were forced into them. Predictably, my opponent local Tory MP, Simon Kirby, supports the review, no doubt because its terms of reference have explicitly excluded banning them.
Caroline Lucas, Green MP for Brighton Pavilion, the Green parliamentary candidate for Hove Chris Hawtree and I issued a joint press release calling for an outright ban, as did the national Green Party. Predictably, also, Nancy Platts publicly supported a ban, but the national Labour Party announced a ‘summit’ on the issue and argued ‘zero-hours’ should be ‘the exception not the norm’, ie. it sat on the fence and has not explained where its ‘red lines’ are between what is morally acceptable and what isn’t.
Fracking: As huge local protests mount in Balcombe, just up the road from Brighton, over Cuadrilla’s exploratory drilling prior to fracking, the same divide has appeared. The government wholeheartedly supports fracking and is issuing massive tax breaks to encourage it. The local Tory MP refuses as yet to be drawn (mindful of local rural opposition). My local Labour candidate opposes fracking. But the national Labour Party supports it! Needless to say, the Green Party nationally and all the local Green parliamentary candidates are completely opposed to it and have given huge support to the local protests. Good luck to the campaigners who are camping at the drilling site.
Rail re-nationalisation: Caroline Lucas MP has announced a parliamentary bill to re-nationalise Britain’s railways. I fully endorse this, as does the national Green Party. The Tories of course oppose it. Once more, my local Labour opponent supports re-nationalisation but of course the national Labour Party refuses to commit itself to such a ‘radical’ course of action.
Other parties
For completeness, I should probably refer to other political parties (though the Lib Dems’ involvement in the coalition makes them in practice indistinguishable from the Tories).
UKIP likes to present itself as anti-establishment and an alternative to those tired of the major political parties. But in practice, of course, its policies are pretty similar to the Tories, albeit with a dash of extra racism thrown in. It supports fracking, opposes rail re-nationalisation and seems to have no policy on zero-hours contracts (though its general pro-employer stance suggests it probably supports them). The one exception to this dismal approach is that it has, in a rare moment of enlightened policy-making, called for the abolition of the bedroom tax!
Where next?
All these issues are key dividing lines – real struggles, involving real people, on issues that have huge consequences for many people’s everyday lives. The coalition government and the local Tories are on one side. The Green Party and its parliamentary candidates are on the other side.
Labour is on the fence – on the wrong side of it. It remains silent or speaks with different voices locally and nationally. The local Labour candidate has taken the same position as the Greens. But everyone knows that when it comes to it, the national Labour Party will triumph over the lone voices in the party against its stance.
As for me, I hope people can see I’ve been putting my words into action – including being heavily involved in building up the Brighton People’s Assembly Against Austerity. The Brighton PA has significant support – the initial launch meeting had 400 people, and the subsequent ‘organising’ meetings regularly attract between 30 and 50 people. On 24 August, it is supporting a Mass Sleep-In in central Brighton to highlight the effects of the bedroom tax in creating further homelessness. It is producing simple anti-austerity leaflets (using the Red Pepper Mythbusters material!) and supporting local Defend the NHS campaigns. I have also been leafleting Brighton station around the re-nationalisation campaign, and supporting the anti-fracking protests at nearby Balcombe. Labour is nowhere to be seen in these campaigns, though I would welcome its involvement.
As I campaign to be elected to parliament, I want to build the broadest opposition to the terrible policies and actions of this government. But words are not enough: local Labour supporters, including its left-wingers, have to be involved in these campaigns, or they will be tarred with the same brush as their leadership.
An assemblage of critical researchers, community and trade union activists has been emerging over the past year to question current government policies that privatise and raise the cost of post-compulsory education, which will effectively exclude working class students from further and higher education. Current policies undermine critical and political education by instrumentalising knowledge and supporting only that which is valuable to 'the market'.
Inspired by the debates in the ‘uncut’ and ‘occupy’ movements around the globe, this group held an Open Day in Leeds on 6 July to talk about what has been happening to adult and workers’ education. We are interested in resisting the privatisation and dismantling of higher, further, trade union and community education, all of which should be funded by the state and free for all.
At the Open Day we offered three workshops, headed Education, Communities, and Work, to invite discussions on how we can create spaces, networks and shared experiences to form the basis of a struggle against the commodification of education.
The Education strand discussed how to build on radical traditions so that learning is creative, innovative and critical. We asked: Who owns education and what is it for? How can we organise ourselves and alternative voices? How do we make ‘real’ education? Our discussion sat within understandings of the crisis in work, education and community, but we agreed that change can be an opportunity to build on our stocks of experience and knowledge, take risks and challenge our assumptions about education. Our strength lies in our capacity to network in continuous dialogue, our commitment to knowledge as power and to education as a ‘resource of hope’.
The Work strand held discussions around the key issues we face in the workplace today. This includes feelings of lack of control, fragmenting collegiality due to loss of positions and instability. Young people and public sector workers are increasingly vulnerable. We talked about the international trade union movement and the International Labour Organisation’s Decent Work agenda and concluded that decent working conditions must be available to all workers, a struggle in times of global austerity. The desire to find pleasure and learning in the workplace continues, however. These commitments informed the drive to involve local trade unions in the campaign for placing education at the heart of work.
The Community Action strand explored the concept of community education for a social purpose – to improve the capacity of individuals and communities to relate to the world around them as active, critical engaged citizens. A wide range of ideas and issues emerged from this discussion, in particular urgency in establishing learning partnerships that could come about through support from the Skills Funding Agency, local authorities, local employers, trade unions, ULF, Lottery, and the ESF. There was acknowledgement of the potential barriers particularly around funding, recruitment and successful engagement with disenfranchised/socially excluded. Our Action Plan includes making better use of community facilities, stirring up the potential of people to improve their lives in small ways, identifying issues communities care about through agreement on workable strategies for dealing with these, and striking a balance between individual and collective needs.
The group has formed links with the Independent Working Class Education Project and People’s Political Economy. We have spoken about our project at the For a Public University workshop 15 June 2012 at Nottingham University, Critical Labour Studies at Ruskin College 2-3 March 2013, at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford 20 April 2013 and Networked Labour in Amsterdam 7–9 May 2013. We intend to continue to network with likeminded social forces with the specific intention to hold this government to account for its current attack on education, and to look for workable alternatives. Please join us by joining the Education4Action Google group and/or emailing Cilla Ross, c.ross at londonmet.ac.uk. Our next meeting is on 20 August at noon at the People's History Museum in Manchester.
Brian Chadwick, Jo Cutter, Kirsten Forkert, Miguel Martinez Lucio, Phoebe Moore, Alan Roe, Cilla Ross, John Stirling and Steve Walker contributed to this report
Basmet Amal are one of four local relief and development organisations, each dealing with a region of the town, that feed into a broader council comprised of relief and social affairs, military-security, political and media-comms committees. The fire service consists of Free Army soldiers and locals legging it to burning buildings with whatever supplies of water they can muster. Ambulances have been targeted by the regime, with those donated from outside re-sprayed to disguise their function. These too are run by volunteers.
Basmet Amal have big plans and they want to see replicated these throughout the country. They've re-started a primary school for children who have missed two years of learning; they've opened a low-priced products supermarket to counter local over-inflation through scarcity and unscrupulous traders (inflation in Ma'arra is currently at 400%); they have managed composition and distribution of 30,0000 monthly aid packages of flour, cooking oil, dried milk, salt, sugar, and beans; they support widows through 500SP donations from overseas donors as well as development of crafts projects; they are building a shampoo and soap factory; sourcing low priced and free medicines; supporting the local field hospital and yet to come, - a womens' recreation centre with gym and swimming facilities, to strengthen women physically and emotionally for generations to come.
Relief is revolutionary when it helps communities stand their ground and keep up the project of liberation. Basmet Amal's goal is self-sufficiency. There has been a total transformation of society after ousting the regime. Sitting in the Shaheed Hassan Hossam Kamil school, Lateef*, a teacher, explains how regime text books had all hailed Bashar's father, Hafez al Assad. He was made into an idol, with even simple maths exercises including references to him. ‘We had to salute him and sing the praises of the regime every day. We were not taught to think for ourselves, we were taught to fear, we were taught to obey. Now our text books are free of these references. We are bringing up a new generation to think freely and to have confidence in themselves and their community’.
It's not lost on anyone running relief that different interests are competing for influence, local, regional and international. ‘Aid is being used to buy peoples' loyalties’, explains Loay*. ‘That's why independence and self-sufficiency are so important for us}. He is senior surgeon working on food relief. Loay rises early, daily, and sees his work as struggle against not just physical poverty but the spiritual and social poverty that this leads to, and which governed so many for so long under the regime. “A human being needs a full stomach. It's hard to do good when you are empty. Hunger can lead to desperation and corruption. Feed a family and you feed a community”.
Solidarity and connection with organisations like Basmet Amal should be coming from our movements at a time when millions of Syrians are being dispossessed, losing their own agency and ability to set up their own initiatives. The new dictate is being told that it's over, to give up, that the Syrian revolution has been overtaken by militias, al-Qaeda, Iran, Saudi Arabia. This blood-drenched chessboard is held up as their game, the game of the biggest powers in the world who control the rules. The message is the same to the people of Syria and the UK This is not your revolution - do not identify with this.
Self-representation, self-organisation, self-determination. These are universal desires driving democracy struggles all over the world, from Turkey to Brazil, Iran to America. We build for them here and people are building for them there. We have much in common. When people keep organising, despite cuts, repression, criminalisation or live fire, there is still everything to hope for.
*Some names have been changed
This is the final part of a six day serialization of Ewa’s trip to Syria. It accompanies Jon Sack’s beautiful reportage from the Syrian border in comic form: The Physio.
Ewa Jasiewicz is a journalist and campaigner. She is part of a small international solidarity initiative working to support grassroots groups in Syria. Please support these organisations:
www.facebook.com/JmaetBsmtAml
Karama Bus children's relief project in Kafranbel
Juan Zero's Jasmine Baladi studio in Bab al Hawa Camp
Photo above is of Ma'arrat al Numan: the sign says 'liberated area'
We're driving 160km deep into liberated territory in Idlib province. Our destination is the frontline town of Ma'arrat al Numan. Our guides are volunteers from the home-grown Basmet Amal (Smile of Hope) relief organisation. The road we're travelling on, we are later told, was liberated by mostly Ahrar al Sham forces, a new fighting group, still under the wider umbrella of the Syrian Free Army, mostly made up of defectors. We pass Tafta Nas, a regime airbase that was liberated in January. Smiles spread around remembering the day it was conquered. It could have been from here that helicopter gunships had flown over Ma'arra to put down unarmed demonstrations.
Ma'arra was once a bustling, fertile, town of 120,000 people. When the regime started strafing the peaceful uprising, 90% of the population fled. 850 people have been killed, and 2000 houses, 20 schools and 15 mosques destroyed since November 2011, according to local relief organisations. Ma'arra was reduced to a dustbowl, sheltering a shadow population of 4,000-10,000. Infrastructure was decimated; the town's main electricity sub station was leveled to the ground and there is no running water. Pipes were all bombed and repairing them would mean approaching an Assad forces base close by. Hospitals were destroyed, schools shut down, and up until only a few months ago, no markets or bakeries were open. Internet and phonelines are down. Communication between people is face to face or via walkie talkies.
Ma'arra appears to be around 60% destroyed. Everywhere you look you see half-standing apartment blocs with gaping living rooms and bedrooms, crippled mosques, giant piles of rubble and burnt out shops. The bombing continued while we were there, the front-line in the East just a kilometre away from 'safety'. Wadi Deif military base – home to some 500 Assad soldiers we are told – is Ma'arra's main threat. ‘They cannot invade us by land. Free Army forces outnumber them. But snipers can see us and the planes keep bombing’, we are told by local activists.
Ma'arra is slowly coming back to life though, with the help of local home-grown aid organisations like Basmet Amal which are co-ordinating physical and social reconstruction. It's estimated that up to 40,000 people are now back.
The uprising that ousted the regime from Ma'arra began just like those elsewhere in Syria, through unarmed protests erupting in main town squares, spurred on by those in other towns, and the shakey mobile phone footage of children being shot dead and stamped on, crowds gunned down.
It was November 2011 for Ma'arra, when hundreds broke through their fear to protest and were broken up with live ammunition. They returned, with their dead, for the all too familiar event of funeral-turned-demonstration. They were again attacked in an attempt to break people at their weakest but instead this became a live fuse for even more incendiary resistance. The regime kept killing, first with snipers and security forces and then with war planes. Undeterred people kept taking to the streets, until the cycle of picking up the dead and returning with ever more, forced people to take up arms.
Some 200 people were reported to have been shot by snipers from the City museum that regime forces had used as a base. The killings happened between October 2011 and July 2012. It took nine months for local activists to muster the decisive armed strength needed to oust the regime from the base. This was no easy or rapid move.
The growing resistance bought or seized weapons from army officers by force, while many defected voluntarily taking their guns and skills with them. The latter was the most effective and common way to build up an arsenal. With ammunition running out, more ingenious if humble means of attack are being developed. We witness footage of 'The Canon of Hell' – a rocket launcher made out of a tractor except its' 'rockets' are cooking gas canisters.
But it's the social resistance that we have come to support. And Basmet Amal are a leading light in it. Made up of 30 volunteers, it was originally the idea of a young local woman, Leila*, who manages the organisation's external communications, reports and planning. Her work could have even more impact if she could access the internet. One of the organisation's aims is to secure enough funding to build communication masts in the city centre, re-starting mobile phone and internet access which would facilitate better co-ordination between people and organisations.
*Some names have been changed
This is the fifth part of a six day serialization of Ewa’s trip to Syria. It accompanies Jon Sack’s beautiful reportage from the Syrian border in comic form: The Physio.
Ewa Jasiewicz is a journalist and campaigner. She is part of a small international solidarity initiative working to support grassroots groups in Syria. Please support these organisations:
www.facebook.com/JmaetBsmtAml
Karama Bus children's relief project in Kafranbel
Juan Zero's Jasmine Baladi studio in Bab al Hawa Camp
Picture by Masoud Bashora - freelance photographer from Ma'arrat al Numman. His facebook page is here: https://www.facebook.com/Maarawe.Free.Lens
Our first glimpse of Syria is through the eyes of hundreds of children living in the Bab Al Hawa refugee camp on the Turkish Border. We’re in Juan Zero's art studio – a tent about 10 metres long and 4 metres wide with wind billowing through it, rustling hundreds of crayon-drawn pictures by children aged between 5-14.
Juan is a Syrian activist and cartoonist who set up Jasmine Baladi Studio at the camp nine months ago. On any given day a hundred children can cram up to the tent door screaming with joy to get in. Groups rotate, 30 kids all sit round a long table, quietly drawing, gently encouraged by male and female youth volunteers.
The pictures are overwhelmingly positive: sunny houses, flowers, animals, birds. ‘We don't let them dwell on the past’, explains Juan, ‘We want them to focus on the future. The past for many of these children is horrific’. There are some of the usual drawings of blunt bullets firing out of box-y tanks and out of clunky planes onto red-scratched stick bodies that could be from any war zone.
But the predominant image popping up across the gallery-walls is bizarrely Sponge Bob Square Pants. And not just any Sponge Bob. We're talking Sponge Bob Jaish al Hurr (Free Army Sponge Bob), waving the new Syrian Independence flag, raising a rifle, wearing military fatigues even. The kids have adapted Sponge Bob into a symbol of the Syrian revolution.
*Some names have been changed
This is the fourth part of a six day serialization of Ewa’s trip to Syria. It accompanies Jon Sack’s beautiful reportage from the Syrian border in comic form: The Physio.
Ewa Jasiewicz is a journalist and campaigner. She is part of a small international solidarity initiative working to support grassroots groups in Syria. Please support these organisations:
www.facebook.com/JmaetBsmtAml
Karama Bus children's relief project in Kafranbel
Juan Zero's Jasmine Baladi studio in Bab al Hawa Camp
Masoud takes us to a house full of refugee men from Hama. Almost all have been injured in resisting the Assad Regime. They identify as Free Army. Most were hit with missiles or shrapnel. Eleven sit together in one room on plastic chairs and thin mattresses.
One young lad with a beautiful, joyous whole-face smile has lost the ability to speak due to a brain injury. He's getting it back but for now can only respond with nods and smiles, comprehension but no conversation. Another has been paralysed down the right side of his body. Another has lost a leg. Most are young – under the age of 30. Some sport beards that spell 'Salafi' to a prejudiced eye. All are covered in tattoos – considered 'haram' or a taboo in Islam.
The designs range from two swords crossed, names of loved ones, and sparsely sketched women's faces with pouting lips and straight strips of hair ('who is that?' - 'my mother' deadpans one – to peals of laughter from the rest). 'He; he's a drinker' points out one to a bearded, large man in his mid 30s – Abu Mohammed. He laughs. 'They’re joking' he says with a twinkle in his eye.
They're working class guys – builders, brick layers, electricians, carpenters; but they've been through hell. Their families have too and not for the first time. In 1982 Hafez al Assad – Bashar's father and ruler of Syria for 29 years sent his forces into Hama to put down Muslim Brotherhood insurgents. The result was a crackdown and massacre of as many as 40,000 inhabitants over a period of 27 days. Now again since the uprising, Hama has seen massacres reported in nearby villages of Qubeir and Tremesh, resulting in the deaths of over 250 people.
Torture
Abu Mohammed hands me a cigarette and shakes his head wearily. ‘You've been to Palestine yes?’ (I nod) ‘So you've met men who have been jailed and tortured yes?’ ‘Yes’ I reply, ‘Its almost a rite of passage there, most men from their mid teens onwards go through it, get rounded up, get arrested, go inside’. ‘Israel’, begins Abu Mohammed, slowly, ‘Is more merciful than the regime of Assad’. Pause. ‘We have been tortured with knives, slashed, we have been electrocuted, we have been drilled, with electric drills (he makes a drilling gesture with his hand) into our bodies.’ The boys around the room nod wide-eyed. ‘See this beard?’ says Abu Mohammed, pointing to his chin. ‘I’m shaving this off as soon as Assad is brought down’. It's unclear how religious the guys really are. There are stories of some fighters growing beards to look more pious in order to secure funding from more religious Gulf state backers.
We eat: baba ganoush covered with mincemeat and tomato, pitta, omlette, and lentil and parsley soup. Our talk is about the first days of the uprising in Hama. I ask the guys how they felt. ‘By God’ says Abu Mohammad, ‘I started to cry.’ Another man in his 40s pitches in ‘Me too. I could not believe it. So many young people came out, they had lost their fear. Our town square was full’. ‘I felt such joy, we all did’ says Abu Mohammed, dipping his bread in olive oil. ‘Tears rolled down our cheeks with joy’.
Leaving the humble, overcrowded home with no running water, I see a young, clean cut, gelled-hair trendy guy of about 15 or 16 sitting talking to the other guys. I greet him in Arabic but they tell me he's Turkish, a neighbour. It was good to see this friendship overcome the fear-stoked barriers being whipped up between refugees and locals. Would he be a man by the time they can go home?
*Some names have been changed
This is the third part of a six day serialization of Ewa’s trip to Syria, It accompanies Jon Sack’s beautiful reportage from the Syrian border in comic form: The Physio.
Ewa Jasiewicz is a journalist and campaigner. She is part of a small international solidarity initiative working to support grassroots groups in Syria. Please support these organisations:
www.facebook.com/JmaetBsmtAml
Karama Bus children's relief project in Kafranbel
Juan Zero's Jasmine Baladi studio in Bab al Hawa Camp
Photo by Masoud Bashora
We're on the wind-swept balcony of a marble apartment on the edge of Reyhanli. Beyond us are fields, scrub and then Syria. Over 4.25 million Syrians have fled their homes in two years. This includes 1.6 million outside the country and the remainder internally displaced. Just two weeks ago two car bombs exploded in the town centre, right in front of the Police station and town hall, killing at least 46 and injuring hundreds.
Syrian refugees – who are estimated to have swollen the town's population from 90,000 to 120,000 - became targets for local Turkish residents angry at immigration and blaming them for the blasts. Syrian cars were torched and smashed and refugees attacked. Some NGOs and charities shut their doors and went underground.
A siege mentality settled over the stunned town. Our friend Masoud*, from Aleppo is telling us how he came to be here, remembering the first days of the revolution. It had started with text messages between students at the University of Aleppo. They would meet at a particular square at a set time, and observe. Who was here from the security services, who sent to spy and contain? And who was on their side. Could we find each other? A chosen comrade would kick it off, by watching and watching, before shouting at the right moment, ‘Allahuakbar!’ And they would reveal themselves, chanting freedom slogans, that multiplied, a hundred and then a thousand human microphones amplifying desire.
Our friend recalls the time when there were hundreds gathered in the main square. The person whose turn it was to shout cleared his throat and did it, only to be pounced upon by a dozen police officers who began to beat him ferociously. The disparate soon-to-be-a-crowd began to find their voice. ‘Get Off Him! Get Off Him! Get Off Him!’ they began to shout, one, two, ten, fifty, one hundred, one thousand, voices surged at the officers. Nobody touched them. The officers backed off. The sheer will and power of the crowd urging and urging and defending their comrade had forced back the regime. Masoud laughs and shakes his head at the memory. ‘It was incredible’ he says.
The demonstrations continued in Aleppo and the University became a battleground. All public spaces became full of possibility, threats, tensions but to Masoud, a new beauty, the beauty of people finding each other. He became known. His name went on a list. Wanted, he went into hiding. Now the security services were coming to his home, threatening his mother, his sisters, his brothers. If we can't have you we will take them was the message. We'll hurt you through them, we'll stop you through them.
All he could do was just keep running…
Masoud ended up leaving, his ID card burning in his pocket at every junction where a checkpoint could loom ahead. He managed to hide until the last hurdle and then there was no turning back. Assad soldiers were beckoning him to come forward. Cold sweat. His name, his name. It was a rebel attack on a target behind him that saved him. The gunfire and grenades tore the soldiers' attention away from him. They began to mobilise and cordon off the area, halting all movement, regrouping, talking fast over radios, withdrawing to go back to their counterparts. This was his chance to move and he took it, stealing through. Others did the same, including someone zooming through in a car. A tank was coming round the corner. Masoud shouted at the car to 'Stop!' but it was mown down fast, crushed under the treads. Screaming and blood; shelling and crashes erupting all around him. All he could do was just keep running…
He ended up in Reyhanli, caring for the wounded. If he couldn't fight then he'd heal. And there was no shortage of the sick and injured streaming through the border. Broken bodies, some caught in the crossfire, some deliberately targeted by regime snipers. Others were fighters. The traumatic injuries were such that it wasn't just the large volume of emergency cases that needed attention – but the complicated months of intensive therapy needed to get people back on the mend. These were not patients you could just discharge and let go – they had no homes to go back to, they had no legs to walk on, some no mouths to speak with, no eyes, no arms, they all needed long-term rehabilitation. A second to lose mobility, months or years to regain it.
*Some names have been changed
This is the second part of a six day serialization of Ewa’s trip to Syria, It accompanies Jon Sack’s beautiful reportage from the Syrian border in comic form: The Physio.
Ewa Jasiewicz is a journalist and campaigner. She is part of a small international solidarity initiative working to support grassroots groups in Syria. Please support these organisations:
www.facebook.com/JmaetBsmtAml
Karama Bus children's relief project in Kafranbel
Juan Zero's Jasmine Baladi studio in Bab al Hawa Camp
Think of Syria and what images come to mind? Wrecked buildings, refugees, a stoical Bashar al Assad? Ask most activists in the UK what they think is going on in Syria and the majority response is ‘I don't know’ or ‘It’s been taken over by al-Qaeda now, Saudi Arabia and the USA‘ or ‘Assad is better than imperialism’. Two of the most popular are: ‘There's nothing we can do’ and ‘Revolution? What revolution?’
There is still an ongoing revolution and broadly speaking, the left/anti-war movement in the West is undermining those struggling to keep it alive by focusing on political posturing and lobbying rather than practical solidarity. An ongoing map of grassroots social resistance as compiled by Amnesty International shows the breadth and creativity of some of these movements mostly unheard of in the West. Together, it's worth noting that participation in these groups outnumbers those participating in armed resistance groups, which challenges the idea that all resistance to dictatorship and imperialism in Syria is militarised.
The popular narratives about Syria hand responsibility to ‘the big boys’ to sort out the 'mess' – the USA, UK, Saudi Arabia, the EU, Israel, Iran. These big powers control the message and representation of the Syrian struggle; they demonise, confuse, order and alienate any kind of solidarity with the Syrian people. When states tell those watching the conflict in Syria that ‘there's nothing you can do’ what this really means is ‘keep back, leave it to us’. ‘Everybody wants to eat from Syria’ is a common phrase inside Syria. But not enough people are feeding the grassroots struggles for self-determination.
If we on the UK left believe in people’s capacity to self-organise then we need to find examples of this capacity and support them. That's why I travelled to Syria in May with a German activist friend I’ve known for ten years as part of a nascent international solidarity initiative called 'Witness Syria'. So far, since January 2013, a Turkish comrade, two Danish activists and ourselves have been over to identify what is possible solidarity-wise. We are part of a wider group of around 20 activists from Poland, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Sweden, Germany, Denmark, America and the UK who have experience of longterm solidarity activism in the Middle East over the past twenty years and want to support Syrian liberation struggles.
The living
Since the beginning of the Syrian uprising, which began in March 2011, over 100,000 people have been killed. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, it breaks down as 37,000 civilians including 8000 women and children; 43,000 Assad regime military personnel including special forces;13,539 rebel fighters; and 2,015 defectors from government forces. The figures could be much higher given that combatant sides prefer to downplay losses.
The media obsession with ‘what bleeds leads’ doesn't really tell us what leads people to resist. Without context, texture or self-representation by Syrians, the uprising has been spun into a civil war, with barbarians in the lead, needing civilisation and discipline by an experienced West or a Strong Man dictator. Sectarianism is getting stronger, and factional and communal fighting is a reality but this is being encouraged and orchestrated by vested interests. There is a story behind the story, daily revolutions behind The Revolution which are being told by Syrians themselves, usefully and necessarily to one another around the country and in the diaspora. Facebook is the big info point internationally, and on the ground there’s a boom in underground newspapers and newsletters, explaining the latest protests not just against the regime but now against austere, authoritarian militias, Free Army corruption, local new government unaccountability, militarisation...
Much has been written about Syria, mostly in Arabic, by Syrians. Myself and Katrina* are sitting in a breezy flat in Reyhanli, Turkey, with some of our new friends there. They're six young men from all walks of life crammed together in a small flat, removed from their families and partners. They work 24/7 to support refugees and communities inside and on the borders of Syria. They seem to sleep at their computers. Take-away boxes pile up in the kitchen.
One is a film-maker, one is an NGO co-ordinator, one is a writer with thousands of Facebook followers, another was a labourer for years around central Europe, and one plays the Oud intently in the corner, I didn’t learn what he does. All are in contact with other Syrians working to sustain the revolution. They're weary of the postures and positions of much of the European Left. Debate and discussion between them is vivid, passionate and persistent. One tells us, ‘Last night we were actually on the verge of calling it a civil war’. Another explains: ‘My struggle is now evolving on two fronts, both against the regime and against the armed groups that are trying to control the society.’ They long gave up watching Al-Jazeera and mainstream media, and they long gave up on most of the anti-war European and US Left. Their allies are other Syrians and Arabic activists, in Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and the Gulf.
A German friend, who pioneered our visit to Ma'arrat al Numan, shakes her head as she re-tells the stories of speaking at Syria events back home. ‘I had people come up to me afterwards and shout in my face, that I am naïve, Assad is better, I am supporting imperialism’. A Syrian woman activist living in another Turkish town was assaulted at a lefty anti-war gig by a group of Turkish women because she was wearing a knitted Free Syria wristband. Our German friend continues. ‘I met this Swedish woman at one talk and she was like “What, you mean there are cool Syrians out there?'’’ Mohammed* is riled but calmly dismissive. ‘Why should I care if some activists in Europe think I am cool or not? All I care about is developing my society and rebuilding my country with justice’. Fickle grandstanding and misapprehensions as well as recent 'Peace delegations' are brushed away as ignorant and irrelevant. There is no justice, just us...
*Some names have been changed
This is the first part of a six day serialization of Ewa’s trip to Syria, It accompanies Jon Sack’s graphic reportage from the Syrian border: The Physio.
Ewa Jasiewicz is a journalist and campaigner. She is part of a small international solidarity initiative working to support grassroots groups in Syria. Please support these organisations:
https://www.facebook.com/JmaetBsmtAml
Karama Bus children's relief project in Kafranbel
Juan Zero's Jasmine Baladi studio in Bab al Hawa Camp
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