A Sickness in Lebanon And Syria: Crux Of The Problem The Authority Of The Assad Clan
05 June 2014
By Diana Moukalled
The voting in Syria's presidential election by
expatriates in Lebanon on May 28 saw both a contrived
public spectacle at the Syrian Embassy in Beirut and a
fierce torrent of abusive exchanges on social media.
Outside the embassy, large crowds raised posters of
Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad and sang songs of
support for him—something we thought we would never
see again in Lebanon following the Syrian withdrawal
in 2005—causing shock and an explosion of sentiments
that had until now been held back to burst out on
social media.
Feelings of loathing erupted and abuse and insults
prevailed, with both Lebanese and Syrian social media
sites filling up with exchanges that included the use
of repugnant language. From the intensity of the anger
and mutual hatred expressed on Facebook, it seemed
like you could almost hear the screams of rage and
expect the combatants' limbs to reach out of the
screen to start hitting each other at any minute.
This is not the place to repeat the expressions that
were used to condemn all those who voted for Assad, or
the calls to throw all Syrian refugees out of Lebanon,
or the denunciations of the Lebanese people as a
single loathsome group full of hatred for others,
especially Syrians.
All angry parties seemed afflicted with a rampant
disease, the symptoms of which spread and infected
everybody. At this point we could easily turn to
psychiatry to analyze the Lebanese–Syrian situation,
which seems to have become a syndrome in its own
right.
Modern medicine defines a syndrome as the collection
of signs and symptoms that characterize a single
condition, which makes the appearance of one of them a
warning of the possible appearance of the others.
I do not of course claim to have any medical
expertise, but I am comparing the situation we can
observe today with what psychiatry has diagnosed as
taking place in many other situations, such as
Stockholm Syndrome, which has been abundantly analyzed
and used to describe our situation in the Arab world.
In the Lebanese–Syrian case, there exists what seems
to be a chronic disease that has worsened and spread
in the past three years, and what took place last week
was nothing other than an extension of a political,
security and social clash that started decades ago and
has now reached its peak.
Without much effort, we can see that the ballot that
took place in Lebanon among Syrians was not a genuine
one, and the same will be true of the voting in Syria
itself also. What actually took place was simply a
public exhibition that was carefully planned under the
sponsorship of, and pressure from, pro-Syrian parties
in Lebanon and motivated by the ability of the Syrian
regime to threaten anyone who did not go to the
embassy with being banned from returning to Syria.
What happened in Lebanon was not an election. There
were no ballot boxes or booths, and many did not have
voting cards—some people who voted were even below the
minimum legal voting age. Therefore, these were not
elections, so there is no need to consider them as
such.
Why then did the events at the embassy of the Assad
regime ignite this previously dormant fire? The reason
is down to a flaw that the Lebanese and Syrian crowds
did not openly display in their clashes, either
physically or on the Internet. The crux of the problem
is not mutual hatred, as we suppose, but the Ba'ath
regime and the authority of the Assad clan, which has
created a very deep abyss in whose fires we are now
being swallowed.
Diana Moukalled is a prominent and well-respected
TV journalist in the Arab world thanks to her
phenomenal show Bil Ayn Al-Mojarada (By The Naked
Eye), a series of documentaries on controversial areas
and topics which airs on Lebanon's leading local and
satelite channel, Future Television. Diana also is a
veteran war correspondent, having covered both the
wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan, as well as the
Isreali "Grapes of Wrath" massacre in southern
Lebanon. Ms. Moukalled has gained world wide
recognition and was named one of the most influential
women in a special feature that ran in Time Magazine
in 2004.
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EsinIslam.Com
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