The recent mention I received in the Arabic version of Newsweek as one of 43 people making a difference in the Arab World was bound to raise eyebrows and generate some cynical, if not downright hostile, responses here. After all, I was the only Syrian on the list, yet very few people around here know me. So how could I be making any difference? – A very legitimate question indeed, and the fact that someone did indeed raise it in the Syrian press on Monday was not particularly surprising to me.
Year: 2005
A Heretical Closure!
Many of laborers involved in the process of renovating our building are actually denaturalized Kurds, that is, descendants of Kurdish citizens that have been stripped away of their Syrian citizenship as a result of the 1962 census and the manipulations that took place at that time. In other words, they belong to the very group of people whose basic rights my team and I at the Tharwa Projectare supposed to be busy defending, and are actually doing so, to the best of our restricted abilities. Continue reading “A Heretical Closure!”
Another Inauspicious Lull!
With its pullout from Lebanon nearing completion, the Syrian regime seems to be about to go into one of its usual self-congratulatory phases, a development that cannot but augur ill for the future. For some of the worst mistakes committed by this regime happened during such phases. Continue reading “Another Inauspicious Lull!”
Syria Squeezed: Are We Free Yet?
… What is going on now is a lot of testing of “red lines,” as everyone in Damascus seems to call them. People are saying things and publishing things. But many of them, like al-Bounni and Ammar Abdulhamid, who heads the minority-rights Tharwa Project, are engaged in a harrowing pas de deux with the government. Al-Bounni and Abdulhamid are both barred from leaving the country. Intelligence officials have interrogated Abdulhamid three times since January. Al-Bounni has seen his siblings and friends thrown in jail for peaceful political speech. No one testing the limits knows when the next crackdown might come or what will provoke it. Continue reading “Syria Squeezed: Are We Free Yet?”
The Ammar Abdulhamid Archive 