Initiative to End the Civil War in Syria

This 9-points plan (click here for Arabic version) represents my own little contribution, offered through the auspices of the Tharwa Foundation, to ongoing efforts aimed at resolving the conflict in y home-country: Syria. As a peace plan, it may not represent the early expectations of the revolutionaries, not to mention my own, or any one side of this conflict for that matter. But parties to the Syrian conflict have to prepare themselves for settling for much less than they initially wanted and sought. The struggle for democracy is a complicated long-term process that requires continuous readjustments. It might begin with a protest movement or a popular revolution, but it does not end with it. Politics, no matter how derided and cynical it seems sometimes, remains a necessity.

The complicated issues related to the shape of future Syria and the nature and scope of the transitional justice process are differed to a later stage, due to the intricate calculations involved on all sides. The current plan merely aims to enable parties to the conflict, domestic, regional and international, to agree on a longer-term truce (perhaps as long as 5 years), while they negotiate a final settlement that might involve talks and compromises regarding developments in other countries and even other regions of the world, not only Syria. In other words, the idea is to exchange a violent long-term conflict for a long-term political process, no matter how complicated it is bound to be, in order to ease the suffering of the Syrian people.

Continue reading “Initiative to End the Civil War in Syria” →

“The Jüdische Kulturbund Project”: A profile of and an interview with Ammar Abdulhamid

Ammar in Damascus - 2005 — Ammar Abdulhamid Writer and Multimedia Artist living in the United States. Photo taken in Damascus, winter of 2005

Originally published on The Jüdische Kulturbund Project.

Ammar was born in Damascus, Syria in 1966. When he was 17, Ammar studied English for three months in the United Kingdom. At 18, he spent a year at Moscow University before moving to Wisconsin in 1986. Two years later, he moved to Los Angeles, California, then, returned to Wisconsin in 1990 to study history. He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Steven’s Point in 1992.

Continue reading ““The Jüdische Kulturbund Project”: A profile of and an interview with Ammar Abdulhamid” →

Killers, Cowards and Charlatans

On March 15, 2011, the Syrian street was divided between those who wanted freedom and those who kept opting for security at all costs. This cartoon shows why liberty is a much better idea, for all the risks it brings.

At the beginning of the Syrian revolution there were many millions who wanted to oust Assad, and many who wanted him to stay. Each group motivated by their own concerns, most of which were pretty legitimate. The systematic violence unleashed by Assad and his supporters, and the lies they perpetrated to get support for this policy from their sympathizers paved the path to where we are today. Nonviolence could not continue to work in the face of such mass and systematic violence, coupled with international indifference and opposition ineptitude.

Continue reading “Killers, Cowards and Charlatans” →

Here I Stand

President Barack Obama speaks about the breakthrough in the Iranian nuclear deal in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington on Thursday, April 2, 2015. World leaders, he said, had come to a “historic understanding” on a possible deal to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

A rare point of agreement between the critics and advocates of a deal with Iran starkly captures the nature of my own disaffection with it and with the current state of affairs in our world. The point simply put is this: the deal is being inked with Syrian, Iraqi and Yemeni blood.

Continue reading “Here I Stand” →