Hanin Ghaddar

For people who’ve lived through the Lebanese civil war, one of the main collective memories we share is of the statues that were erected everywhere during the conflict. Monuments of self-imposed heroes, built on illusions of immortality, sprung up rapidly in every town in Lebanon, to celebrate community and sectarian leaders.

As these leaders and their statues grew in size and influence, the state and its institutions were dissolving. A citizen perished, while the member of the sect or the tribe came to life. The lack of the state, the citizen and a collective memory of the war pushed us all deep into our shells to wait for the nightmare to be over. Only those with guns thought they had an idea or a cause, a sense of belonging to this leader or that ideology. The rest of us just waited for the war to end.

With our civil war wounds still half-open, watching Syria doesn’t ring the same bells. That’s because in Syria, there is a revolution. The Syrian people are destroying their statues and getting rid of their immortal heroes. They are trying to overcome the sacredness of the Baath ideology and its leaders, which have trapped them for decades. Unlike us Lebanese, they aspire to demolish all that. 

During the first days of the Syrian uprising, we saw scenes of brave, unarmed people destroying monuments of President Bashar al-Assad and his father Hafez in many towns in Syria. These gestures weren’t only about breaking the statues but also about breaking the fear that kept these people in their shells for decades.
 
For the Syrian people, this is about taking down the idols of the self-imposed heroes, not erecting them, and thereby breaking the shells of fear, not sinking further into them.

During our civil war, all I wanted was to see more state institutions, like a united army or tough statesmen who could reassure us of a minimum level of stability. Yet all we saw was our army divided and our state losing all signs of sustainability. Meanwhile, armed militias were fighting against each other on the streets, and ideologies were taking over the state.  The fighting was never about Lebanon; it was about other people’s interests: the Palestinians, Israelis, Iranians, Syrians and Saudis, among others, while the militiamen thought it was about a grand cause or a sacred hero.
 
I see the Syrian people struggling for something different: freedom and dignity, away from ideologies, grand causes or leaders. I do not see militias fighting each other. I see the Syrian army shelling towns and cities. I see Syrian security forces arresting and torturing people in state-run jails. I see the state’s media taking the side of the dictator, inciting sectarian fears every day. I see state-sponsored monsters, the Alawite shabiha, killing children and raping women, mostly in Sunni areas, for one reason: to make the revolution look like a civil war between Sunnis and Alawites, and to push the rebels to more violence. The more it looks like a sectarian war, the less credible the revolution sounds.

In a way, it is a civil war, but from one side—the regime’s. The regime is killing its own people, not helplessly watching them kill each other, as we experienced in Lebanon. The role of the state institutions in the conflict makes it hard to believe this is a civil war.

From the side of the rebels, the violence practiced against them cannot be matched because simply, it is not an equal game. They have kept a very clear line between the peaceful, unarmed protesters and the Free Syrian Army, which was initially formed for self-defense after months of being subjected to Assad’s killing machine.

However, it would be naïve to ignore mistakes. There is nothing sacred about a revolution. It is created by the people, and people make mistakes. They feel rage, the desire to avenge their loved ones. Many mistakes have been made, and some took up arms for reasons other than self-defense. And we should not ignore instances when victims become victimizers and when young men want to make heroes of themselves.

Looking at the bigger picture, though, we still see hope and beauty on the streets, even amid the destruction and death. In Beirut we never witnessed creativity growing from strife. It grew on its periphery, by people who were marginalized by the civil war, and felt, like all of us, hopeless and helpless.
 
When I look at signs created by the protesters in the Syrian town of Kefranbel and also the music, videos, animation and inspirational art that was made in the past year and a half in Syria, I am struck with hope, because this kind of expression cannot be born from the thirst for blood and hatred that we lived with for decades in Lebanon. This can only come from hope and belief in oneself and in the freedom of the individual. It can only be a sign of the Syrians’ craving to be free citizens.
 
This overwhelming hope and the urge to live beyond the death witnessed every day makes me wonder with a slight feeling of jealousy of why, despite years of civil war, we Lebanese are still caught in our sectarian hatred, unable to become citizens or trust our state. But again, I look at the Syrian people and I realize that their hope and struggle will teach us many lessons about how to bring down our own monuments and statues, and become free.
 
Hanin Ghaddar is the managing editor of  NOW Lebanon. She tweets @haningdr