Victoria Yan & Michael Jareb

BEIRUT: With fresh Syria peace talks scheduled for the end of January, two Lebanon-based projects consider how the war’s stories will be chronicled. Ibrahim Mohammad, a Syrian refugee who fled his hometown of Homs at the end of 2012, now lives in the Metn town of Fanar.

He told The Daily Star how he has compiled a written testimony of the experiences of his fellow countrymen and women in order to provide an inclusive narrative of the nearly 6-year-old war.

“I want people who read the book in 50 years to realize the extent of the suffering the Syrian people underwent and how many people died. That people died for their country, for freedom, for speaking a single word,” Mohammad told The Daily Star.

“When we get our freedom, and I believe we will ... because every person that stood up and demanded freedom was victorious in the end, because the people are the ultimate owner of their land, it will be important to remember the price the Syrian people paid for their freedom,” he said.

The 34-year-old is one of the 4.8 million registered refugees of the Syrian conflict and one of the 1 million registered Syrian refugees in Lebanon. While working with several NGOs to earn a living, he has compiled the book entitled “Stories of Syrian Refugees.”

“A lot of refugees from all across Lebanon contacted me, willing to share stories. I would visit them, wherever they were, in order to record their stories,” Mohammad told The Daily Star. “The refugees are from different social classes and different sects; I don’t discriminate. I don’t believe in sectarianism, I consider the Syrian people to be one.”

Mohammad, who has already collected more than 330 stories, represents an individual effort in a collective struggle over the record of history.

The bloody and relentless war, waged between a multitude of groups in Syria, has carved an array of narratives and different experiences. For Lokman Slim, a Lebanese political activist and co-founder of the nonprofit cultural organization Umam Documentation and Research, worries that with the possibility of a transition to a political settlement, there is a risk the narrative of a war will be shaped by propaganda and selective censorship.

“Documenting, and documenting what others are documenting, is a way of dismantling propaganda,” Slim told The Daily Star.

“The very idea of documentation is something that Syrians discovered within the revolution and I think that is something that cannot be undone, [regardless of] whatever political negotiation may happen,” he added.

Since he launched Umam in 2005 to create an accessible and open archive of Lebanon’s history, Slim has devoted much of his life to the preservation of history.

Although the organization was originally created to try and record Lebanon’s violent conflicts, the current war in next-door Syria prompted Slim to expand his work beyond Lebanon’s borders.

Since the onset of the conflict, Umam has started an online database titled “Memories at Work, Syria” to archive events and stories from the country. The result has been a mirror of the original Lebanese project.

“Working on the past when it comes to a group of people, a community, [is essential] in helping this community make its way through its present, in defining its views, and in taking a position,” Slim said.

However, Makram Rabah, a historian who teaches at the American University at Beirut and the Lebanese American University, questions the effectiveness of individual and external efforts to create a collective memory.

“These acts of recording history are important, but really it has to be a fostering organization or institution [that does this]. It cannot be an individual effort as it’s very hard to [instill] collective memory. You need to always be enforcing it through repetition, education, institution,” he said.

Rabah, who has studied how the Maronite monastic order’s educational doctrine shaped the sect’s collective memory of the 1984 Christian-Druze conflict, also employed the Palestinian Liberation Organization as an example of how an overarching institution is successful at implementing a communal collective memory.

“So this is still lacking amongst the Syrian refugees. No one has stepped up,” he said. “We don’t have Syrian parties abroad, we have NGOs, but still these are all dependent on funding that will eventually run out.”

Despite losing so much when he fled his home, Mohammad remains undeterred in his efforts to chronicle the conflict.

He calls his project a “service to [his] country and people.”

“The war in Syria has become history; it is and will be part of the history of the land of Syria. No one should forget this history and what it entails. ... I can’t interview the dead but I can interview the living, the survivors,” he said.