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Thursday 4 December 2008

Syria shouldn’t be demonised

Ignore the hype: Syria shouldn’t be demonised

The Asad regime is not as wicked as US sources argue

Almost everywhere else, due to discrimination and in some cases outright persecution, the Christians are leaving; the mass radicalisation following the invasion of Iraq has made the Christian position even more difficult. Only in Syria has this pattern been resisted. As the Syrian Orthodox Metropolitan of Aleppo, Mar Gregorios Ibrahim, told me: ‘Christians are better off in Syria than anywhere else in the Middle East. Other than Lebanon, this is the only country where a Christian can really feel the equal of a Muslim — and Lebanon, of course, has many other problems. If Syria were not here, we would be finished. It is a place of sanctuary: for the Nestorians driven out of Iraq, the Syrian Orthodox and the Armenians driven out of Turkey, even the Palestinian Christians driven out by the Israelis.’

The confidence of the Christians in Syria is something you can’t help noticing, particularly if you arrive from Turkey. There, until very recently, minority languages like the Syrian Christians’ Aramaic were banned from broadcasting and teaching, and almost all seminaries had been closed. But cross into Syria at Qamishli, and you find yourself in a town that is 75 per cent Christian, with icons of Christ and his mother filling almost every shop and decorating every other car window — an extraordinary display after the paranoia of Turkey.

The reason for this is that the Allawite Asads have kept themselves in power by forming what is in effect a coalition of Syria’s religious minorities: in his final years, five of Hafez el-Asad’s seven closest advisers were Christians. Since then, the Christian presence in Syria has dramatically increased. The implosion of Iraq has forced four million Iraqis abroad, and many of these have found shelter in Syria: unshaven and tired-looking Iraqi refugees can be seen lounging in every park. Among these, Christians overwhelmingly predominate. Although Iraq’s 750,000 Christians only made up about 7 per cent of the pre-war population, they were a prosperous minority, something symbolised by the high profile of Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s Christian foreign minister. Highly educated and overwhelmingly middle class, the Christians were concentrated in Mosul, Basra and especially Baghdad, which had the largest population of Christians in the region.

More articles from: William Dalrymple | this section

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