Damascene Vision
It is easy to get a sense of a precarious regime in imminent danger of collapse…the final few days…the last gasp…tipping point…and all the rest of the rhetoric. Easy that is, unless you happen to be in Damascus.
Consider if you will our immediate experience. You stand, in the blazing July heat, taking pictures of the state TV studio, President Assad’s propaganda outfit, in the central district of the city. Ahead of you, this seventies glass-fronted cube. To the left, the city opera house. Next to it – immaculate and patrolled by soldier-guards in ceremonial uniform – the Defence Ministry. So we won’t be turning our camera to that.
Behind us, the National Library and another vast flag in the distance, perhaps 30-feet long and fifteen wide, unfurls almost in slow motion in the desert wind, to declare the site of the city’s main park.
Traffic cops, immaculate and in designer shades, politely ask to see our Ministry of Information permission. Presently, sensibly in the shade of some trees, a not-so-very-secret mukhabarrat secret policeman will radio our information to his desk from our translator.
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‘Hot spots’
We will not, the soldiers at the roadblock calmly tell us, be filming high-shots of Damascus from the hills to the west of town, as we had planned to do. This is because our permit does not specify that we can take video from said hill, according to the soldier commanding. And that is that.
Nor will we be visiting any of the ‘hot spots’ as they delicately call them. These are places like al-Midan to the east of al-Qubair to the north where there was heavy fighting until recently.
Military checkpoints have the entire city parcelled up into easily-patrolled segments. The ‘hot-spots’ are more or less surrounded by permanent-looking checkpoints where you get soldiers in full body-armour and machine-gun sandbagged nests. Inevitably there will be a well dug-in tank nearby. Lurking….waiting…
The House of Assad
Above, at any time of day or night, the distinctive chugging of rotor-blades as a large Russian helicopter gunship makes lazy circles over the Damascene ‘hot-spots’.
So this is not, on the face of it, a city where the regime is in imminent danger of collapse. The systems of a police state are well in order and I speak of this as a consumer, client, victim in a mild way – for my only pain is frustration unlike the hundreds – thousands – who endure horror in the House of Assad’s prisons, detention centres and police stations.
The defiance of the rebel fighters, burning with understandable hatred of the regime, is plastered all over YouTube and beyond. Of the equal passion from the Syrian Army you get to see little. We would love to film their side and their story. It is not possible.
Laughter all round
From behind a tank a soldier approaches our car. He is very clearly in command in this eastern district of the city:
“Tell me,” he asks, “if the British government faced an uprising like this, would it fight as strongly as we are doing?”
His men have surrounded the car by now. Not threatening. But awaiting an answer to a question where there can only be one answer:
“Of course not,” I say on cue. “The Syrian army is very strong,” and with that, a somewhat half-hearted clenched fist from me. It works. Handshakes, backslapping and laughter all round. When suddenly the soldier – ‘General Faisal’ he calls himself – has another statement to make:
“Please,” he leans into the open car window, “give my regards to George Galloway.”
None of it caught on camera of course.
Parallels with East Germany
The 21st century concept of media-co-option, so honed by NATO during its long Afghan war, is entirely lost here. In Syria you may as well be in East Germany in 1974 on this issue. Filming with their army – putting its story out to the world, simply causes mild irritation at the utter naivety of it.
Why on earth should we need to explain ourselves to the world?
Wearily, the helpful lady at the ministry responsible for foreign journalists says she will ask. I could be wrong and hope I am, but am not confident of putting their story together anytime soon.
However she says suddenly, from nowhere:
“Do you want to go to the military hospital or film a soldier’s funeral?”
“Yes of course – when?”
“When would you like?”
I am at a loss. Is she really saying that you can pick any day you want because there will be a dead soldier’s funeral for sure? Is the attrition in the very capital really now that serious?
“Tomorrow?”
“Of course – I will write a letter of permission.”
Damascene Vision
This is how Damascene Vision works these days. Not always what you can see, touch, hear or much less film. But what slips out. The banality of death here. The notion that of course every day means a funeral around 8 am. Why not?
Yes the machine is in place. The police state is very much policed. But bit by bit it is being somehow hollowed out, degraded, eroded. The process is more evolutionary than revolutionary. So it is that Thursday’s violence in the capital seems more than contained. For the time being.
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