“Arab Spring” drives Syrian Christians into exile
From SpiegelOnline International:
“There were always Christians in Qusayr—there were around 10,000 before the war,” says Leila, the matriarch of the Khouri clan. Currently, 11 members of the clan are sharing two rooms. They include the grandmother, grandfather, three daughters, one husband and five children. “Despite the fact that many of our husbands had jobs in the civil service, we still got along well with the rebels during the first months of the insurgency.” The rebels left the Christians alone. The Christians, meanwhile, were keen to preserve their neutrality in the escalating power struggle. But the situation began deteriorating last summer, Leila says, murmuring a bit more before going silent.
“We’re too frightened to talk,” her daughter Rim explained, before mustering the courage to continue. “Last summer Salafists came to Qusayr, foreigners. They stirred the local rebels against us,” she says. Soon, an outright campaign against the Christians in Qusayr took shape. “They sermonized on Fridays in the mosques that it was a sacred duty to drive us away,” she says. “We were constantly accused of working for the regime. And Christians had to pay bribes to the jihadists repeatedly in order to avoid getting killed.”
Grandmother Leila made the sign of the cross. “Anyone who believes in this cross suffers,” she says…
...And while there may be a number of open questions about the Assad regime, like the fact that “there is certainly no freedom of expression in Syria,” he says the rebels aren’t one bit better. There may have been respectable aims at the start of the uprising, but the insurgency has since been hijacked by Islamists, the mayor argues. “And we know the types of Muslims who have emerged at the head of the rebellion: The ones who would like to lead the people back into the Stone Age.”
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“Arab Spring” is a misnomer when it is also commonly used to describe events in Libya and Egypt. The situation is very different in all three countries.
Part of the problem is that Western nations have very little influence with the rebel movement in Syria. By contrast, in Libya our overt practical support for the rebels meant that they made an effort not to offend perceived western interests.
In Egypt the west did not offer any significant support to the rebels, but Egypt is heavily dependent on the West anyway, for trade and tourism. There have been some sporadic outbreaks of persecution of Christians, but it has been very moderate by Middle Eastern standards.
But Syria is different. Russia and China have effectively drawn a line in the sand on western involvement there, aand the west is most unlikely to aggravate them. An unfortunate side effect of this is that it leaves the field open for islamist extremists to become involved in the rebel movement. All we can do is pray for the Christians there.
[1] Posted by MichaelA on 7-25-2012 at 06:10 PM · [top]
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