Opinion The new Hama Rules
Three decades ago,I saw an Assad flatten the city of Hama. But its residents are not scared any more
What a difference three decades make. In April 1982,I was assigned to be the Beirut correspondent for the Times. Before I arrived,word had filtered back to Lebanon about an uprising in February in the Syrian town of Hama famed for its water wheels on the Orontes River. Rumour had it that then President Hafez al-Assad had put down a Sunni Muslim rebellion in Hama by shelling the neighbourhoods where the revolt was centred,then dynamiting buildings,some with residents still inside,and then steamrolling them flat,like a parking lot. It was hard to believe and even harder to check. No one had cellphones back then,and foreign media were not allowed access.
That May I got a visa to Syria,just as Hama had been reopened. It was said that the Syrian regime was encouraging Syrians to drive through the town,see the crushed neighbourhoods and contemplate the silence. So I just hired a cab in Damascus and went. It was,and remains,one of the most chilling things Ive ever seen: whole neighbourhoods,the size of four football fields,looked as though a tornado had swept back and forth over them for a week.
This was an act of unprecedented brutality,a settling of scores between Assads minority Alawite regime and Syrias Sunni Muslim majority that had dared to challenge him. If you kicked the ground in some areas that had been flattened,a tattered book,a shred of clothing,the tip of a steel reinforcing rod were easily exposed. It was a killing field. According to Amnesty International,up to 20,000 people were buried there. I contemplated the silence and gave it a name: Hama Rules.
Hama Rules were the prevailing leadership rules in the Arab world. They said: rule by fear strike fear in the heart of your people by letting them know that you play by no rules at all,so they wont ever,ever,ever think about rebelling against you.
It worked for a long time in Syria,Iraq,Tunisia,and so on until it didnt. Today,Syrias president,Bashar al-Assad,Hafezs son,is now repeating his fathers mass murdering tactics to quash the new Syrian uprising,again centred in Hama. But,this time,the Syrian people are answering with their own Hama Rules,which are quite remarkable. They say: We know that every time we walk out the door to protest,you will gun us down,without mercy. But we are not afraid anymore,and we will not be powerless anymore. Now,you leaders will be afraid of us. Those are our Hama Rules.
This is the struggle today across the Arab world the new Hama Rules versus the old Hama Rules I will make you afraid versus We are not afraid anymore.
Good for the people. It is hard to exaggerate how much these Arab regimes wasted the lives of an entire Arab generation,with their foolish wars with Israel and each other and their fraudulent ideologies that masked their naked power grabs and predatory behaviour. Nothing good was possible with these leaders. The big question today,though,is this: is progress possible without them?
That is,once these regimes are shucked off,can the different Arab communities come together as citizens and write social contracts for how to live together without iron-fisted dictators? Yemen,Libya,Syria,Egypt and Tunisia are all going to attempt such transitions at once. It is unprecedented in this region,and we can already see just how hard this will be. I still believe that the democratic impulse by all these Arab peoples to throw off their dictators is heroic and hugely positive. They will oust all of them in the end. But the new dawn will take time to appear. Thomas L. Friedman
Share
