Farhad Hami
It may be understood, at the first glance that the issue of peace in Syria is a kind of intellectual luxury or Gandhian monologue which conceals a nostalgia for calm and stability, because speaking about peace collides with the logic of power and the ferocity of the game of the immediate international rivalry. Thus, the wheel of social and political memory is overloaded with bloodshed and popular disappointment, the diaspora seas and camps, where the painful past, the turbulent present and the unknown future weight the memory of each individual.
Amid this popular, psychological despair and the alarming danger, eight years after Syria’s enormous crisis, there are some historical and present incentives for us to open the windows for possible solutions. The words of the German poet Hölderlin, who confronted pessimism, “saving existence wherever there is danger”, turn us in fact to shed light on those appeals from north and east of Syria which call for peace, coexistence and equality, and which haven’t yet been heard because of the prejudging rooted in prevailing authoritarian discourses.
It is clear that the structure of the ongoing war in Syria is almost uprooting the society, but the contradiction of the peace scenarios presented in dealing with the Syrian war is still trapped in the styles of international law and classical Western ideologies on war and peace. While those styles were maximizing the legitimacy of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan State, which gives absolute sovereignty to the state apparatus in imposing the mechanism of war and peace in order to overcome the war of all against all at the domestic level, and to establish measures and standards with the neighboring countries. If peace is the absence of war, the sovereignty of the state, which monopolizes violence and its items, is the one, which has the right to declare peace and war. It is well known, this legal legitimacy by leading the state’s monopoly on the decision of war and peace has brought modern history into bloody global and local wars, and the Syrian sovereignty is certainly no exception!
The targeted of these theses is the societal diversity outside the state, and what is swollen is the state apparatus and those who dominate it or who wants to dominate it from the opposition team. Addressing the history of war and peace in the Western civilization in his book: ‘Society Must Be Defended’, Michel Foucault will argue that, the legalization of the concept of sovereignty, the national security, and the monopoly of violence in peace and war by the state, which will bear the brunt of the world’s fierce wars against societies.
What was mentioned above was necessary to understand the peace mechanism in north and east of Syria, that takes real Syrian diversity as the basis for shaping peace in the face of war, especially this natural Syrian diversity was, and is still threatened to be lost in the country, because of the violence emanating by the sovereignty of the unilateral nation-state on one hand, or the violence which wears the fundamentalist monotheistic religious garment which is intertwined and interferes with state violence to stifle the Syrian diversity on the other hand.
Consequently, the hypothesis of peace in north and east of Syria will restructure a peaceful-political project that embraces this diversity from extinction, annihilation and fragmentation.
Narratives of the alleged peace
The Syrian government which moves according to the logic of military superiority supported by Iran and Russia, invests in the formula of (reconciliation and security) against society in order to generalize the state’s influence and to restore the formula of the unilateral national sovereignty against Syrian diversity, invoking the need of the people for security and economic guarantees following the catastrophic repercussions imposed by extremist groups on the people throughout the Syrian conflict.
There is an exposed trick by the security solution proposed by the Syrian government; where this (peaceful) security solution doesn’t only aim at eliminating the extremist groups that believe in violence throughout the country, but also at restoring a society reeling under the rubble to its security fold, and then to circumvent the political solutions that protect and preserve the dignity and the political will of society.
These solutions may seek to restore security and sovereignty in some areas, but at the same time, they plant time bombs inside the society; and the detonation of those bombs is possible at any moment as soon as favorable conditions exist.
In light of this, we can say that this solution is to maintain the war in a different and hidden way, and it isn’t related to the hypothesis of the absence of war and the imposition of honorable peace, which preserves the identity of the society and its humanitarian and political dignity.
While the armed and extremist opposition groups operating under Turkey’s command in northern Syria try to promote a theory of peace, security and stability along the lines of the Syrian government’s vision, but they have invoked all the arsenal of military superiority which is attributed by Turkey in order to get rid of community institutions, social identity, and the political and moral will.
This so-called peace, which has passed through Syria’s northwestern region of Afrin, carries the schemes of engineering the society by the power of unlimited violence, and is based on the impact of further extermination and organized smelting against the existence of the whole society.
According to this approach, we are once again facing the continuation of the war with all of its crudeness of oppression, domination and death.
The tragedy of the Syrian diversity lies in the fact that the two parties who don’t believe in an internal peaceful solution, have representatives and spokespersons at international peace conferences, such as Sochi and Geneva.
Both sides are engaged in a bloody struggle against the will of Syria’s diverse society, taking on the “Russian-Western” international guarantor in support of improving their position in hegemony, influence and domination, and believing in a vertical, violent solution imposed from above at the expense of the Syrian diversity, while both are fully prepared to transform the international guarantor which is supposed to be neutral, in order to deepen the international wars on Syria, both of which have been fighting for years the daily intrigues and military breaches in order to sustain the domination of the local community.
There is a written tragedy in the name of a proposed and false international peace, which is drawn by parties who don’t believe in silencing the sounds of the arms and the war machine. Idlib model is the last chapter of this tragedy that is equally ironic.
But what is the formula which was put forward by these parties, which calls day and night for the conclusion of a ceasefire and the launch of the political process, and what the international envoy seeks while trying to bridge the views in the process of talks with these parties? Once again, Syrian diversity and the cultural identities are the major victims, where the government’s bloc believes in the sovereignty of unilateralism, while the Islamist opposition side seeks to restore the identity of the state – the individual according to the closed ideological style against the structure of the Syrian society, while liberal blocs which aren’t related to the reality of societal realm rush to achieve an imaginary triumph by promoting the concept of citizenship and rights before the state apparatus without including the wide and varied societal scope on its agenda.
Consequently, there is a coup against societal diversity, which is as deeply rooted in its historical image as the continuation of war in a different way against the society.
Peace in north and east of Syria
The project of north and east of Syria will center on these overlapping and identical formulas at the end, drawing on the vision of the American-German philosopher Hannah Arendt, about the necessity of enabling the concept of “forgiveness and pledge” as a preliminary formula in order to take society out of the scourge of internal wars. At the same time, protecting society and safeguarding its pluralistic political will in accordance with cultural, religious and national traditions that promote peace and intersect with contemporary cosmic concepts calling for the protection of society and its differences in the face of a managed war machine. This argument calls for the consolidation of dignified peace while retaining its right in self-defense against the ongoing war both inside and outside Syria, because abandoning this right means eliminating the political and institutional identity of north and east of Syria, which has fought extremism and tyranny in order to make public space (public institutions and political councils) for people to express their diverse cultural identities, which was oppressed by extremism and tyranny of the central state in earlier periods.
The recent concluded truce formula with the Turkish side by the U.S. mediation is a vital step that emphasizes this determination and vital cohesion in the right of self-defense.
North and east of Syria’s thesis in the concept of forgiveness is an urgent approach to address people’s memory. Without a fair condemnation of past criminality by domestic legal institutions, the past cannot be turned around by running behind the idea of naive oblivion, tolerance and pardon. Those who have committed crime against individuals and society need to be brought to justice and exposed to public opinion and community conscience, such as holding Islamic State (ISIS) members and other terrorist groups involved in practicing crimes against Syrian diversity and its members.
In certain cases, forgiveness and pardon are carried out, in accordance with local consensus, with a view to launching a new phase of the mechanism of peaceful coexistence after convictions of crimes in the courts of law have been found and revealed to the public. That is, the crime in the process of forgiveness isn’t punished in the manner of imposing death, but in a way that does justice to the memory of society and relieves the collective and individual conscience.
The formula of the pledge, according to the north and east of Syria project, constitutes a moral and legal social commitment to overcome the painful past by uniting the will of Syrian societal diversity to build the future. The promise, in this case, means the need to establish a new social contract that goes beyond the concept of sovereignty in a unilateral nation-state. In this way, it will serve as a constitutional formula that protects the legal, political and democratic right of the individual and society, the pledge, as Hannah Arendt says: “Islands of safety within the ocean in the uncertain future, the relationship of forgiveness and pledge is a common living and public space based on respect for the identity and differences of society and its legal, moral and cultural institutions”.
In fact, the formula of north and east of Syria criticizes the concept of traditional sovereignty, which has become a monopolistic means by the ruling junta and the opposition to confiscate the freedom of Syrian diversity under the banner of the need and security. Without linking that sovereignty to a new legal and constitutional formula in Syria, the dilemma of the existing state of war that strikes the entire structure of society cannot be resolved, the latter passes through making public space available for the people in achieving the statements of forgiveness and the new phase, establishing an open and flexible sovereign identity containing cultural, religious and national traditions, and safeguarding the identity of society within the framework of Democratic Autonomous Administration as a vital pillar to protect the Syrian diversity against violations of the totalitarian and Islamic fundamentalist state. Only then the page of the painful past can be folded through a political solution, in order to create a space of coexistence, according to the late French philosopher Paul Ricœur.