SUWAYDA, Syria (North Press) – Samer al-Bahri, the father of a third-grader from Suwayda city, was shocked by a letter from his son’s school requesting that he pay a fee of 650 Syrian pounds.
Al-Bahri understood that it was a fee of his son’s placement for the Ba’ath Vanguard Organization, which it would purchase the supplies of the “vanguard comrade” from a book in which his full name is written with activities written in his record, according to the letter.
The Ba’ath Vanguards, known as Tela’i in Arabic, is a government-mandated youth organization associated with the Ba’ath Party. The Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party, or Ba’ath Party, was founded in Syria in the 1940s and came to power in the 1960s. The party is the ruling party in Syria, and mixes Arab nationalist and pan-Arab ideology. Though it exists in other Arab nations, its greatest base of power is in Syria, with over 2/3 of the People’s Council of Syria being Ba’ath party members.
Despite all the hardships and expenses incurred by the families of the students to secure expensive school supplies, as well as arrange their transportation costs, which have increased with the fuel crisis, school officials in Suwayda insist on the need to enroll schoolchildren in this program.
Distorted ideas
“With the arrival of the winter, it would have been better for the organizers of the Ba’ath Vanguard to spend money on the purchase of winter clothes for students of low-income families, and not to burden the people with additional financial burdens for things that no longer receive attention and welcome from anyone,” al-Bahri said.
“I don’t want my son to grow up on values that have brainwashed Syrian children in order to distort their ideas and create generations that are subordinate to authoritarian regimes,” he added.
The father will not send the money requested of him, not only because he doesn’t have it, but because he does not believe in the philosophy of the Ba’ath organizations, which he thinks have ruined the country.
Obligatory membership
Membership in the Baath Vanguard Organization is mandatory for Syrian children from the first to the sixth grade, during which time pupils learn slogans taught to them by school principals and supervisors during the morning meeting in the school courtyard.
A teacher at a primary school in Suwayda, who refused to share his name for fear of being dismissed from the job, said that after five decades, the organization is still cultivating within children “the seeds of sacrifice for the sake of the tyrannical leader.”
Imported experience
“Former President Hafez Assad brought the experience and founded the Ba’ath Vanguard from North Korea after a visit to Korea in 1974,” Rabie Rustem, a children’s script writer, told North Press.
“The racist slogans in the ideology of Ba’athist organizations in Syria have created generations saturated with fictitious affiliations that have made them morally and nationally distanced from the rest of Syria’s communities and peoples,” he added.
According to Rustem, childhood needs imagination, creativity, and freedom, not a scrap of paper and forms imposed on students to increase the number of associate members.