The 40th Anniversary of the Hama Massacre: Sustained Collusion

“Atrocities, Massacres, and War Crimes” is a book edited by Alexander Mikhabridze, lawyer and professor of history at the University of Louisiana; It was published in 2013 as part of ABC-CLIO publications. The work is closer to a dictionary, in alphabetical order of facts starting from the year 689 BC, with the massacre of Babylon ordered by Sennacherib, King of Assyria, which resulted in the killing of the entire population of the city, and the diversion of the rivers to completely submerge it; And it ends in 2012, with the Houla massacre committed by the Syrian regime forces in the town of Taldo and its surroundings, and the number of its victims reached 108, including 34 women and 49 children (according to the United Nations, whose numbers the book was based on). The date of the book's publication explains the absence of subsequent massacres committed by Bashar al-Assad's army and the militias supporting it in other locations and dates in Syria, especially those that took the form of chemical attacks.

But the al-Assad family, the father Hafez, like his brother Rifaat and his heir Bashar, his second son Maher, and the officers or leaders of militias and gangs from among the cousins ​​and the guardians, have a share in a second essential article included in the book; It is the massacre in the city of Hama, February 2, 1982, the 40th anniversary of its perpetration these days. It is true that this second article also refers to atrocities that took place in Palmyra prison, but they are quite brief references that do not exceed a handful of words, within an article of 414 words. Mikhabridze could have stopped, even within the same brevity, on a series of atrocities that preceded or followed the Hama massacre, and were committed by the regime with the same brutal methods, which amounted to war crimes par excellence. This was the case for the massacres of Jisr al-Shughur (200 victims) in the heart of the city; Souk al-Ahad (190 victims), Hanano neighborhood (83 victims), al-Mashareqa neighborhood (86 victims) and Bustan al-Qasr (35 victims) in the city of Aleppo... Their absence from the book is nothing but an explicit and blatant manifestation of the shortcomings of world public opinion, and the international media behind it, to pay attention to what Syria was witnessing atrocities, atrocities and war crimes.

In other Western publications, with the almost exclusive exception of the works of a number of Israeli historians who dealt with the file for reasons related to the interests of the occupying state, its concerns and bets on the Assad family (Moshe Maoz and Avner Yaniv, in “Syria Under Assad” 1986, for example); It was quite rare for the Western reader to find reasonable, minimal material, and not at all detailed or comprehensive, about those massacres. British Patrick Seale, author of a biography of Assad a deeply sympathetic father who remained a friend of the regime until the last day of his life, called the Battle of Hama “the final chapter in a long open struggle” behind “the ancient, multi-level animosities between Islam and Baathism, Sunnis and Alawites, countryside and city.” This interpretation was not only short, shallow and stereotypical, but it is all of these features, with the intentional tendency to deceptive flatness and distortionary simplification added to it.

Seale knew that the organized massacres in the city took place without an apparent or direct cause, such as the outbreak of fighting with Islamic militants, for example; Its aim was to inflict punishment on the city and its people, and to establish what another Western observer, the American Thomas Fridman, would dare to call “the lesson of Hama.” The city witnessed massacres in the “Hama Al Jadeeda” neighborhood, where the people gathered in the municipal stadium, looted their homes, then returned to them and killed nearly 1,500, with machine gun fire; In the “Souk al-Shajara” neighborhood, which resulted in the killing of 160 citizens, either by being shot or buried under the rubble, and cramming 70 others into a grain store and setting it on fire; In the “Al-Bayyadh neighborhood” where 50 were killed and their bodies were dumped in a pit designated for the waste of a tile factory; the “Al Taweel Market” when 30 young men were executed on the roof of the market, and 35 others were crammed into a home appliances store; the “Al-Dabbagha neighborhood” when 35 citizens were crammed into a sawmill, and it was set on fire; the “Al-Bashoura neighborhood,” which witnessed the execution of entire families, from the Al-Kilani family, Al-Dabbagh, Al-Amin, Musa, Al-Qasiya, Al-Azem, Al-Sammam, and Turkmani; Similar terrible details were repeated in the massacres in the Al-Asida, Al-Sharqiah, Al-Baroudia neighborhoods, the Serihin cemetery and the National Hospital…

The British weekly The Economist, a well-established forum for market economy and businessmen, wrote (but nearly two months after the massacre!) that the “real story” of what happened in the city of Hama “has not yet been known, and perhaps it will never be known.” Acknowledging that the city became “ruins” after being bombarded with tanks, artillery and aviation for three weeks, and that “a large part of the old city was completely demolished and leveled with bulldozers”; The magazine completely avoided using the term “massacre” and preferred, on the other hand, to adopt a description of the conflict that is the most ambiguous and the most delicate at the same time: rebels, against government forces! The "Economist" was not better off than the position of the British government, specifically Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister at the time, despite the apparent estrangement that dominated British-Syrian relations at that era.

Fairness requires, especially on this 40th anniversary, to single out the French newspaper "Liberation", which deviated from the rule, with the virtue of the redemptive spirit of one of its chief correspondents, Sorge Chalandon, who risked his life and infiltrated Hama under the false name (Charles Baupet) and a false description (researcher). in antiquities); He is the one who will be the first foreign journalist to enter the martyred city, and to record with his own eyes a lot (not at all, all) of the killing, sabotage and destruction that befell its people and its buildings, ancient before modern. “The dead were first counted by the thousands, then by the hundreds, and then by the thousands during just the first hours. I was accompanied by a notable of the city, and we went from house to house, and we saw the bereaved families, the bodies being dragged by the feet, or carried on the shoulders” Chalandon wrote; Intent to stifle the spirit of the novelist, who is skilled in the art of narration and the winner of prestigious awards, in order to triumph over the duty of actual reporting on the horrors that Hama witnessed.

As long as one of the chief makers of the massacre, Rifaat al-Assad, has returned to Syria in full view, not without the undeniable complicity of the security services in France, the home of the Jacobins, the French Revolution and the Commune; The most basic rights of the victims of the Hama massacre are to recall that fascist prelude that the brother, the leader of the Defense Brigades, assumed during the party's seventh regional conference (December 1979). On that day, the brotherly Assad announced, as a member of the party’s regional leadership, that whoever does not stand with the revolution stands firmly in the ranks of its enemies, and called for a “national cleansing” campaign and demanded that the opponents be sent to work and education camps in the desert. The brotherly Assad was anticipating the popular protest movement that crystallized within the framework of the opposition parties not affiliated with the front of power, and in the professional syndicates of doctors, dentists, engineers, pharmacists and lawyers, who announced a one-day strike (3/31/1980) to protest against the absence of freedoms, the ferocity of the repression machine and the violation of rights Citizen.

It is more likely that the conclusion of the interpretation of sustainable complicity, on this 40th anniversary, will not be the rush of the regimes in the Emirates, Bahrain, Algeria, Egypt and Oman to rehabilitate the Syrian regime; Whoever humiliates with the occupying state, or engages in militarism, tyranny and corruption, or lies about owning the stick of “moderation” from the middle of it... How can it not be easy for him to humiliate him with the Assad House, or with what remains of its crumbling walls!