Assad provided his people with "bananas".
Before we were about to depart, the driver asked the estaz (a university professor or teacher) if he wanted to buy some bananas (while he was in Lebanon). The estaz declined. Bananas weren’t in shortage in Syria any longer, he said.
Then he added, “God protect the president. (At the time, Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father.) He knows what the Syrian people want. He saw that the Syrian people wanted bananas, so he provided them with bananas.”
As it happened, that was the most profound political thought the estaz would make for the rest of the trip. To thank the ruler for his magnanimity in allowing the Syrian people access to bananas.
The words had come out un-selfconsciously, like the recitation of a familiar prayer. But for a learned man in particular, they must have been accompanied by a sense of shame at having to engage in this daily ritual of submission.
Those who don’t understand why Syria revolted two years ago are entirely oblivious to this deep sense of shame that its people lived with for decades. It wasn’t the deprivation or lack of consumer goods. Rather, it was the incessant demand to submit to an all-knowing authority, one that cannot be questioned.
Damascus in the 1960s was a thriving cultural center that had hundreds of media publications. By the ‘80s, just a handful was left. The two party-sponsored newspapers were completely interchangeable with little variation from day to day.
But they carried their shame with them. Everybody knew about the thousands in the regime’s prisons, those who refused to submit. Poets, writers, activists and workers who spent decades facing incarceration and torture but refused to sign a piece of paper denouncing their political aspirations.
Those on the outside felt that shame but thought they were helpless to do anything about it. They publicly sang the praises of the regime and the heroic role it played.
Organised attempts at staging demonstrations never materialized. When the eruption came, it was brought about by the regime’s heavy-handedness and the instinctive reaction to it. The time for living with the shame was over.
Syria’s was the least well-articulated or organised of all the Arab uprisings. It was raw and abrasive.
The people who had the responsibility to lead the uprising failed it. Perhaps this was unavoidable, the accumulation of anger and shame got in the way of cold thinking and the decades of oppression meant that Syrians were starting from scratch.
What we’re seeing today isn’t what Syrians wanted. The situation got out of control, but the regime bears the main responsibility for that. What is clear is that there will be no return to the old ways. After all the sacrifices, the people of Syria won’t go back to living with their shame.
http://beta.syriadeeply.org/op-eds/bananas/#.Uugpmnw8KSM