Forty-five years. Forty-five years had to wait for a prisoner of the tyrant of Damascus to taste freedom, coming out of the prison of as-Suwayda, just as a rabbit can come out of a magician’s hat. His family did not even know where he was, he had been forgotten by almost everyone, because that is how things worked: they were making people disappear forever and denying knowing where they were. Pinochet threw them out of an aeroplane in flight, the mafiosi dissolved them in acid. The al-Asad regime made them live a lifetime in a cell, in miserable conditions, so that they would suffer until the last day of their existence. One of the most brutal regimes in modern history fell within days, after half a million fellow citizens had lost their lives in the bloody repression that followed the Arab Spring.
It happened on the 8th of December. The same day, my sister calls me to ask about the Syrian disaster, about the new jihadists. I don’t hear her, so much is the din of the carousel of cars driving around the centre of Berlin with the flags of the Syrian revolution. And when I do hear it, the answer is perhaps a little hasty: let them celebrate, we’ll do the analysis later. Possibly without activating our Orientalist standards of judgement.
For those who believe, among Catholics, December 8 is the feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary; in short, we celebrate the only creature to have been born without original sin and to have lived in purity. On the strength of this status, I suspect that Our Lady had a hand in it, because what happened has all the hallmarks of a miracle. When History had already decreed the superiority of the dictatorship, capable of keeping itself standing at any cost, one ordinary day, while diplomats were discussing the many wars they were fuelling around the world, Syrians who had not given up, massed in the province of Idlib since 2017, broke their pause and put the regular army on the run wherever they arrived. Some of them, you could see them advancing on motorbikes, as if they only had the power of determination as their decisive weapon. I immediately thought of those eighty-two of the Granma vessel, who were almost decimated on their arrival on the Cuban coast in 1956, but who in the mountains and in the jungle were able to reorganise themselves, to set off again to conquer power: the Cuban dictator Batista escaped three years later.
It is so difficult to accept that every nation has the right to self-determination, there is always a good reason to doubt the outcome of any liberation intent, to the point that when the Syrians were left alone by the whole world while the Russians massively bombed the liberated cities and the Iranians advanced with ballistic missiles and heavy artillery, it was 2015, friends of the Syrian Opposition asked me: why are you letting us die like this? Is it really true that you think democracy is not for the Arabs?
I am afraid I know the answer to that uncomfortable question. And in the last few hours I have had the inkling of proof. The same day of the liberation from the tyrant of Damascus, if Le Monde newspaper constantly keeps what is happening in Syria as the first news in its digital version, and so does The Guardian, La Repubblica already moves on to the Formula 1 competition in Abu Dhabi in the afternoon. From the first hours of this dizzying acceleration of history in Syria, much of the European press was talking about jihadists, wondering if we were on the eve of the birth of a new Caliphate. So I called the League of Free Syrian Lawyers in Gaziantep, who instead confirmed that the Opposition had a unified military command, to which Islamic-inspired and secular groups had joined, and from which a couple of small groups still linked to al-Qaeda had remained outside. Yet, in our part of the world, people continued to lament and miss, in public or in private, the tyrant, who with whip and blood guaranteed something that some call ‘stability’, but which for the majority of Syrians was a devastating curse.
Father Paolo Dall’Oglio, the Jesuit priest who devoted his entire life to the people of Syria and to inter-religious dialogue, was right when he said that freedom is priceless, and that only when Syrians regain their unity will they be able to take their destiny back into their own hands.
What more can I say? Let the Syrians celebrate, on December 8 they experienced what our ancestors experienced at the very end of Fascism. What is to come will have to be built, or rather rebuilt, and the Syrians know that they will have to do it by joining forces, and hoping that foreign powers will not act to sow division or divide and occupy slices of the country. They also know that they might once again find themselves alone, that even democratic countries might turn a blind eye, more concerned with closing their borders than expanding the horizon of democracy.
But that is precisely why something miraculous happened, upsetting all the cards, in the West as well as in the East. That’s life, boys.
I still can’t imagine how that gentleman who spent forty-five years in absolute isolation might feel, now that he has come out into the open air, having thrown away a whole life. At least for him, let the Syrians enjoy this event of redemption, too good to be true, too true to be impossible.