By Fabio Bosco
On the January 21, I began a six-day trip through Syria at the invitation of Monif, a former Trotskyist leader of the Communist Workers Party (CWP). The CWP was severely repressed by the dictatorship, and he himself spent 16 years in prison, eight of them in the notorious Sednaya prison.
At the Lebanese border, entry was allowed with an invitation. Only people with Israeli or Iranian passports are denied entry.
As soon as you enter Damascus, you can see the signs of poverty that the entire population has been subjected to. On the streets, 5-liter gallons of gasoline are sold for $10 to fuel vehicles and heat homes, since electricity is not available 24 hours a day (in the neighborhood where I stayed, it was only available 2 hours a day).
Since the fall of the dictatorship on December 8, the price of food, with the exception of bread, has dropped because farmers can take their produce to the cities without having to pay tolls at every checkpoint along the way.
In addition, shortages have been reduced by imports from Turkey, and the Syrian lira has appreciated against the dollar, selling at 11,000 to the dollar.
The Old City
The next day I explored the beautiful Old City of Damascus, with its lively markets around the famous Umayyad Mosque.
This religious complex in itself is a tribute to religious tolerance. The remains of St. John the Baptist can be found there, as well as those of the Kurdish general Saladin, who ruled Egypt and Syria and fought to expel the Crusaders.
There is political fervor among the people. Everyone is discussing every step of the transitional government.
I had a conversation with a group of people who, upon learning that I was from Brazil, immediately asked me about Lula’s position on the genocide in Palestine. It is interesting to see that the information about Lula’s position on Palestine is what circulates outside the country, instead of the position of the Brazilian government against the actions of the armed resistance in Palestine and Yemen.
The day’s debate centered on the “fine-toothed comb” operation in Homs province, in which there were reports of abuses against the population and in which 14 military personnel of the former regime were killed, several of them high-ranking. Opinions were divided. Some thought it was the right thing to do against the former regime, and others thought it could be done in a way that respected individual rights.
I asked about the Druze, and someone from Sweida told me that recently there had been a consensus among the population, the armed groups in the city, and the sheikhs for a united and democratic Syria. Another person joked that the Druze had become Trotskyists because for them the revolution is permanent.
That same day, I attended a meeting called by the lawyers’ union in the former headquarters of Assad’s party, which the residents have transformed into the Jaramana Social Forum in the suburbs of Damascus. The debate was about defending democratic freedoms and a constitution. 150 people participated.
In the same place, I attended another meeting with 150 people about women’s rights and their extension throughout Syria. There was an atmosphere of great optimism.
On Friday, January 24, I participated in a demonstration for the disappeared politicians in Marjeh, in the center of the city, with 250 people, many of them with photos of relatives and friends who have disappeared in the prison system. It is estimated that 200,000 people have disappeared. For this event there was a caravan of at least 40 people who arrived by bus.
Then three Palestinian friends, Walid, Motassem and Mustafa, took me to visit the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp, the largest outside Palestine.
The camp has been devastated by airstrikes by the dictator Assad. We passed two destroyed hospitals and also devastated mosques, one where the first major massacre took place when the dictator Assad bombed the mosque on a Friday when there were more people in the area.
They said that the first fighting was between the forces of the dictatorship and young Palestinians inside the camp, where Salafist organizations later entered.
As we walked through the camp, one of them took a photo of graffiti on the wall and explained to me that it was a tribute to a friend, a PFLP dissident, who was kidnapped and executed by the “Palestinian branch” (one of the 18 repressive services of the dictatorship) for supporting the revolution.
They explained that this widespread bombing was not only for military reasons, but mainly because Assad, looking to the future, decided to expel the entire Palestinian population to make room for the families of militiamen who came from other countries to support him.
They also told me that at the beginning of January they organized a protest in front of the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority in Damascus against the repression in Jenin.
Then on January 15, when the ceasefire was announced in Gaza, there were demonstrations in solidarity with Palestinians all over the country. Assad never allowed demonstrations. Another important point was the release of about 700 Palestinian prisoners who were still alive in the prisons of the dictatorship, including 67 members of Hamas.
It is also important to remember that Syria has had part of its territory occupied by the State of Israel since 1967. For 50 years, Assad has not allowed anyone to throw even a stone at the Israeli soldiers occupying Syrian territory. Today, it is not possible to know whether the transitional government will stand against the Israeli occupation and in solidarity with the Palestinian people beyond diplomatic protests.
What is certain is that the Syrian people love Palestine, and in one way or another this solidarity will reach the Palestinian people.
The next day, I visited the country’s most famous prison, Sednaya, with the activists Lujane, Motaz and Fares from Deraa. The prison had a building for dissidents that held up to 15,000 prisoners until 2018, when they began to carry out between 30 and 40 executions a week in various ways: military executions by firing squad and the rest by poisoning, suffocation, or crucifiction. Several bodies were dissolved in acid and never found again.
Omeya Square
Then we went to Omeya Square, the center of the celebrations for the fall of the dictatorship.
On Sunday, I returned to Lebanon, crossing the border without any complications.
The future lies in the hands of the working class
The Syrian people are very happy with the fall of the dictatorship and have high hopes.
But there are several obstacles to achieving the goals of the revolution: freedom, bread and social justice.
The most important is the transitional government itself. This government wants to rebuild a capitalist economy integrated into world markets. To accomplish this, it has turned to the imperialist countries: the United States, European countries, Russia and China, as well as the regional powers, especially Turkey and Saudi Arabia. However, this policy will be an obstacle to guaranteeing an improvement in the quality of life of the population.
The interim government also wants to rebuild the bourgeois state, especially the armed forces that were destroyed by the revolution, and also a Bonapartist regime, that is, a regime that rules with the support of the army. In addition, they want to draft the constitution without the participation of the people and to call elections in four years.
These measures threaten the freedoms and democratic rights of the people to decide the future of the country. Another threat is the presence of foreign forces in the country. The Israeli army occupies an area in the south and is pushing for the division of Syria into three states. The United States has a large base in the south and about 2,000 troops in the northeast, where they work with the Kurdish SDF militias led by the PYD party. And finally, Turkish troops occupy strips of the border and work with a militia called the National Army, whose main objective is to prevent the Kurdish population from having any form of autonomy or self-determination.
The only way to guarantee the ideals of the revolution is for the working class, the youth, and the poor to organize themselves to fight for democratic freedoms, social rights and power.
It is very important to have a revolutionary party based on the working class with a socialist perspective.
This objective faces a difficulty, which was the betrayal by the majority of the world’s left, which did not support the Syrian revolution: they supported Assad or remained on the sidelines.
The party of the dictatorship also presented itself as socialist for a whole period, and the main communist parties in the country were part of the dictatorship’s government for 50 years and have therefore been completely discredited in the eyes of the population.
These difficulties should not prevent the working class and youth from building a party to lead their process of self-organization, their struggles, and a socialist future for Syria.
