3 - Ethno-religious Subjectivities: Dynamics of Communitarianism and Sectarianisation

Summary

When discussing Syria's general situation in Aleppo City by late 2011, interlocutors often used the term fawda to refer to surrounding events in the country, a term that has wide-ranging connotations, extending from a small kerfuffle to mayhem and chaos. With almost a full year of unrest, fawda was no longer an abstract term that expressed uncertainty. Rather, it reflected a reality that people were living with on a day-to-day basis. Between 2011 and 2013, I spent an extended period of time accompanying Hovsep in Aleppo and later in Beirut after he left Syria. At the time, he was a student at the University of Aleppo. ‘The revolutionaries called it the University of Revolution’, with continuous anti-government rallies that reached ‘at least 10,000 students when the UN observers were in the country’. Based on his experiences, fawda was related to both the Assad rule's willingness to use violence to suppress demonstrations, and of protest dynamics by anti-government student activists.

There used to be multiple demonstrations in different faculties to divide the security forces. The ones I saw, let's say at 1.30pm, one person yells ‘allahu akbar’ and people quickly rally around him. It only lasts five to ten minutes before the security forces get there and start beating people up and detaining them. If the demonstration grows too big, security forces start throwing tear gas and firing rounds of live ammunition in the air or even at the demonstrators. It happened once that [I saw] they started firing at people. The demonstration ends, a few students are detained. The following day, you’d get a bigger demonstration demanding the release of the detained students. The students who were only watching after seeing their friends beaten and detained end up joining the next protest.

The pattern of these events was predictable: protesters rallied, security forces attacked and detained a number of students, then another anti-government rally took place, and then government supporters responded to the new protests because ‘government supporters knew that these demonstrations were going to take place … they were always ready to mobilise too’.