Just over a year ago, when the ‘Arab Spring’ uprising began in Egypt, Barack Obama made a speech in which he said, “We need not be defined by our differences but by the commonality that we share…… Egyptians have inspired us and they've done so by putting the lie to the idea that justice is best gained through violence …… In Egypt, it was the moral force of non-violence, not terrorism, not mindless killing, that bent the arc of history toward justice once more.”
Everything indicated major change and radical restructuring in the region, through the voice of the people rather than through violence. That was before the resistance from Gadaffi and the ensuing battles within Libya between pro and anti Gadaffi forces.
The situation in Syria is a quantum leap down the road of violence towards genocide! The desperate situation within that country continues, seemingly little changed: indiscriminate shelling of civilians; bloodshed without cause; suffering and trauma. Sitting here in the UK, it is just impossible for me to conceive what people must be experiencing, what they must be feeling and thinking. The untold sorrow is one thing; the fact that there is no apparent end in sight amplifies the magnitude of this suffering.
I don’t know how people cope! The only thing I can imagine is that a part of them closes down; the reality of their lives takes on an element of unreality, where boundaries to the individual’s thoughts are tightly drawn in. The nearest I can come to imagining how this might be comes from speaking to lifers, in prison. When I have asked them how they deal with the thought of being incarcerated for another, say, 20 years, and perhaps for not being with their children as they grow up, they respond by saying, “You live from day to day. You can’t allow yourself to think too much or you would tear yourself apart.”
Can you imagine? …. Think about it? …. Could you put yourself in the shoes of a Syrian mother or father in Homs, right now?
This week, a UN backed peace plan has been endorsed by all the members of the UN Security Council. Yet this still remains a long way from resolution as government forces, at the same time as the plan was being endorsed, continue to shell the civilian population. The UN says more than 9,000 people have been killed in the year-long uprising in Syria, while tens of thousands of people have fled their homes.
We have to find ways to address this carnage; to tap in to all means available!
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