ASSAD REGIME WHITEWASHES CRADLE OF SYRIA’S REVOLUTION
An exclusive dispatch from Homs where the government is determined to drown out dissent
More than 20,000 families have returned to Homs in Syria in the past two years, the city’s governor says, yet an eerie emptiness prevails in the area that has been under complete regime control since 2014.
A community meeting in the Christian quarter of the old city descends into farce as residents, carefully selected, share with a rare visiting foreign delegation their tales of anguish at the hands of the opposition.
Anti-government slogans in Homs, which was once called the “capital of the revolution”, have been whitewashed from the walls and, instead, portraits of President Bashar Al Assad keep a stern watch over the streets.
Even in the areas untouched by the bombings, shopfronts were covered by shutters with the dominating red, white and black Syrian flag painted on them.
Despite the Assad government’s insistence that life is returning to the city, Sunni areas – where anti-government sentiment was strongest and destruction most devastating – were barren.
Some have returned but a closer examination of exactly who is returning to Homs reveals a concerted regime effort to make sure the city can never again be Syria’s spark.
Governor of Homs, Talal Al Barazi, said during the community meeting that 21,000 families had returned to the city since 2016, but this is far from any sort of reconciliation between the government and opposition.
Damascus has actively encouraged and incentivised an influx of Assad loyalists from the Alawite heartlands on the Mediterranean coast. They are not moved into the heart of the city, but into new housing projects on the southern periphery. Much of the reconstruction that has taken place in Homs has been limited to Christian areas, overseen by the Syrian patriarch – an institution that has become increasingly close to the regime since the war broke out in 2011.
Churches and shrines are busy workshops, storing piles of newly built pews covered in sawdust.
Khalid ibn Al Walid mosque in Homs has also been rebuilt, something the government has been keen to demonstrate, but as one man who spoke to The
National said: “There is no one here to pray in it.”
While church leaders show off renovated chapels and rebuilt altars, there is little mention of rebuilding in the mainly Sunni areas, where residents are nowhere to be seen and regime flags are slapped on front doors.
Church officials claim that at least seven churches of varying denominations have been rebuilt in the city at a cost of millions of dollars.
The fear is that the continued neglect of communities that at some stage supported opposition groups in favour of loyalist areas will create further resentment between communities.
“My Alawite friends come into the city for work. They live close, but not too close,” Mania Khashoun a communications trainer from Homs’ Hamdiya district, tells The National.
Sanaa Abu Zeid, MP from Homs, said: “We are rebuilding Homs in the design of our president. Bashar Al Assad is personally driving the reconstruction.
“Everything that has been achieved and that will be achieved is through the efforts of the army and the will of our president,” said Mrs Abu Zeid, addressing the meeting through a crackling microphone.
It is not only the reconstruction of the city’s buildings that has been inherently political, but also the rewriting of its history. The memory of popular protest, or any kind of legitimate grievance, is being erased from the official history of Homs.
“I remember the first days. I asked the kids protesting, I called from my balcony, ‘How much are they paying you?’ They said 500 Syrian pounds (Dh3.5) each,” Haysam Kozma, 61, tells
The National during a carefully orchestrated tour of the Old City.
What people think in the safety of their own homes, when the Alawite Mukhabarat minder is not about, is left to supposition.
“My family is from the same village as Assad,” the minder says to The National. “Now I’m doing security in Homs.”
Whether Homs will ever welcome back those communities who saw hope in the opposition is far from certain, as the words opposition, terrorist and Wahhabi are seemingly synonymous in Assad’s Syria.
“The normal ones [Sunnis] are OK, but I don’t think the Sunnis will come back, they’ve got no hope,” Mr Kozama says. “It was very good before the war but I don’t see how we will go back to that time, it’s going to be different.”