19 April 2018
With over 600,000 Armenians slaughtered on future Syrian territory in 1916, the Armenian Genocide ought to be more than a footnote in Arab history, argues Vicken Cheterian in response to Yassin al-Haj Saleh.
Commentary
For Syrians, the past is long gone, while the future—a homeland free of Assad—is forbidden, writes Yassin al-Haj Saleh in this reflection on exile, time, and revolution.
Twenty-five years after returning to post-war Lebanon, our writer reflects on the disappointed hopes of a generation, and how the country “somehow feels worse now than it did then.”
Enthusiasm on the left for Vladimir Putin’s bombing campaign in Syria has strong echoes of the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan that killed and displaced millions, including relatives of this author.
In his ninth letter to his missing wife Samira al-Khalil, abducted in Douma in 2013, Yassin al-Haj Saleh writes that “a crack in the wall of your dark prison” may now have opened.
From besieged Douma, the last remaining pocket of opposition-held Eastern Ghouta, Osama Nassar reflects on the fate awaiting him and his fellow residents as Russia and the Assad regime impose their “settlement” on the region’s starved and battered population.
In response to Vicken Cheterian, Yassin al-Haj Saleh argues the link between the Armenian genocide and today’s mass murder of Syrians is tenuous at best—and that both the killing in Syria and genocide in general are better understood in terms of state power than as ethnic or religious conflicts.
Assad was never going to save Syria's Kurds from the Turkish army. That the Kurds sought a devil's bargain with him anyway was a mistake in more than one way, argues James Snell.
While the existence of sectarianism is of course not to be denied, ‘sects’ themselves remain unhelpful concepts that cannot form bases of effective policymaking, argues Dr. Rima Majed.
The French president has talked a tough game on Syria lately, especially as regards the regime’s chemical weapons crimes. But these words, much like those of his American counterpart, are ultimately so much hot air, argues James Snell.
One of the first genocides in modern history took place, in part, in the Arab world, including in Syria. That mass murder is happening again in Syria today offers a chance to draw new attention to this long-neglected subject, and explore the ties that may exist between the two exterminations.
In a final death knell for the once-great magazine, Newsweek has stooped in recent days to printing crackpot conspiracy theories about chemical weapons in Syria.