Syria Opinion: "Women Have Been Essential in the Uprising" (Allaf)

"My People Are Rising" by Mohja Kahf

---

Rime Allaf writes for Bitter Lemons, reprinted by Lebanon's Daily Star:

On Jan. 10, while President Bashar Assad addressed his supporters in Damascus, the Syrian authorities handed the tiny tortured body of a 4-month old baby girl to her uncle in Homs. Arrested with her parents a few days earlier, one can only assume, knowing the Syrian regime’s documented brutality, that baby Afaf had been thrown into a cell with her mother and submitted to horrific treatment, terrorizing her and her mother and leading to her death.

In its violent repression of the uprising, the Syrian regime has made no distinction between men and women or between adults and children. There has been equality in oppressing, and equality in suffering. But there has also been equality in protesting, albeit in varying degrees of visibility and in different forms.

For the last 10 months of the Syrian revolution, many skeptics have repeated the tired refrain that women have been absent from the uprising and that it seems to be a male-dominated (read “Islamist-leaning”) protest movement. Such generalizations, meant to discredit the revolution, do much injustice to the women who have lived the uprising from the start at the side of their compatriots.

It is true that the initial Friday-centric demonstrations were, by default, overwhelmingly comprised of men. With no other option to gather freely, protesters met at the mosque and grouped at the end of Friday prayers to start marching and chanting, and week after week the presence of women in these demos was negligible. Moreover, there is little doubt that the sheer brutality of the regime, with its blind random shootings, led many men to insist that their female relatives remain at home in an attempt to keep them out of harm’s way.

In this, the Syrian revolution may have differed from others where women were visible from the start, especially as most other revolutions have begun in big cities. But no other revolution has been suppressed with the ferocity of the Syrian regime, nor has any other country (save for Libya after the military intervention started) endured so many casualties. Declaring the Syrian uprising to be woman-less, therefore, would reflect a rather skewed view on the situation and a superficial understanding of how the Syrian regime acts.

As repression got more brutal, the protests spread throughout Syria and extended beyond Friday prayers. This resulted in a noticeable increase of women on the streets of Syria, chanting alongside men and running under fire alongside men. Some organized women-only protests, others mingled in the mixed crowds and some took microphones to lead defiant chants at gatherings such as the woman who electrified Homs when she shouted to a roaring crowd that her children would not attend a school that had been used as a torture center.

Even when they weren’t taking to the streets, women’s participation in the revolution has been constant. They have made signs, helped give first aid to the wounded, and run charity networks to distribute aid to the neediest families under siege from the army. While these activities were not undertaken exclusively by women, they played an important role in the logistics behind the protests.

Read full article....