I woke up this Thursday morning, in the comfort of my home, in my sheltered, leafy neighborhood of Cleveland Park in Washington, where the only menace present was the exasperatingly loud sound of my neighbor’s lawn mower. The first order of business? I read a news story on the BBC website headlined, “Syria Conflict: Warplanes set rebel-held Aleppo ablaze.”
Aleppo was seeing “the heaviest airstrikes in months,” the report said, heralding the collapse of a less than two-week old truce. The strikes led to massive fires across the length and breadth of the eastern part of the city, caused by “incendiary phosphorous bombs,” which in turn led to more fires. And it doesn’t really matter — after you’ve read that “blazes lit up the night sky” and conjured up an image in your mind of the carnage — who dropped them. Was
it Russian Su-24 aircraft or Syrian government fighter jets? A shattering contrast to my blissful surroundings!
Is there no end to the agony of Aleppo, one of the oldest, continuously inhabited cities in the world and once the country’s commercial and cultural hub? Is there no end to the suffering of the people of Syria? I ask because, Heaven knows, we have reached a point where, after well over five years of reading incessantly, almost daily, about slaughter, deprivation and gore, reading about suffering beyond all rational understanding, in that tormented land, we have become desensitized, as if our internal psychic economy could not handle any more of the same.
By late afternoon, long after my neighbor had stopped mowing his darn lawn, and I calmed down, banishing from my mind apocalyptic images of collapsed buildings, bodies buried under the rubble, ancient souks swallowed up raging fires and emaciated children with blood-drenched bandages wrapped around their heads, I began to let my animus, sorry, but I’m letting my column this week turn into a first person, toward Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin show.
Unless you’ve been visiting Mars over the last year, you would know that I’m not alone in the Arab world who harbors intensely hostile sentiments toward Russia and its leaders.
Let’s face it, public opinion in our part of the world has turned vehemently against Moscow, whose air power, coupled with its diplomatic muscle, wielded in support of the Syrian dictator, whose regime was tottering a year ago, has emboldened him to become so openly cocky as to aver, on the eve of the cease-fire, that his plan was no less than to “regain the whole country back from the terrorists.”
All thanks to Putin, against whom, I say, I harbor considerable animus. Putin, who loves grandstanding, photo-ops and the idea that the quarterbacks in the West return his calls and sit with him to discuss the fate of Syria and Ukraine.
A man whose seemingly muscular style of doing business feeds into the Russian people’s nostalgia for the absolutes of Czarist and Soviet grandeur. If you’re a Russian who, since the collapse of communism, has felt that your country was left by the wayside as a big power, then trust your poker-faced president to push that repeat button, back to those halcyon days when it still was.
Whether before or after, Russia never balked at bombing its perceived enemies’ habitat back to the Stone Age. And the enemies need not have been foreign. They could’ve been your own citizens, a world view you embrace ardently and pass on to your protégés in Damascus and Kiev.
Who does not, as a case in point, recall the horrors of the first Chechen war in 1994, launched against the subject Chechen Republic, whose paltry population of 1,300,000, had suffered, by the conclusion of the hostilities less than two years later, as estimated 100,000 dead or more, of whichmost were civilians. Beyond the casualties, Russian troops left behind a Grozny, once an attractive though rustic capital of 400,000, reduced to rubble.
Recalling that war in an article in the Washington Post in October 1999, the paper’s correspondent in the Caucuses at the time, Lee Hockstader, mused: “I have never seen a more extravagant, terrifying and ultimately futile use of firepower in populated areas than that which the Russians unleashed in Chechnya ... Chechnya’s capital of Grozny was reduced to a smashed, smoldering husk reminiscent of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb.”
Five years later, Russia was back in Chechnya to start yet another, more intense conflagration in that Muslim Republic.
Now Russia is in Syria. American Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov may have butted heads at the UN Security Council last Wednesday, but the die is cast.
People in the West have not, since the 16th century, ceased to use the term “the Russian Bear” to symbolize Russia, implying that the country is “big, brutal and clumsy.”
And since this column is, as I alerted you earlier, is presented in the first person, you can’t accuse me here of racial profiling — maybe just of being an angry Arab who feels pain at reading, upon first waking up in the morning, that one of the most ancient and beloved cities in his world, is set ablaze by Russian warplanes, or perhaps by Syrian government warplanes supplied by Russia.
Aleppo was seeing “the heaviest airstrikes in months,” the report said, heralding the collapse of a less than two-week old truce. The strikes led to massive fires across the length and breadth of the eastern part of the city, caused by “incendiary phosphorous bombs,” which in turn led to more fires. And it doesn’t really matter — after you’ve read that “blazes lit up the night sky” and conjured up an image in your mind of the carnage — who dropped them. Was
it Russian Su-24 aircraft or Syrian government fighter jets? A shattering contrast to my blissful surroundings!
Is there no end to the agony of Aleppo, one of the oldest, continuously inhabited cities in the world and once the country’s commercial and cultural hub? Is there no end to the suffering of the people of Syria? I ask because, Heaven knows, we have reached a point where, after well over five years of reading incessantly, almost daily, about slaughter, deprivation and gore, reading about suffering beyond all rational understanding, in that tormented land, we have become desensitized, as if our internal psychic economy could not handle any more of the same.
By late afternoon, long after my neighbor had stopped mowing his darn lawn, and I calmed down, banishing from my mind apocalyptic images of collapsed buildings, bodies buried under the rubble, ancient souks swallowed up raging fires and emaciated children with blood-drenched bandages wrapped around their heads, I began to let my animus, sorry, but I’m letting my column this week turn into a first person, toward Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin show.
Unless you’ve been visiting Mars over the last year, you would know that I’m not alone in the Arab world who harbors intensely hostile sentiments toward Russia and its leaders.
Let’s face it, public opinion in our part of the world has turned vehemently against Moscow, whose air power, coupled with its diplomatic muscle, wielded in support of the Syrian dictator, whose regime was tottering a year ago, has emboldened him to become so openly cocky as to aver, on the eve of the cease-fire, that his plan was no less than to “regain the whole country back from the terrorists.”
All thanks to Putin, against whom, I say, I harbor considerable animus. Putin, who loves grandstanding, photo-ops and the idea that the quarterbacks in the West return his calls and sit with him to discuss the fate of Syria and Ukraine.
A man whose seemingly muscular style of doing business feeds into the Russian people’s nostalgia for the absolutes of Czarist and Soviet grandeur. If you’re a Russian who, since the collapse of communism, has felt that your country was left by the wayside as a big power, then trust your poker-faced president to push that repeat button, back to those halcyon days when it still was.
Whether before or after, Russia never balked at bombing its perceived enemies’ habitat back to the Stone Age. And the enemies need not have been foreign. They could’ve been your own citizens, a world view you embrace ardently and pass on to your protégés in Damascus and Kiev.
Who does not, as a case in point, recall the horrors of the first Chechen war in 1994, launched against the subject Chechen Republic, whose paltry population of 1,300,000, had suffered, by the conclusion of the hostilities less than two years later, as estimated 100,000 dead or more, of whichmost were civilians. Beyond the casualties, Russian troops left behind a Grozny, once an attractive though rustic capital of 400,000, reduced to rubble.
Recalling that war in an article in the Washington Post in October 1999, the paper’s correspondent in the Caucuses at the time, Lee Hockstader, mused: “I have never seen a more extravagant, terrifying and ultimately futile use of firepower in populated areas than that which the Russians unleashed in Chechnya ... Chechnya’s capital of Grozny was reduced to a smashed, smoldering husk reminiscent of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb.”
Five years later, Russia was back in Chechnya to start yet another, more intense conflagration in that Muslim Republic.
Now Russia is in Syria. American Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov may have butted heads at the UN Security Council last Wednesday, but the die is cast.
People in the West have not, since the 16th century, ceased to use the term “the Russian Bear” to symbolize Russia, implying that the country is “big, brutal and clumsy.”
And since this column is, as I alerted you earlier, is presented in the first person, you can’t accuse me here of racial profiling — maybe just of being an angry Arab who feels pain at reading, upon first waking up in the morning, that one of the most ancient and beloved cities in his world, is set ablaze by Russian warplanes, or perhaps by Syrian government warplanes supplied by Russia.
