TravelChick

Massive Rally in Damascus

There was no way to miss the rally in support of the Syrian government today. People started gathering on the highway outside the university an hour before it started, chanting and shouting and waving flags. We peered out the classroom windows and knew that we still had another hour of class before we could go see what was going on; concentrating on the Arabic we were supposed to be learning suddenly became impossible. We wanted to learn about the words for independence and all the words we have been seeing on posters in Lebanon lately.

After class ended, my friends and I ran out to the street and climbed onto a fountain in the median to get a view of the crowd. People filled both sides of the street, walking towards the center of the city. The crowd became denser and denser, full of people waving Syrian and the occasional Hizbollah flags as well as a black flag with a red design in the center (which flag that is I still haven't been able to find out).

I pulled out my camera and started taking photos. The crowd was enthusiastic, and upon seeing a group of foreigners, people would often stop and talk to us. We stood around for a few minutes and then decided to walk through the crowd. They were moving in the direction we needed to go, the direction of home.

I kept scanning the crowd to try to gauge who exactly was at this rally: was it just men, how old were they, did they cut across classes? While the majority of the crowd was men, there were quite a lot of women in the crowd, including one group of very exuberant young teenage girls in hijab. I saw people of all ages, but got the sense that this was a rally that was limited primarily to the lower and middle classes. That's probably the thing that's hardest to gauge, though.

People chanted, "Allah, Syria, Bashar, that's it" over and over. I saw several banners with quotations from Bashar about what it means to be Syrian; people also carried signs denouncing Bush and his idea of democracy.

As I tried to read the signs and banners people were carrying, I tried to make sure I didn't lose my friends. I hate crowds and rarely go to rallies; I was wading through this one in order to get home. Gradually, though, I lost sight of two of my friends. We passed people who had climbed up on top of a billboard right behind one that read 'Proud to be Syrian' (in English) and were waving Syrian flags. While trying to get a photo of them I managed to separate from my three other friends. The crowd was getting denser and I was starting to feel that I might get stuck in this mass of people, pushed towards whatever the end point of this rally was. Just when I was beginning to get jostled from right and left and was about to start panicking, I looked over to the right of the crowd and saw one of my friends standing on top of the bridge I was about to pass under. I managed to push my way over to the stairs up to the bridge and ran after her, shouting her name. She was with another one of our friends and we stood on top of the bridge for a while, watching the crowd pass under.

We wandered through the city to get home, crossing the path of the rally and people going towards the rally; although people were leaving, there were plenty of people going to replace them. The rally seemed to fracture and spread through parts of the city. Aside from the core that seemed to be heading towards the area where many of the embassies are, groups of people were spreading towards the Old City.

When I finally got back to my neighborhood, the streets were eerily deserted and almost all the shops were shuttered. Bashar posters had suddenly appeared in the windows of restaurants and stores. The main street, usually crowded with cars and people, was deserted, so I walked down the middle of it, listening to the chanting crowd off in the distance.

After the support rally at the University last week, I had wondered whether or not there would be more rallies. Last night I went to check my e-mail and heard some people in the cafe talking about a rally that was going to take place today; apparently people had been notified about it on their mobiles. When I heard this I turned around and mentioned that I have a mobile but I didn't get a text about the rally. I was curious, though, about
how big it would be, what it would entail, and who would be there. I hadn't quite imagined seeing the rally like this, or seeing a rally this big. There had to be at least a hundred thousand people there.

While thinking about this rally in context of the rallies and demonstrations taking place in Lebanon and what Bush and Chirac have been saying makes me a little nervous, I also really want to believe that peace in Lebanon and the Levantine can be maintained. It's difficult to think about further unrest or civil war in Lebanon. For a while I have felt that the US doesn't fully understand the the state and nationalism in the Middle East and now I'm beginning to feel that it doesn't want to.

posted by Travel Chick @ 8:19 PM