TravelChick

Quneitra/The Golan

Last Friday my Finnish friend and I went to Quneitra, a town in the Golan Heights. It lies just within the Syrian border, across the border from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. In 1974, the town was handed over to the Syrians under a truce negotiated by then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Today it is under UN patrol, a ghost town maintained as a ruin by Syrians.

Going to the Quneitra requires obtaining a permit from the Syrian Ministry of the Interior. To get there one has to take a service (a minivan outfitted as a little bus; they’re one of the most common forms of transportation here) from Damascus to a nearby town, register with the police there, and then take another service from the town on through several checkpoints and to Quneitra. In Quneitra you are assigned a guide to take you around and explain things to you.

The first part of the ride was uneventful; after registering with the police in Khan A???, Soraja and I boarded the second service. After a few kilometers, it was just the two of us and a middle-aged man sitting in front of us. We stopped at a checkpoint and handed our passports to the driver to hand on to a guard; when the guard returned the passports to the driver, he passed them to the middle-aged man, who retained them. He flipped through both of them, carefully examining our stamps, and then read over our permit. I thought he was being unusually curious and glanced over at Soraja, who gave me a look of panic. We were on a somewhat desolate road, in a service with two men, one of whom had our passports.

We got to Quneitra and the man with our passports got out and handed our passports over to a twenty something man who got into the service with us; he turned out to be our guide. He was, fortunately, a really nice one, open to answering my questions and not only letting me speak in Arabic but also explaining words I didn’t understand in Arabic (even though, as I later found out, he spoke quite a bit of English).

According to the Syrians, the Israelis destroyed Quneitra, stripping the buildings of everything of value before leaving under a negotiated cease-fire in 1974; the Israelis dispute this, of course, but the UN confirmed Syrian’s beliefs in a report. The Syrian government has left Quneitra as it was when it was handed over, a town of completely destroyed buildings and rubble of houses, as a reminder that Syrian land is still occupied. It’s a one and a half hour trip from Damascus but a stunning reminder of the violent wars that have consumed the Middle East.

Because the area is technically Syrian but under UN control, you’re assigned a Syrian intelligence guide when you get there and they show you around (I’m not sure why you’re not assigned a UN guide, actually). In addition to the guide who held on to our passports and permit while we were there, we met a soldier who let us walk around the outskirts of the city and look from a distance at the various checkpoints that lead to the occupied Golan Heights. We stood on a veranda overlooking a minefield and watched a dog wander lazily across flowers dotting the lush, green field. Absent the barbed wire and a sign warning of the mines in the area, it would have been a beautiful scene.

It’s really depressing to have looked at Quneitra and to have seen the destruction there, especially amongst the beauty of the countryside. The day we were there it was especially strange because families from the Golan were there to picnic, so, among crumbling buildings, families picnicked and children played on sloping ruins. Life goes on, in a sense, and people survive, but the destruction war brings is brutally unfair.

posted by Travel Chick @ 2:42 AM