In post-Assad Syria, “mistrust of the other is deeply rooted”
The intercommunal violence in southern Syria over the past week has highlighted the entrenchment of sectarian divisions. This sociological and political phenomenon was fueled during the Assad regime's dictatorship and has roots dating back to the Ottoman era and the French Mandate, according to L'Orient-Le Jour.
Since July 13, the violence unfolding in southern Syria evokes the brutality, but also the language and methods, of an era many hoped was over. As with the coastal massacres in March, the other—Alawite, Druze, Bedouin, Sunni, Christian, or Shiite—has become a beast to be slaughtered. “Pigs,” “dogs,” “traitors,” and “terrorists” are executed with a bullet to the head, disemboweled, bombed, or burned alive. Entire families are wiped out. Corpses pile up on the ground. Militiamen sing the praises of “ethnic cleansing.”
Summary executions, rapes, kidnappings, looting, and humiliations have reintroduced terror. “We thought fear was abolished. But mistrust of others is so deeply rooted that it couldn't just disappear,” laments historian Amar Moustafa. Syrians have started counting the dead again: the scale of destruction is not the same, but the new era is cruelly reminiscent of the old. “There is a reproduction of what was said and what was done,” laments writer and intellectual Farouk Mardam-Bey.
To grasp the centrality of the Baathist heritage [in reference to the Baath Party, in power in Syria since the 19
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