00:00 Ewa Jasiewicz: [I'm not] Palestinian, I'm British-Polish. Thanks for inviting me to speak at this event. I am not an expert on Syria. I've been to Syria twice: in 2005 to Yarmouk refugee camp, and just recently in May to Maarat al-Numan in Idlib province.
00:00 I just want to give a bit of background to where I'm coming from as an activist. I speak Arabic. I've spent about a year over the past ten years in Palestine, in Gaza, working with the International Solidarity Movement [and] with the Free Gaza movement [?], and also nine months in Iraq in 2003 and 2004. So my purpose for going to Syria was very much coming from a solidarity with grassroots resistance movements, with intifadas, against oppressive regimes, against imperialism.
00:30 So I went to Maarat, in southern Idlib, in May, with a friend of mine who'd already been in January of 2013. She's a German activist; we actually met in Jenin in 2002. She really drove it, but we were both really conscious of just how little grassroots, on-the-ground solidarity was coming from Europe and Western activists with the Syrian revolution — that the whole narrative of it being a revolution was suppressed, was rejected, in favour of these kind of — as we've heard already from Joseph — this kind of "our man" [framing], in a similar way that people treated the Saddam Hussein regime, that so many people defended the regime there in 2003 when the country was invaded.
01:33 And we felt this was a very dangerous narrative for any liberation movement, and [dangerous] for us too as activists, as solidarity activists that do stand in solidarity with uprisings. And we felt also that there was a real lack of information coming out. Obviously a lot of information was coming out, but most of it was in Arabic — even if you look on YouTube, most of it. If you're not an Arabic speaker — and I can speak but I can't read or write it — you can't really find very much info.
02:05 So the primary purpose for us was to go out to Maarat, [and] it was Maarat because Julia met activists from an organisation called Basmat Amal in the [inaudible] refugee camp on the Turkish border, and they actually made the connection with Julia; they invited her and her partner to go in.
02:35 So we felt we had to go in and try and make these connections and try and do what we could to change the narrative back here. Our capacity as activists is very small when it comes to humanitarian relief — even though as activists we've never really prioritised that, we've always talked about solidarity not charity. But in the case of Syria the situation is so desperate that we also started to engage with fundraising, raising money for Basmat Amal in Maarat.
03:07 [Basmat Amal] is a grassroots social development and relief organisation that was set up in 2011. It was the brainchild of a young woman, [inaudible], from the Jundi family in the city. And the Jundi family, as well as a small number of others, stayed on in the city when the regime unleashed total violence, destruction of infrastructure, massacres in the town square [and] in the streets — and, through people fleeing, reduced the population of that town from 125,000 people to around 3,000 people in January 2013. When we were there in May the population was about 10,000 people.
03:39 And Basmat Amal — which means "smile of hope" — and three other homegrown Syrian relief organisations were busy coordinating plastic sheets for refugees to sleep on and under. People had moved into caves; people had actually moved into this kind of museum exhibit of ancient caves and homes, because there was so little housing left, because basically about fifty [per cent] of the town was flattened [by the] air force. And when we were there it was still being shelled on a daily basis from a nearby military base.
04:42 Most of the armed resistance there was the Free [Syrian] Army — there were about 2,000 fighters there — and a sort of smattering of people who couldn't afford to leave or didn't want to leave and wanted to rebuild the infrastructure.
04:42 And that's what Basmat Amal and the other organisations were doing. They were running a kind of hospital in hiding, in the basement of a building, using just whatever they could. They had a satellite dish fitted with light bulbs as a kind of operating light in the hospital. It was very makeshift, it was all very haphazard, but people were doing a fantastic job in patching up fighters and civilians who were getting shelled by the regime.
05:13 There was no ambulance service — as we know, the regime targets ambulances — and the Free Army were doubling up as paramedics, using whatever vehicles they could find to ferry people around. Likewise with the fire service: the regime was targeting civil defence, the fire service, so that was also very makeshift.
05:44 And despite this, people still had hope. People were still organising, and they were rebuilding their society without dictatorship, without the regime, and along non-sectarian and grassroots mutual solidarity lines. So the first schools began to open up in 2012, because there were children who didn't know how to read or write and hadn't had any lessons for two years. So this was a really important development.
06:15 As well as that, they have now new projects: a community bakery; a kind of soap products factory that they're working on; and a hospital, a proper hospital [inaudible] with a gynaecological unit and free healthcare. As an organisation they are very conscious of the Assad regime's impoverishment of the Syrian people, and of capitalism, and they want a not-for-profit society. They're trying to create a kind of low-price supermarket there as well, and I know this has been mirrored elsewhere in Syria.
06:48 The reason for trying to have a low-priced supermarket or chain is that prices vary wildly according to who has access to resources to sell. The price of cooking gas went up 300 [per cent]; the price of water — because the water system had been shelled in Maarat, so everything had to be brought in by truck — this was unaffordable for most people.
07:20 So to be able to provide as many social services, public services, for free as possible was not only the moral thing to do, it's also a vision of the future: of a kind of society without dictatorship, without capitalism, and with full equality. So we were very inspired by Basmat Amal.
07:54 How much longer have I got?
07:54 Chair: Actually, you have four minutes.
07:54 Ewa Jasiewicz: Okay. So — some other activists went out there as well, to Maarat. We focused on this place and this organisation because we don't know [of] other organisations, and we're not going to go travelling around Syria in search of them, because it's extremely dangerous, and also we have to focus on what we can cope with.
08:25 So some other activists went out there as well, and we have a network now. It's called Witness Syria. It's made up of Palestinian, Syrian, Danish, German, Turkish, Polish [and] British activists, and so far two Swedish and two Danish activists have gone out there as well.
08:25 And we did some fundraising initiatives, based on our experience of being there and asking Basmat Amal what was most useful for them. We just recently raised enough — a few thousand euros — for telecommunication masts. This was a priority in Maarat, because the regime had bombed the telecommunication system, so they had no mobile phones, very little internet access. There were some internet cafés that were used by the resistance, but they weren't really for public use. So it was really important for people to be able to connect with each other, to communicate with each other [and] with the outside world, in order to self-organise. So we felt like this was a really good use of funds and of our support.
09:28 So we raised enough money for that, and since then we've carried on fundraising. We've had a gig in Brixton that raised about a thousand pounds, and that's going towards the project.
09:28 And really, for us, it's just important to have these links, to have these connections, because we need to find each other. Paul Mason talks about this in his book *Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere*, and it comes from [inaudible], an anti-capitalist group in France. It's a basic principle of how we're going to, I think, overthrow oppressive regimes, oppressive structures, capitalism around the world: we have to connect, we have to find a commonality and a common ground [?]. And it does exist. We are everywhere.
09:59 And so it's important for people from this country, from all over the world, to make connections on the terms of Syrian grassroots resistance — but to meet and to struggle together, because we are fighting for the same thing. We agree [on] democracy, social justice and a rejection of sectarianism. So on this basis it's really important to promote those values, [and] those organisations that are doing that work, and do it together in whichever way we can.
10:30 And I feel this conference is really important in trying to catalyse that process forward. It's already happening elsewhere in the world — I know there are some committees in Sweden, and obviously in Lebanon and Egypt there's a lot of mutual aid and solidarity — but this country still has a long way to go. The left, or activists, still have a long way to go here.
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