[di Francesco Tortorella]
“When everyone thinks alike, no one thinks much”[Walter Lippmann] What I expect from journalism is that it helps us think, understand. I don’t expect answers from journalism. We are all intelligent enough to find the answers ourselves, when someone helps us ask the right questions, and provides us with data observed in reality. Questions are more important than answers: it is the basis of philosophy, the basis of learning, pedagogy and development. What mass journalism is doing with Syria, from this point of view, is a job that is not very useful for understanding, counterproductive with respect to our ability to think. Mass journalism, in fact – forced by censorious and politically correct editorial systems – is giving us prepackaged answers regarding the responsibilities for the suffering of the Syrian population. It is telling us that the Syrians are suffering because of the responsibility of their president Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies. In February 2020, a documentary nominated for an Oscar was also released in Italian cinemas, entitled “To My Little Sama”. An extraordinary document, filmed live during several months of war in Aleppo, which does this same thing: responding that the suffering of the Syrians is Assad’s fault; without asking questions, without helping us understand. Is this the information we need? A (single) answer, without any questions?
There is a war going on: on one side the Syrian dictatorial regime and the Russian and Iranian allies. And on the other side? Does anyone know? Has anyone asked? Is anyone helping us understand it? Assad has a face, we all know it by now, and each of us would be able to identify it. Therefore, one of the two conflicting parties is clearly recognizable, indeed it even has a name and surname, Bashar Al Assad: an operation that is journalistically naive and intellectually dishonest in itself, because those who know politics know well that a head of state does not and cannot decide everything, does not and cannot govern everything. Instead, the second of the two conflicting parties is still unknown: they called it “the terrorists”, then ISIS, then Daesh… Only a few scientific journals in the sector – see Limes – have cited the countless acronyms of armed groups, mafias and criminal gangs involved in the conflict against the regime and the Syrian population, independent of each other, but dependent on those who paid them. And few specialized sources have tried to trace who paid this second faction in the war, that is, who are the instigators of this operation. But the general public has not found anywhere any ideas to ask questions and seek answers on this topic. Therefore, the second party in question is not clearly recognizable. So: what is the journalistic sense of writing sentences of condemnation against the only clearly recognizable party in question? And not even asking the question of who the other party in question is? “If you let those who should be behind bars decide the future of Syria, there is not much hope” … I am surprised to read answers like this, without questions, even on the pages of Vita Non Profit, which is always careful to try to understand ( http://www.vita.it/it/interview/2020/03/04/siriani-prima-uccisi-e-poi-cancellati-da-ogni-narrazione/306/ ). Among other things, in this article Vita says that independent journalists are banned from entering Syria. This is not true and I have seen it firsthand. See “Syria. Una guerra contro i civili”, the book by Michele Zanzucchi (independent journalist) and Massimo Toschi – ed. Città Nuova – written after a trip through Syria, in mid-2018, authorized by the Syrian authorities. But even considering that the Syrian secret services monitor the activity of foreign journalists, do we really consider it so strange? After the secret services of half the world financed journalists in 2011 to spread the partial truths they wanted, functional to the overthrow of the regime in Syria… do we really find it so strange that today the regime wants to control the activity of journalists? One of the important things I learned from my father is – faced with a fact that I cannot understand – to ask myself “who benefits?”. So let’s try: who benefits from spreading the idea that the suffering of the Syrians is all Assad’s fault? After nine years of work in support of the Syrian population and two trips to the main cities of Syria, after having personally spoken with hundreds of Syrians, after having observed with my own eyes, read and studied, I would try to ask myself a few questions, and I would expect help from journalism, in asking questions. Has anyone asked when the war began? Who started the war? Did the Syrian regime attack? Or was Syria attacked? Who attacked Syria? In 2016, the Syrian army besieged East Aleppo to bring it back under its control – as seen in the documentary above -: who had taken control of Aleppo before the army reconquered it? And how had they taken control of that part of Aleppo? Who was governing East Aleppo when the army besieged it? And how were they governing it? Was East Aleppo a democratic republic before the army retook it? The policemen whose testimony I managed to gather tell me that, at the time of the first peaceful demonstrations of the population in March 2011, they received from their superiors the absolute order not to touch the demonstrators in any way; and that this order was modified only when the demonstrations became violent with the infiltration of foreign mercenaries. It is not difficult to imagine, for us Italians who hosted the G8 in Genoa in 2001. Now, imagining of course that this story is the version of a part of the police and not of all of them, perhaps the part favorable to the regime: is it correct, professional and transparent to circulate in newspapers all over the world only and exclusively the version according to which from the beginning the Syrian police repressed the demonstrations with weapons, killing their own people who were peacefully taking to the streets? But are we Italians – those of the Diaz in Genoa 2001 – the ones entitled to judge the actions of the police forces of any other country? The documentary “To my little Sama” shows a scene with dozens of corpses fished out of the river, by firefighters and police in the center of Aleppo, in front of the cameras. The narrator says that they were the corpses of Syrian citizens massacred by the army and thrown into the river. When I saw the scene I wondered why, if the army had committed this crime, it would have thrown the bodies into a river that passes through the center of Aleppo and allowed cameras to film the scene of the police and firefighters retrieving the bodies from the river? Wouldn’t it have preferred to cover all this up?
I asked those who were present at that scene , in 2011, to tell me what they had seen. The story was that they were the bodies of Syrian army soldiers, killed and thrown into the river by mercenaries. Moreover, as you can see in the documentary, they were wearing the same uniform for all of them. Am I able to establish which of the two versions corresponds to reality? No. And wouldn’t it be more journalistically correct to show both? When the first protests took place in Syria in March 2011 , the border with Turkey was already almost closed, so much so that on the Syrian side it was guarded only by police, because on the Turkish side there was the army that carried out very strict controls and did not let anyone pass unnoticed. After the first public demonstrations in Syrian cities, in the space of a few weeks 45,000 armed foreign mercenaries entered Syria from the Turkish border. How did they get in? Who let them in? Who continuously supplied them with weapons in the nine years that followed? Definition of “mercenary” : “Professional soldier who, for money, fights in the service of a foreign state, or even political or economic groups” (www.treccani.it). In whose service are the mercenaries who devastated Syria? Who paid them and who is still paying them? We are talking about salaries of 2,000 dollars a month. Let’s do some elementary school math. Even if we want to limit ourselves to just the first group of 45,000 foreign fighters who entered from the Turkish border: 2,000 USD * 12 months * 45,000 people = 1 billion dollars a year. In 9 years, that’s 9 billion dollars. Who took out this money to destroy Syria, overthrow the regime and replace it with others? Who did they want to replace it with? In this regard, it is true that “The CIA budget for Syria alone was close to a billion a year”? Because, “As Hillary Clinton confirmed in her book “Hard Choices”, the United States provided “satellite-linked computers, phones, cameras and training for over a thousand activists, students and independent journalists “” in Syria? (cf. Rick Sterling, Hiding the Basic Facts about Aleppo: https://oraprosiria.blogspot.com/2020/02/un-documentario-bello-ma-fraudulente.html?m=1 ). For what purpose does a foreign government spend $1 billion a year to fund activists, students and journalists who oppose the government of their country? Why do two Syrian documentaries nominated for an Oscar (who organizes the Oscar?) contain video footage only of attacks carried out by the Syrian army supported by the Russian army and not of attacks carried out by mercenaries or other foreign armies in Syria? If it is true, according to international criminal law , that the Syrian regime should pay criminally for the crimes committed against the population, what should happen instead to the instigators of the mercenaries who devastated entire cities of millions of inhabitants? Should an international criminal court also be responsible for seeking out, finding and punishing these instigators? Or not? Or are they too “high up” to be punished? So, let’s just settle for punishing Assad? And why should Assad be punished first and only then, perhaps, calmly, in the best of cases, start looking for the instigators of the crimes committed by the mercenaries? Is it possible that no one has asked themselves what happened in the countries where – to stick to the last 20 years – a dictatorial regime was overthrown, directly or through mercenaries, and replaced? Does Libya tell us anything? And Iraq? And Afghanistan? Does anyone with common sense really hope that the same fate befalls Syria? Has anyone asked themselves what Syria has to do with the interests of the world’s greatest powers? Why did they start “dealing” with Syria? Why did the Third World War take place in Syria? Has anyone noticed that Iraq and Afghanistan are one to the west and one to the east of Iran? And that Syria was Iran’s main ally? Why are the armies of the world’s greatest powers on Syrian soil today to overthrow or defend the Syrian dictatorial regime? And why is no one doing it with the Chinese dictatorial regime? Do we want to ask ourselves or not? But is the answer really that doing it in Syria costs less than doing it in China? That doing it in Syria is within the reach of armies from half the world and doing it in China would be impossible for anyone? So is it legitimate to overthrow weak regimes from the outside and not strong ones? Is it really permissible to place injured people under the rubble of collapsed buildings and then pull them out in front of the cameras and tell how cruel the regime was to bomb its own people? (a proven fact in Syria). Does no one notice the similarity between these episodes and those of 2003 regarding chemical weapons in Iraq? And why are these types of operations done with Iraq and Syria and not with China? Does anyone know that the organized mafia gang called ISIS did not emerge suddenly? Does anyone know that on the Syrian ground that mafia gang was defeated by Iranian and Kurdish militias, and not by others? Which NATO armies are fighting against Iranian and Kurdish militias in Syria today?
Has anyone wondered why all the mercenaries captured by the Syrian army were relegated to the province of Idlib? Has anyone wondered why the Turkish army occupies the Syrian province of Idlib, arms, finances and explicitly and transparently protects the mercenaries present there? Does anyone know that the Turkish army – within NATO – is the most powerful after that of the United States of America? Do we know that it could fight against all the European armies put together? So has anyone wondered why , in the drama of the population of Idlib caught between two fires, everyone is blaming Assad and invoking international law against him and no one is raising their voice against Erdogan? Who is selling weapons to the Turkish army that is bombing Syria? Who authorized the sale of 100 million euros of weapons to Turkey in the last year? Was it an oversight by the Italian authorities? Is there a place where one day the shame of those who had the courage to take out billions of public money to destroy an entire foreign country and did not find the courage to show their faces to children, the elderly, and Syrian families can be hidden ? Until we ask ourselves these questions and look for answers, we will be content to see Assad behind bars. After Noriega, Milosevic, Saddam, Gaddafi, etc. … on to the next. Until the day before, respected heads of heads of state functional to opaque interests and alliances. Branded overnight as bloodthirsty dictators by the international press. And meanwhile, the people in Syria today are no better off than before. Has mass journalism helped us understand all this? They have written in all languages that Assad has deliberately committed crimes against his own population, has deliberately displaced them, locked them up in Idlib, bombed them and starved them. Has anyone wondered who continued to guarantee the supply of flour to bakeries at symbolic prices during nine years of war, even in the areas controlled by mercenaries? Has anyone wondered who today is guaranteeing flour, sugar, bread, salt and other essential foods, fuel for heating and transportation at symbolic prices, through a magnetic card for each family, to the Syrian population? And, for the sake of completeness, has anyone wondered for what stupid reason the same person is keeping his own population alive and killing it at the same time? Over whom will he continue to reign when he has exterminated them all? We answer. But be careful: easy answers to complex questions have never helped anyone understand. Has anyone wondered why the Syrian dictatorial regime in recent months has activated forgiveness groups throughout the country, inviting the various components of society to join them and heartily asking Christians to join them, for the pacifying function they have always had in Syrian society? And in this regard, does anyone know that the exodus of refugees from Syria abroad, caused by the war, has mainly affected Christians? Are we really sure that it is the West that is interested in pacifying the country? Does mass journalism ask what the consequences of the embargo are on the Syrian population today ? Do we know that cancer cases have increased exponentially in Syria during the war? Do we know that the embargo is preventing cancer patients from receiving adequate treatment? Do we know that the financial embargo is preventing humanitarian organizations from bringing relief to the exhausted Syrian population? Who is imposing the embargo on the Syrian population? In the end, who benefits from all this? Easy answers to complex questions have never helped anyone understand. I am left with only one answer, that of a journalist, Walter Lippmann: “ When everyone thinks the same way, no one thinks much .”
