London Mayor Boris Johnson attends the unveiling of a replica of Palmyra’s Arch of Triumph in Trafalgar Square on April 19. (Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse)
During the unveiling ceremony, Johnson told spectators that they were gathered “in defiance of the barbarians” who destroyed the arch, the BBC reports. But despite the triumphant nature of the day and the clear delight that many had in the rebuilding of the historic ruin, some were concerned about what, exactly, Palmyra had come to represent.
Syrian citizens walk in the ancient oasis city of Palmyra in March 2014. (Joseph Eid/Agence France-Presse)…there are concerns that the city’s ancient wonders could become a propaganda tool for the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Annie Sartre-Fauriat, an expert on Syrian heritage who works with UNESCO, said the Palmyra site should be evaluated and perhaps restored once the conflict is over.
“For the moment, we should not be fooled of the manipulations of opinion by a bloody dictator,” Sartre-Fauriat said.
Syria’s government declared just last month that it had forced the Islamic State from Palmyra after a prolonged campaign. “The liberation of the historic city of Palmyra today is an important achievement and another indication of the success of the strategy pursued by the Syrian army and its allies in the war against terrorism,” Assad said at the time.
For Assad and the Syrian regime, the capture of Palmyra seems to have been not only a symbol of the newfound prowess the Syrian military had on the battlefield with Russian air support but also a claim that Syrians were the only ones who could protect Syria’s heritage. Palmyra itself had relatively little strategic value for the Islamic State, Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, a fellow at the Middle East Forum think tank, told Al Jazeera as the city was liberated. “Palmyra is more important for the regime, symbolically, to present itself as the defender of civilization against barbarism,” Tamimi said.
This message has an international audience, too. The Islamic State’s destruction of Palmyra had created a global outcry. Now the Syrian regime and its Russian backers were able to portray themselves as the protectors of the ancient cultural site. In the days after their troops took Palmyra, the Syrian regime quickly took Western journalists to the ancient city to show them what the Islamic State had destroyed and what, by extension, Syrian troops had saved.
They saw a way to use the sympathies of the foreign nations to further their agenda. They do not really care about their own heritage or even their own people.
In doing so, the Syrian regime was ignoring the damage it had caused to Palmyra, Sartre-Fauriat said. Assad’s troops had inflicted their own damage on the site, Sartre-Fauriat explained, firing shells and rockets into ancient sites and also looting graves.
“Assad has never had an interest for history and heritage,” Sartre-Fauriat said. “He has never protected any places from looting, destruction or in the perspective of a danger, he has never respected the resolutions of UNESCO on any World Heritage Sites.”
Outside of the ruins, Palmyra has long been known as the site of some of the worst excesses of the Assad regime. The city was home to one of the regime’s most notorious prisons, called Tadmur. The prison inflicted such horrors upon political prisoners from the late 1970s onward that Faraj Bayrakdar, a Syrian poet who spent four years there, dubbed it “a disgrace for the history of Syria and for all humanity.“
Assad is accused of being involved in a variety of alleged war crimes, and many pin responsibility for the continuing Syrian war on his refusal to give up power. Many also believe that Assad’s regime allowed the Islamic State and other extremist groups to prosper in a bid to discredit and weaken more moderate rebel groups.
Joseph Willits of the Council for Arab-British Understanding said he worried that the attention placed on Palmyra’s ruins Tuesday overshadowed the plight of Assad’s people. “While the digitally created replica of Palmyra’s Arch of Triumph looked glorious in the London sunshine, I cannot help but feel this project plays a role in cementing the idea that Syria’s monuments and heritage are far more important than its people,” Willits said, noting that Assad’s role in the horrors of Syria was not discussed Tuesday.
Supporters of the campaign to free Bassel Khartabil demonstrate in London on April 19. (Courtesy of FreeBassel)Alexy Karenowska, the director of technology at the Institute of Digital Archaeology, said that the Syrian government had “no involvement whatsoever in the project” to rebuild the Arch de Triumph and that the project was well underway before the Syrian government retook Palmyra. “Our focus is entirely on the betterment of archaeology and cultural heritage,” Karenowska said. “We do not take a political position of any kind nor is it our place to comment on political issues.”
Isn’t that the Assad family at the unveiling in Arona? CAN YOU BELIEVE THE BS?? What propaganda. I can’t believe people buy this garbage. So, they deny, deny, deny any connection to the project, but…
However, a representative of the Syrian regime, director of antiquities Maamoun Abdulkarim, did attend the event in London on Tuesday. Abdulkarim told the BBC that the ceremony in London was an “action of solidarity.” The arch is to stay in London for a few days, before setting off on a tour of global cities and ending up in Syria.
Also in attendance were representatives of the campaign to free Bassel Khartabil, a Palestinian-Syrian software developer and open source activist. Khartabil cared dearly for Palmyra and wanted to help people enjoy Syria’s rich history. He had spearheaded a plan to build 3-D models of the city to be posted online for anyone to see as part of the New Palmyra project.
The militant group Islamic State captured the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria this week, raising concerns about the fate of its fabled ruins. (Reuters)
The Islamic State’s capture of the Syrian city of Palmyra has caused an international outcry. Around the world, people are deeply concerned about the pre-Islamic, Roman-era treasures located near the city, and there are deep fears about what the Islamic State might do to one of Syria’s most important archeological sites.
But Palmyra’s ancient ruins aren’t the only site of historical importance in the area. There’s another piece of history nearby, though it is far more modern: a prison considered one of the most brutal places in Syria.
Tadmur prison was originally built as military barracks for the French mandate forces in the 1930s. It became a military prison as Syria gained independence. In the late 1970s, large numbers of political prisoners began to be housed in the facility, and Tadmur gained a reputation for horror that bordered on legendary. Things were so bad that the prison even developed its own literature sub-genre, with those who made it out writing about their time in the prison, much like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about the Soviet Union’s gulags.
Faraj Bayrakdar, a Syrian poet who spent four years in the prison, once dubbed it a “kingdom of death and madness” and “a disgrace for the history of Syria and for all humanity.”
Thousands of people were believed to be kept in the prison at its peak in the 1980s, and there were persistent reports of torture and death in the prison — a 2001 Amnesty International paper noted that the prison “appears to have been designed to inflict the maximum suffering, humiliation, and fear on prisoners and to keep them under the strictest control by breaking their spirit.” The same report notes that beatings and torture had been rife and often arbitrary and that in the 1980s, guards seemed to have been given a license to kill the prisoners if they wished.
The prison’s most notorious moment occurred in 1980, the day after an assassination attempt against President Hafez al-Assad, the father of current leader Bashar al-Assad. .. The soldiers began killing prisoners with little discrimination. Estimates of the dead begin at 500, but Bara Sarraj, a former inmate and author of “From Tadmor to Harvard,” told WorldViews that he thinks the real figure could be more like 2,400.
“The truth is — no one knows,” Nadim Houry, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa division, said, explaining that families were often never told whether their loved ones were dead or alive, let alone how they died. Instead, the prisoners simply disappeared.
It is interesting that the Syrian rebels know that these are Pagan GODS and their TEMPLES, they say they are trying to cleanse their nation to get a fresh start. Maybe that is true if so, that is a great idea!
It would be hard to argue that Tadmur prison is the most important aspect of the Islamic State’s takeover of Palmyra. Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma and an expert on the Syrian conflict, says that although the prison remains of crucial importance for the Muslim Brotherhood community, the Islamic State does not have the same interest in the site.
“For them, Palmyra stands for a Syria that is pre-Islamic and pagan,” Landis says, referring to the ancient ruins near the city. “ISIS seeks to destroy this past in order to make a modern statement about who will rule today and what is divine.” Palmyra also has a variety of sites of strategic importance outside of the prison, such as other military structures and weapons depots.
However, the Islamic State certainly seems aware of the symbolic power of the prison. According to the Site Intelligence Group, the Homs division of the Islamic State released images of the apparently empty prison soon after taking over the site, and the group’s supporters on social media have proudly proclaimed that they have “liberated” prisoners who had been detained for decades.
It does appear that not only the Syrian government but ALL the GOVERNMENTS of the world, truly care more for Pagan Temples and Artifacts that they do about human beings. THAT IS TRAGIC!!!
Among those who know the horrors of Tadmur, the situation is especially galling. “For someone who cares about human rights in Syria, what happened encapsulates the tragedy of what is happening in Syria today,” Houry said, noting that families that lost loved ones to Tadmur are no closer to finding out what happened to them. One horror has simply been replaced by another.
For Sarraj, he’s depressed that it took all this time for the international community to pay some attention to what was happening in Palmyra, where he was tortured for almost a decade. “It is very obvious that this world values only rocks, not humans,” he says.
Here is just a brief excerpt from this great article. I hope you visit the site and read it all.
The incomplete ruins of Palmyra served as one basis of the neoclassical style, incorporated into newly completed buildings in Britain and America. Classical (and biblical) ruins in the Middle East were historically seen as signs of a great and glorious past that has since become desolate; it was the job of European and American imperialists to restore them. Our current-day use of ruins often suggests similar ideas: an American-British venture building a replica of part of a destroyed Roman triumphal arch from Palmyra to tour around the world, before it is to be set up at Palmyra itself; Russia presenting itself as the “liberator” of ancient Palmyra; several countries divvying up the spoils of restoring Palmyra’s damaged ruins. The hope for restoration of ancient ruins, and of the glorious past they represent, springs eternal.
Our interest in ruins is in some sense truly a fetish, an obsession. At best, it can seem cute or silly or self-indulgent. But in contexts like the Syrian war, with hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced, that obsession can be dangerous, even deadly.