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In January 2011 President Bashar al-Assad told the Wall Street Journal that Syria was stable and immune from revolt. In the months that followed, and as regimes fell in Egypt and Tunisia, thousands of Syrians took to the streets calling for freedom, with many dying at the hands of the regime. Stephen Starr delves deep into the lives of Syrians whose destiny has been shaped by the state for almost fifty years. In conversations with people from all strata of Syrian society, Starr draws together and makes sense of perspectives illustrating why Syria, with its numerous sects and religions, was so prone to violence and civil strife. Through his unique access to a country largely cut off from the international media during the unrest, Starr delivers compelling first hand testimony from both those who suffered and benefited most at the hands of the regime. Revolt in Syria details why many Syrians wanted Assad s government to stay as the threat of civil war loomed large, the long-standing gap between the state apparatus and its people and why the country s youth stood up decisively for freedom. Starr also sets out the positions adhered to by the country s minorities and explains why many Syrians believe that enforced regime change might precipitate a region-wide conflict. This revised and updated edition contains a chapter bringing it up to the end of 2013, and examines the experiences of those who have fled the fighting to Turkey and elsewhere.
- Sales Rank: #1722516 in Books
- Published on: 2015-08-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 5.40" h x .70" w x 8.40" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 256 pages
Review
"[Starr's] material is vivid, thought-provoking and sometimes shocking...As eyewitness testimony, it has great value, not least because it challenges some of the simple certainties that have characterised coverage of the Syrian uprising. Mr. Starr captures the pain of a deeply torn society in the throes of a bitter struggle, one that has estranged brother from brother, friend from friend."--The Economist
"Starr's book is the only account that gives previously unheard voices a chance to be heard...his familiarity with the sectarian and political milieu in Syria is better than anyone I know. He has spent five years in the country, marrying into Syrian society if there is one Irishman that the Syrians would describe as muta rrib, Arabicised , it is him...Through a series of vignettes and anecdotes, Starr provides us with a plethora of voices from minorities: Sunnis, Shias, Kurds, Palestinians, pro-regime and anti regime Syrians...The book is a witness to a dilapidated regime [and] Starr captures it all brilliantly."--New Statesman
"Unlike most western reporters who have written from Syria, Stephen Starr brings to bear a great deal of personal experience of the country, having lived and worked in Damascus for four years, including a spell with the state media. He's the sort of man who notices the price of milk going up and the increased presence of security forces on the streets as the noose tightens. With a wide network of friends and contacts, he conveys the warp and weft of daily life with an admirably nuanced understanding of the place."--The Spectator
"Stephen Starr has taken on the mammoth task of elucidating this confusing country. After four years in Syria, he has some insight. . . The general conclusion is that no one in Syria knows what is going on, either inside or outside their own neighbourhoods. It is therefore a strange kind of enlightenment that this book offers, but probably an accurate on."--Times Literary Supplmenet
"The book is an important contribution to the hugely stifled subject of Syria."--Huffington Post
"In the style of Kapuscinski, Revolt in Syria offers the reader a lively text, filled with interesting anecdotes and conversations detailing the first year of the conflict. Aided by five years as a freelance journalist based in Damascus, Starr draws on a broad array of interviewees when offering examples of the decay afflicting many of the country's institutions." -- José Ciro Martínez, New Middle Eastern Studies
"Stephen Starr has written an extraordinary account of the uprising against the regime of Bashar al-Assad...[An] impressive and insightful eye-witness account."--Irish Times
"No-one interested in the contemporary Arab world can afford to miss this book." -- The Muslim World Book Review
Review
Powerful and important. This searching inquiry is painful reading, but urgent for those who hope to understand what lies behind the shocking events in Syria, what the prospects might be, and what outsiders can -- and cannot -- do to mitigate the immense suffering as a country so rich in history and promise careens towards disaster.
(Noam Chomsky) About the Author
STEPHEN STARR is a freelance Irish journalist who has been reporting from Damascus since 2007. He covered the Syrian uprising for some of the world's leading newspapers and his work has been published in The Washington Post, Financial Times, The Times and Sunday Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Irish Times. He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Near East Quarterly.
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Not a bad start for a study of Syria.
By old new lefty
Steven Starr gives lots of up to date information on the conditions in Syria both before and after the Arab Spring hit. You'll certainly get the feeling that any outside power wanting to intervene there would be downright foolish under current conditions. And you get some idea of the nature of the Baath Party and Assad's base of power. Ultimately I was looking for more than what I found in this book, as I didn't get any information on the in depth, internal structure of the Assad government.
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Frustrating but unique
By James R. Maclean
(The author of this review has never visited Syria. What follows is a book review, not a discussion of events in Syria.)
A survey of books published on the Syrian Revolt of 2011 is disappointing: nearly all of them (this excepted) are summaries of widely available news reports on Syria (1). This one and Mr. Wieland's (see footnote) consist mainly of the authors' personal observations in Syria. Starr's account is almost a diary, while Wieland's is organized like an area handbook.
Starr's book urgently needs an editor. The writing is at times difficult to follow, as if he had stitched together many rough drafts, without being able to remember what he had explained to readers. Crucial backstory is often missing or misrepresented (2). Whenever summarizing relevant historical events, Starr crumples the chronology:
[QUOTE]
When the Baath (Renaissance) Party took control of Syria in 1963, followed by an internal military coup led by Hafez al-Assad in 1970, Arab nationist sentiment was elevated to the extent that Kurds were sidelined. In 1962, an 'exceptional census' stripped some 120,000 Kurds of the Syrian citizenship. [...] An alliance established by Hafez al-Assad in the 1970s broke down in in 2004 when an uprising followed a football game in the remnants of the Damascus Spring of 2000-01, the 2004 Kurdish revolt serving to embolden the Kurds [...] (p.35)
[ENDQUOTE]
However, there are so many books about the history of Assad in Syria, or Syria in general, that most readers will not care about this. Most readers will want a feel for Syrian society drawn from Starr's interviews or observations.
Here, Starr excels. Often his writing is vivid and evocative, if hopeless in its pursuit of a conclusion. He does capture a lot of nuance in the complicated relationships of different segments of Syrian society: the Baathist epoch has utterly transformed the country, spawning a host of 2nd-order effects.
But Starr's own personality gets in the way a lot, too. He argues and hectors interview subjects; he dwells a lot on observations that are frankly noise. For example, it turns out that Syrians no less than US nationals, when asked a question about public issues, typically say several incompatible things--like, we need a theocracy to be free, or the like. This is not meaningful, especially if one is exposed to political arguments in a lot of different countries (it's not just countries in dire crisis where people say deranged things). In the first part of the book he records not only his questions, but his pronouncements to Syrians--no doubt stunned at a journalist lecturing them. For example, he rails to ordinary civilians about their preferences:
[QUOTE]
[LEILA:]"The last thing we need is for NATO or America or Turkey to come and help us. This will destroy the country and I know that if they come it will only be for their own interests [...] I do not want freedom if it is free"
[...]
"[STARR:]So how many people must die for you to get what you want? Is it not wrong that people are dying every day?" I asked. (p.119)
[ENDQUOTE]
This is not intended as a real question, however tactless. And Starr does this constantly. After one particular observation, he suddenly becomes convinced the regime will fall; before, he has been impatient with people who want the regime to fall, and afterward, he is doubly impatient with people who fear the consequences of it falling.
The description of society or how Syrians/Syrian institutions behave in common situations is handy, if random (because he's simply generalizing from his personal experiences.) So this book falls into the category of one Westerner's testimony of the early phase of the Revolution, just as it transitioned into a guerrilla war. Starr's own personal expectations and preferences muddy the waters, and it is often quite difficult to decide what point he's trying to make, but not many other outsiders have recorded their experiences in such detail.
__________________________________________________
(1) For up-to-date information, I've relied mostly on Joshua Landis's blog, Syria Comment. One very good companion to this work, in my opinion, is Carsten Wieland's Syria - A Decade of Lost Chances: Repression and Revolution from Damascus Spring to Arab Spring (released 1 March 2012). Starr's book was released 23 weeks later, in August. Starr was a freelance journalist from Ireland, while Wieland was a diplomat from Germany.
(2) In addition to the turgid syntax of the quoted passage, Starr makes occasional jabs at the Baath Party's socialist past. I'm not sure if this just hippie-punching, or Marx-kicking (see my review for the The Morality of Money), or if Starr genuinely feels let down by the Baath Party's one-time socialist credentials, but characterizing the Baathist as "socialist" is a little like calling F. von Hayek a "liberal," and then taking this to mean he was just like Senator George McGovern. In a like manner, nearly all political activists in the developing world self-identified as "socialist" for many years; in some cases, such as early Baathists Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar (founders of the Baath Party) or Gamal Abdul Nasser (1958-1962, President of the United Arab Republic of Egypt and Syria), this meant scarcely more than a developmentalist agenda and a commitment to "reform" traditional social institutions.
After 1962, Aflaq and Bitar resumed their control over Syrian politics; in 1966, a bloody coup replaced them with Saleh Jadid, who really did attempt to implement a hardline quasi-Leninist regime in Syria. After 1968-ish, this mainly consisted of terrible foreign relations--war, or veritable war, with Israel, Jordan, and the West (Edward Luttwak, in Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook, argues that Jadid was compelled to affect "socialism" because it afforded a manageable state structure, considering the sectarian and class structure of Syria). Assad's 1970 coup explicitly replaced a "socialist" dictatorship with a "nationist" one. This is not ironic, nor does it say anything about leftwing politics. The right beat the left in Syria after an open fight between military factions.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating read about the Syrian revolt, presented in a rare light
By Heather
I really enjoyed this read. I started it shortly before leaving Egypt to return to America, and I was impressed by the author's ability to capture a perspective not common of a typical expat journalist. It was bone-chilling to hear how many of the experiences Starr writes about mirrored the murkiness of the political tensions with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt post-Arab spring.
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