Rendering №8

The editorial published on the website of the newspaper "The Guardian" on October 18 is headlined "Syria's future lies in ruins”.  The article discusses the grave situation which has emerged in Syria. Few forms of conflict are so damaging to a country or its people as a prolonged civil war. The author of the article, William Darlymple, uses the annals as the introduction, reminding that by 1939, when Franco's forces had finished mopping up the last Republican resistance in Spain, more than half a million lay dead and some of the most beautiful city centers in Europe had been destroyed.

The article also carries a lot of comments of the same events which happened all over the world and in 20 century and compares them- A similar pattern played out in 1970s Lebanon, which saw 150,000 casualties and the almost complete destruction of the elegant villas of Ottoman Beirut. In Afghanistan it was not Soviet invasion or occupation that killed most people or wrecked Kabul, but the internecine street fighting that followed in the early 1990s.

Speaking of the today situation in Syria, it is necessary to note that Syria faces the desperate prospect of an open-ended civil conflict. As a proof, William Darlymple gives the readers the following statistics -  20,000 dead and 250,000 refugees, calling it the human cost of the war. Apart from the human victims, it is also very important to emphasize the destruction of a people's heritage is irretrievable: once a monument is destroyed, it can never be replaced. Giving appraisal this grief situation the writer quotes groups like the World Monuments Fund which are monitoring the losses. The author writes for better understanding of gravity of the situation that there has been serial looting of Syrian museums and archaeological sites, especially from the museums at Idlib, Dura Europos and Palmyra. The old city of Homs has been levelled, and with it two major museums, several early Christian churches and a number of Ottoman mosques.

William Darlymple mentions about Afghanistan. Trying to compare the situation - As in Afghanistan, there is evidence the looting is highly organised. A Lebanese antiquities dealer recently told Time magazine that he was making a fortune from would-be Syrian freedom fighters who were selling him priceless Syrian antiquities for very low prices and buying arms at inflated rates. To emphasize the importance of the loss the author writes that until two years ago, Syria was the last country in the Middle East to retain its richly mixed Ottoman inheritance.  Then he adds that now, as happened before in Greece, Turkey, Egypt and the Balkans, civil war is leading to a consolidation of the majority community and the exile or expulsion of the minorities.

Giving a description to the civil war in Syria, he writes one of the distinguishing features of pre-civil war Syria was the way it sheltered so many ethnic and religious groups that had disappeared elsewhere. As well as the dominant Alawites there were large minorities of Kurds, Armenians, Circassians and Druzes, as well as more arcane groups such as the Yezidi (wrongly believed by many Sunnis to be devil-worshippers), Mandeans (a Gnostic sect said to be descended from followers of John the Baptist) and the Urfalees (Syrian Orthodox refugees from the early Christian centre of Edessa).

There are a lot of comments of musicians of the Christian Urfalee community. They are also in danger. Musicologists believe that the Urfalee chants are the most ancient still in use anywhere in the Christian world.  Stressing their importance, the write says that the Urfalees preserve the root traditions of both western plainchant and eastern Orthodox sacred music. Now the Urfalees quarter is on the frontline between the government and the rebels.

In conclusion the author reminds that there were hopes it would usher in a new dawn of freedom and democracy when the uprising in Syria began at the height of optimism about the Arab spring. It’s hard to predict the course of events in future but there is some evidence of the deterioration of the situation - the future looks immeasurably grimmer, and what kind of Syria will be left standing after the firing ceases is a prospect few now even wish to consider. More irreversible damage is being inflicted every day on Syria's living traditions, many of which now look likely to disappear from its soil forever.

As for me, I don’t believe that the situation will improve greatly in the future. Today I don’t see any preconditions for it.  Examining the civil war in Syria, I still don’t know real purposes of the rebels and any good results of their uprising. They destroy their own country with their own hands(which they love sooo much as they say in every possible cases). As an example there are so many ruined monuments, museums and other places of tourist attraction which made good profit in the past. Probably some of insurgents really want to help Syria, but they don’t know how…They are under the psychological influence of the high-ranking tops, which pursue the aims having no connection to the patriotism or the religion...