A pillar of the revolt against the power of Bashar Al-Assad, the fragile Syrian civil society before 2011 was damaged by repression, caught up in the violence of the war. Within it, the Mazen Darwich team and his accomplices – lawyers, journalists, etc. – have paid a heavy price: prison, abuse, death under torture, disappearance, exile. But they never gave up.
When he founded the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM) in the early 2000s, lawyer Mazen Darwich knew he was walking on a minefield. The muzzling of the “Damascus spring”, a reform movement which the government had briefly encouraged, deprived it of the illusion that the situation would improve. under the presidency of the son of Hafez Al-Assad. According to the vicissitudes of the Syrian regime on the international scene (pariah of Westerners in 2005; courted from 2008), the center is tolerated, or closed. Mazen Darwich was arrested in 2008, then banned from leaving the country.
“In the 2000s, reformers worked in small, closed circles for safety reasons “, recalls a Syrian, collaborator of the SCM from Beirut. Some try to integrate these circles. This is how Bassam Al-Ahmad, human rights activists within the Kurdish movement, meets Mazen Darwich, as well as the lawyer Razan Zaitouneh, engaged in the defense of political detainees, in particular Islamists, in Syria.
The power oversees some development initiatives: “It was about channeling the aspiration of young people to be active in society and blocking the expansion of political currents”, specifies the same interlocutor. “Mazen was also campaigning for [que le régime prononce ] words of appeasement for the families of victims of the Hama massacre [qui a fait entre 15 000 et 30 000 morts, en 1982, à l’instigation du pouvoir de Hafez-Al-Assad]. He was also involved in the revision of the audiovisual law. But on these two aspects, he said, the tough guys have blocked any change. “
Period of exaltation
At the end of the 2000s, Mazen Darwich felt weary. “People seemed to accept the situation. Then came the “Arab Spring” : when Egypt rose up, we felt that the wave was coming. The majority of Syrians suffered, only fear paralyzed them until then “, he remembers from Paris, where he now lives.
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