It is a tomb for a vanished country, erased from the map and from memory. An immense tomb of a thousand pages, made up of testimonies, analyses, poems, photos, stories, an immense tribute and a considerable amount of work on the destruction of a country, Syria, victim to the both of a fiftieth and totalitarian regime and of a “globalized local war”. Syria. The burnt countrywhose title refers to the slogan of the regime’s supporters at the start of the 2011 revolution − “Assad or we burn the country! »whereby the Syrians got both − is built on the model of the “black books”.
An object of memory as much as of understanding and foresight, the enormous book published under the leadership of an editorial committee made up of Catherine Coquio, Joël Hubrecht, Naïla Mansour and Farouk Mardam-Bey, brings together several dozen authors, journalists, researchers , field witnesses, writers, activists. The bias is displayed: it is not possible to be neutral in the face of a regime that assumes the ” execution “ of its own people and, if the crimes of the Islamic State organization are also addressed, they occupy a much smaller place than those of the Syrian government, responsible for more than 90% of Syrian deaths.
It is impossible to give an exhaustive account of such a diverse and substantial sum. Most of the texts have already appeared elsewhere, but often in Arabic. It is valuable to have access to it today in a single volume.
As the book’s editorial committee immediately points out, what distinguishes the Syrian case from the litany of the horrors of the 20e century is the fact that“no historical event has produced such a sum of documents in such a short time and with such intensity”. Syria has rendered obsolete the postulate long posed on the Holocaust, namely that if we had seen the images nothing like this would have happened. Here, “the abundance of the archive” led to “another form of invisibility”. And equal impotence.
“This abundance of images will not have enabled the Syrians to break down the wall of indifference or renunciation”, write the authors. In this regard, Chamsy Sarkis’ text on the failure of media activism is a valuable exercise in self-criticism and lucidity. A text usefully supplemented by that of the researcher Cécile Boëx on “the forms of denial in the face of the profusion of images”.
The authors point out that the war in Syria has redefined “the new figures of the tyrant, the refugee, the terrorist and the Internet user”. One would be tempted to add humanitarianism and the West. This war of a regime against its people marks a “Turning the World”. And that’s surely why Barack Obama, whose biggest failure in his eight-year presidency, never misses an opportunity to justify his refusal to intervene in August 2013 after the bombardment with chemical weapons of the suburbs of Damascus. He knows he missed a turning point. The diplomat Michel Duclos also draws an enriching parallel between the Spanish Civil War, heralding the disasters of the 20e century, and that of Syria, which opens the 21e.
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