Rania Masri, an Arab-American human rights activist, offered a diverse crowd of Hopkins students and community members her views on the civil war in Syria in a talk entitled “U.S. Involvement in Syria” on Tuesday night in Maryland Hall.
The event was sponsored by the Arab Students’ Organization, the Human Rights Working Group and B-HEARD, the Baltimore Higher Education Alliance for Real Democracy.
Masri, a professor at the University of Balamand in Lebanon and self-proclaimed leftist socialist, is focused on topics related to the Middle East. She addressed the audience on matters of social, political and historical concern pertaining to the current conflict in Syria.
“It pains me as an Arab to be talking about Syria now in a way that is very reminiscent of Iraq,” Masri said.
The crisis in Syria has been at the forefront of the news since Aug. 21, when forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad reportedly used chemical weapons in an attack against rebels in the outskirts of Damascus. The United States and Russia reached an agreement on Saturday to take control of and destroy all chemical weapons in Syria, but only after the U.S. and other countries sympathetic to the rebels threatened air strikes to degrade Assad’s ability to use weapons of mass destruction.
Russia, Syria’s main ally, maintains the rebels were responsible for the attack, but U.S. intelligence has pointed to Assad as the culprit for weeks, and an independent United Nations report released this week — while not directly assigning blame — strongly suggested that only the Assad government had the capability to launch such an attack.
Throughout her speech, Masri drew comparisons between U.S. involvement now in Syria and its involvement in the war in Iraq, the Iran-Contra scandal and other instances of U.S. military interventionism in the past hundred years.
Marsi spent much of her time discussing the impact that the Syrian uprising has had on the civilian population. She cited a plethora of statistics to reinforce this point: millions of Syrian refugees abroad, more than one million of whom are children, and other statistics regarding internally displaced Syrians. Of the refugees, she said that a rapidly increasing number are in neighboring Lebanon, half of whom are children, and the only country to offer full residency rights to refugees is far-away Sweden.
Masri asserted that the first response to this crisis should be to help the displaced non-combatants.
“My main concern is always first and foremost the people displaced by conflict before any political aims,” Masri said.
She also repeatedly painted the U.S. government and the media as overly focused on military intervention.
“Violence is destruction and only encourages additional violence,” Marsi said of the possibility, now lessened because of the arms deal, of air strikes against Assad by the United States, France and other countries.
Masri said that she thought the United States should also stop training and arming the Syrian rebels, in addition to refraining from striking Syria from ships stationed in the Mediterranean Sea.
Citing additional statistics and articles from a variety of western newspapers, as well as statements from the Free Syrian Army and the current Syrian regime, Masri painted a picture of the conflict as she saw it.
To her, there is no doubt that Syria is engulfed in a civil war, not a rebellion. She said that any situation in which Syrians spill Syrian blood is a civil war, and that of the 100,000 casualties resulting from the almost three-year-long conflict, only about 60 percent were combatants. Masri contended that supplying arms to rebels defies international law, and that a war against Syria would be both unconstitutional, in her opinion, and unpopular at home.
To wrap up her presentation, Masri made it clear that she only sought to indict the Obama Administration, not the people of America nor Congress — groups she believes to be as opposed to war as she is.
“President Obama declared the red line to be the use of chemical weapons. . .my red line is the use of violence in any form,” Masri said.
Students in attendance asked what Masri believed was a viable alternative to violent intervention and what Hopkins students and interested community members could do to help.
“Some accuse me of being an idealist; I prefer to call myself a student of Howard Zinn,” Marsi said, invoking the ideals of the renowned anti-war activist, as she asked students to sign a petition urging members of Congress to vote against the authorization of military force if it comes up for a vote.
Sophomore Mutasem Al Dmour, the student liaison from the Arab Students’ Organization who introduced Masri, said after the talk that the event had been inspired by a similar event at Baltimore Community College which also featured Masri.
