Flannan’s past pupil bears witness to Syria

STEPHEN Starr boarded at St Flannan’s from 1999 to 2001 and has written a book entitled Revolt in Syria – Eyewitness to the Uprising, which is just about to hit the shelves.

After leaving Flannan’s, he studied in UL and DCU before heading to Syria. “I went in early 2007, almost straight away after I graduated from DCU. I worked as an editor for a state newspaper for about six months and then I started freelancing. I had studied security and conflict studies in DCU and there’s nothing for a fresh graduate in Ireland in that kind of thing, so I basically took off and ended up in Damascus.”

While he ultimately got married to a Syrian, settling in was tough. “It wasn’t that easy in the beginning. I hadn’t a word of Arabic before I went there. I speak it fairly fluently now, the local dialect and that. It’s definitely not easy in the beginning, that’s for sure. I went alone and I didn’t know anyone out there.”

He says the book gives a flavour of an everyday person’s experience of the revolution. “It’s about the last year or so and it’s an eyewitness account. It’s not really an analysis, it’s basically what I was seeing everyday and the places I went to, things like that.”

He believes millions of Syrians want a peaceful life, more than anything. “The Government are doing awful, awful things, for sure. But one thing that we’re not seeing is that there are millions of people who don’t like the Government but aren’t supporting the revolution either, they just want a quiet life, safety for their kids and the schools to stay open and to keep their jobs and so on. They just want safety and peace and quiet, much like ourselves I suppose. We don’t hear about that.”

As the conflict has gone on, he feels the rebels have lost some of the popular support they once enjoyed. “At this stage, it has changed a bit. Now it’s so messy and bloody and both sides are killing each other. In the beginning, it was just the Government but now the rebels are fighting back, shooting the regime soldiers. It’s really an awful, awful mess now. The people in the two cities that make up almost half of the country’s population, they see an awful lot of wrong in the revolution. They don’t like the Government but they don’t want this instability. When the opposition are seen shooting soldiers, it loses them support.”

The book reaches the conclusion that the existing regime is doomed but he doesn’t believe a civil conflict will follow. “I don’t think you’re going to have a civil war afterwards. The people that come from the same sect of religion as the regime makes up about 10% of the population. It’s not like Lebanon, where you had 30%, 30% and 40%, or Iraq where you had 60% against 40%.”

He says the regime is in constant decline by now. “Every single day, it’s crumbling. Even recently, Syrian businessmen announced a $300 million fund for the opposition.”

Stephen has now left Syria and will soon be based in Canada. “I’m going to Toronto to do a fellowship in journalism at the university there but I’m home for the next month or two, just to do some publicity for the book.”

His wife is in Syria at the moment. “She’s a Syrian-American and she’s back out there for a few weeks. It’s relatively safe but every day, there’s something. Yesterday morning at half six she was woken up by an explosion in the next town over, some fella had put a bomb under a tank. She’s trying to get her family to move back to America.”

The book has already won a number of favourable reviews with Noam Chomsky writing that,

“This searching inquiry is painful reading but urgent for those who hope to understand what lies behind the shocking events in Syria,” and Fergal Keane described it as being “written with insight and verve”.