Last fall, Wendy Pearlman Northwestern assistant professor of political science, spent five weeks in a dusty Syrian refugee camp, crouched in make-shift tents made of burlap, visiting schools crowded with practically homeless children, all in an attempt to understand what compelled Syrians to overcome the fear that had silenced them for so long and rebel against their regime's rule.
Pearlman offers "a new perspective to the revolutions," said Jessica Winegar, the interim director of the Middle East and North African Studies Program. Pearlman shared the testimonials of Syrian refugees explaining how they gained the courage to protest with an audience of nearly forty Northwestern professors and students in University Hall on Feb. 22. Pearlman's talk was part of a greater series of discussions about Syria organized by the Middle East and North African Studies Program, called "Syria in Focus."
"When you see people get killed right in front of you, you're no longer afraid," a mother from a southern Syrian city, Daraa, told Pearlman. Pearlman interviewed refugees who had fled from Southern Syria to Jordan's only Syrian refugee camp, Zaatari. Most of the refugees in the Zaatari camp are Sunni Muslims, who had been peaceful protestors and now support Syria's rebel army. They overcame the barrier of fear that had held them back from protesting against Assad's regime, Pearlman said, inspired by youth who didn't remember the atrocities the Regime had committed in the past, the deaths of their neighbors or Assad's own apathy towards his people.
"It became painfully clear this person should not be ruling us," a Syrian doctor told Pearlman. He was clustered around a television with a group of doctors and nurses at a hospital when he watched Assad give a televised speech dismissing the protestor's demands. "He is too stupid to be our president," he said.
Pearlman also talked of a young woman she interviewed who abandoned all fear of Assad's regime at a protest. She told Perlman, "I started to whisper freedom. When I heard my own voice, I started shouting and crying. This was the first time I have heard my own voice. This is the first time I have a soul." The young woman said she wasn't afraid anymore, and joined the demonstrations against Assad and his regime.
Pearlman's stories about individuals standing up against the regime gave Weinburg senior Timothy Garret a much-needed reminder about the humanity beyond the issue. "It's really helpful to go to these types of events to be reminded that people are being affected," Garret said.
And even though the core of the regime has been broken, said Pearlman, the Syrians in Zaatari aren't going home anytime soon. They are condemned to a winter of flooded tents, delays in supplies and inedible food. Conditions that Pearlman said are nothing short of "tremendously miserable."
Yet the refugees Pearlman talked to have already achieved the seemingly impossible. Beginning with small protests in villages that have spread to big cities like Damascus and Aleppo, the protestors have challenged a regime that appeared immune to the Arab Spring, said Pearlman.
For Syrians, the Arab Spring was "like an earthquake. It gave people a lot of hope, but no certainty about what it meant for them."
And the fear that held back contestation is rapidly disappearing from Syrian discourse, Pearlman said, to the extend that an 11-year-old protestor turned to Pearlman and asked, "What fear?"