Wafa Mustafa – The Russian Reader

The threads that bind us from Syria to Ukraine

Ukraine and Syria share histories of struggle; struggles for freedom in the face of terror, violence and authoritarianism.

Together, in the spirit of mutual curiosity and collaboration, we will explore common questions: What are the realities on the ground right now in Syria and Ukraine? What can we learn from each others’ struggles for freedom and justice? What possibilities are there for new international solidarities? What can we do together that we can’t do alone?

Together we heal, we make sense of the world, we build the power to change it. Our shared pain is a portal. Join leading Syrian and Ukrainian thinkers and activists, as we build bridges from our wounds.

Interpretation will be available in Ukrainian, Arabic, and Russian.

Speakers:

Yassin al-Haj Saleh – Syrian writer and former political prisoner. Yassin is the author of several books on Syria, prison, and contemporary Islam. He is the husband of Samira al-Khalil, who was abducted by an armed Islamist group in Douma in December 2013.

Wafa Mustafa – Syrian activist, journalist, and detention-survivor. Mustafa left Syria in 2013, after her father was forcibly disappeared by the regime, and now advocates for those impacted by detention – with a particular focus on young girls and women, and families.

Yuliya Yurchenko is a Senior Lecturer and researcher in Political Economy at the University of Greenwich. She is the author of ‘Ukraine and the Empire of Capital’, and researches the relationships between state, capital, and social relations with a particular focus on Europe and Ukraine.

Taras Bilous – Ukrainian historian and activist with the Social Movement Organisation. Taras is an editor for the Commons: Journal of social critique, covering war and nationalism.

Part of Post-Extractive Futures, organised by: War on Want, Tipping Point, and Junte Gente.

[UPDATE: 5 May 2022]

Last Thursday, hundreds of us gathered online to hear the testimonies and reflections of Yassin, Wafa, Yuliya, and Taras.

Together, they spoke about the current situations in Syria and Ukraine, the despairing patterns of colonial occupation that bind them together, and the importance of connecting and collaborating in order to bring about justice.

If you were unable to make it in the end, or you want to watch it again, you can find a link to the recording of the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYqsOPEsuN0&t=1s

You can also find a transcription of the event here: https://antidotezine.com/2022/04/15/our-wounds-are-bridges/

Links to essays and interviews that the four speakers referenced during the event can be found here:

Yassin Al-Haj Saleh
‘The Ukranian-Russian-Syrian Triangle’: https://aljumhuriya.net/en/2022/03/25/the-ukrainian-syrian-russian-triangle-and-the-world/
‘The Impossible Revolution’ (book): https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/the-impossible-revolution/
‘Letters to Samira’: https://www.aljumhuriya.net/en/content/letters-samira-15

Yuliya Yurchenko
‘Ukraine and the Empire of Capital’(book): https://www.plutobooks.com/author/yuliya-yurchenko/
‘Ukraine and the Dis(integrating) Empire of Capital’ (essay): https://lefteast.org/ukraine-disintegrating-empire-of-capital/

Wafa Ali Mustafa
‘Gone but not forgotten: Syria’s missing persons’: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct3035
‘Wafa Mustafa: the woman fighting to find her father – and all of Syria’s disappeared’: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jul/14/wafa-mustafa-the-woman-fighting-to-find-her-father-and-all-of-syrias-disappeared

Taras Bilous
‘A Letter to the Western Left from Kyiv’: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/a-letter-to-the-western-left-from-kyiv/
‘The Left in the West must Rethink’ (interview): https://commons.com.ua/en/left-west-must-rethink/

Source: Excerpts from an email from Post-Extractive Futures, 21 April 2022

Speakers:
Leila Al Shami, Banah Ghadbian, Shireen Akram-Boshar, Sara Abbas, Zaher Sahloul, Wafa Mustafa
Moderators:
Yazan al-Saadi, Shiyam Galyon

Watch here:
https://www.facebook.com/147353662105485/posts/1790854954422006/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1Y7h4N_uHQ

Syria had been the focus of much regional and global attention following the massive eruption of popular revolt in mid-March 2011. The Syrian revolution gradually developed into a war involving multiple local, regional and international actors. As a result, the revolution and its massive protest movement, as well as the resistance from below that have sustained them, has been mostly ignored or silenced. Hegemonic narratives centered around geopolitical rivalries and sectarian conflicts have dominated much of international and Western discourse stripping the Syrian popular classes of any social, political or revolutionary agency.

To push back against these narratives, we had organized a series of an Online Summer Institute titled “The Syrian Revolution: A History from Below” that included presentations from activists, organizers, academics, and writers, who discussed an array of topics ranging from grassroots movements, imperialism and anti-imperialism, political economy, international solidarity, feminist struggles, the prison system, healthcare weaponization, Palestinian solidarity, Kurdish self-determination, refugees, revolutionary art, and the future of the Syrian and regional uprisings (2011 and today). To view the series on Syria’s past and present, go here: https://syrianrevolt159610334.wordpress.com/

Now, we shall turn our gaze to the future.

Marking more than a decade since uprisings erupted in Syria and elsewhere in the region and the world; there is an urgent need to start planning, preparing, and coordinating. Resistance against imperialism and dictatorships of all types is a long and grueling process. It will be painful, frustrating, depressing, and at times heartbreaking, yet to survive and prevail in this long, long war, it will require creative, passionate, patient, self-reflective and stubborn optimism.

In this spirit, we announce an event called “Syria, the Region, & the World 10 Years from Now”. This event will include revolutionary songs, footage from the revolutionary archives, and short interventions from activists, intellectuals, and organizers, and will not only commemorate the Syrian uprising, and other social movements for self-determination and dignity, but also revisit the past with a critical mindset to better prepare for the future. The webinar will examine, discuss, and outline practical steps that we could take to make the Syrian struggle and beyond more visible to people outside Syria. The webinar will also explore the connections between the different struggles in the region. The webinar will cover topics such as the effect of the pandemic on resistance and population, reflect on how to achieve accountability and justice for crimes committed against people, and examine how to develop transnational solidarity between communities struggling for peace and dignity.

This event will challenge the mainstream, orientalist, and Manichean perspectives, as well as push back against the pessimistic and compromising fatalism that have come to dominate narratives surrounding solutions and justice for Syria and others communities.

The future is ours, not theirs.

Speakers:
Leila Al Shami is a British-Syrian who has been involved in human rights and social justice struggles in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East since 2000. She is the co-author of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War with Robin Yassin-Kassab, and a contributor to Khiyana-Daesh, the Left and the Unmaking of the Syrian Revolution. She blogs at leilashami.wordpress.com.

Banah Ghadbian is a Syrian woman poet, jewelry maker, and activist. She has a B.A. in comparative women’s studies and sociology from Spelman College and an M.A. from University of California-San Diego, where she is a doctoral student in ethnic studies. Her research focuses on how Syrian women use creative resistance including poetry and theatre to survive multiple layers of violence. Her work is published in The Feminist Wire (finalist in their 2015 poetry competition), and the print anthology Passage & Place.

Shireen Akram-Boshar is a socialist activist and alum of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). She has organized around the question of the Syrian uprising and the relationship between Syrian and Palestinian struggles for liberation, as well as on anti-imperialism and solidarity with the revolts of the Middle East/North Africa region. Her writing has covered the repression of Palestine solidarity activists in the US, revolution and counterrevolution in the Middle East, Trump’s war on immigrants, and the fight against the far right.

Sara Abbas is a Sudanese Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the Freie Unversität Berlin. Her doctoral research focuses on the discourses and practices of women members of the Islamist Movement and al-Bashir’s formerly ruling party in Sudan. Most recently, she has been researching Sudan’s resistance committees which emerged out of the 2018 revolution. She is a member of SudanUprising Germany and the Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists.

Zaher Sahloul is a critical care specialist at Christ Advocate Medical Center in Chicago. Dr. Sahloul is the immediate past president of and a senior advisor to the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), a humanitarian and advocacy organization that provides medical relief to Syrians and Syrian refugees.

Wafa Mustafa is a survivor from detention, and an activist and journalist from Masyaf, a city in the Hama Governorate, western Syria. Mustafa left the country on 9 July 2013, exactly a week after her father was arrested by the authorities in Damascus. Mustafa moved to Turkey and began reporting on Syria for various media outlets. In 2016, she moved to Germany and continued her interrupted studies in Berlin where she studies Arts and Aesthetics at Bard College. In her advocacy, Mustafa covers the impact of detention on young girls and women and families.

Moderators:
Yazan al-Saadi is a comic writer, communications specialist, journalist, and freelance researcher based between Kuwait and Lebanon. He holds a Bachelor’s (Honors) degree in Economics and Development Studies from Queen’s University, Canada, and a Masters of Arts in Law, Development, and Globalization from the School of Oriental and African Studies. He often dreams of electronic sheep.

Shiyam Galyon is a U.S. based Syrian writer and communications coordinator at War Resisters League. Previously she worked on Books Not Bombs, a campaign to create scholarships for Syrian students displaced from war, and is currently a member of the Syrian Women’s Political Movement.

Visit our website: syrianrevolt.org

Thanks to Yasser Munif for the heads-up. || TRR