“The Promised Land That Nobody Will Ever Reach”

Fadwa al-Hatem shrugs at the latest dog-and-pony show from Assad – a new bill promising fair elections:

What astonishes me most about the situation in the country is the two-faced attitude that the regime is displaying. On the one hand it wishes to be applauded for its "bold" reforms and initiatives, while at the same time its feared security apparatus continues killing, arresting and torturing countless Syrian citizens.

Two forms of carrot are constantly dangled tantalisingly in front of the population: those of "reform" and "resistance" (ie against Israel). Both are vacuous but were thought capable of keeping the regime in power indefinitely. For anybody who follows such announcements regularly, the official and unofficial government media are always peppered with words such as "civilised", "progressive" and "development" – terms for something that is supposedly in a constant state of progress, or transition. This is what we find today in Assad's Syria, with political reform always something that is to be studied and applied moderately, but never actually implemented. Reform is the promised land that nobody will ever reach.