Reflections on Syria: Developing A Cadre of Citizen Diplomats

With an entourage of twenty graduate students I walked down the cold cobble-stone streets of the Old City Damascus in mid-January of 2010, still amazed by the reality of the situation. For many years I have traveled alone into this world, in between enemies, in between Syria, the United States, and Israel, crossing borders quietly, with great trepidation and enormous inexperience. The practice of citizen diplomacy in Syria has been one of a carefully choreographed dance with politicians, wonderful peace partners, and religious figures where every word determined the health or destruction of both social and political relationships. I have engaged in this work solely with my Syrian counterpart, Hind Kabawat, and we both did this unsupported, unfunded, and at significant financial loss. But this year we opened our work up to a much more public process. It included Masters and Ph.D. students from George Mason’s Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, Georgetown University, American University, and the Fletcher School. I combined my twenty students in a classroom with Hind’s ten Syrian students, and the outcome was extraordinary. The Syrian and Mason students developed an intensive and amazingly close working social network of partnerships, and a level of emotional bonding that astonished both me and Hind. It has resulted in a Syrian/American alliance of alumni dedicated to small projects creation and mutual aid in the development of a social network for peacebuilding, and other joint projects of positive social change.

The week of intensive training in Damascus combined class lectures, joint innovative project creation, as well as high level meetings with significant figures in Syria, including Dr. Bouthaina Shaban, and Michel Smacha, Presidential Advisors, and the President of Damascus University.  The week also included a special meeting with the Grand Mufti of Syria, Sheikh Hassoun, as well as the Grand Mufti of Damascus, and the Chief of the Religious Legal Courts (Sharia Courts) of Syria. That meeting was an emotional reunion for me and Sheikh Hassoun, a heartfelt review of the results of the devastating wars of the region, which we both had tried to prevent. Iraq has always been front and center, and the Grand Mufti of Syria had simple and profound messages for President Obama as to where the United States should put its future efforts in the region. It became a joint call for life-affirming American contributions to the region and its suffering refugees, with wonderful student engagement with the Mufti. In all my 27 years of interfaith peace work in the region, never have I seen such a high level and profound engagement of shared humanity as was expressed in that room with the Grand Mufti. To see so many prominent clergy weeping together with students over the losses of children to war in the region was the greatest testimony I have ever witnessed to the true spirit of Islam and the Abrahamic Faiths.

Students were astonished at how quickly they would become immersed in and responsible for high level meetings and the mechanics, challenges, and surprising breakthroughs of citizen diplomacy, all under the watchful and quixotic eye of Middle Eastern media, including Iran’s television stations. They did not just study citizen diplomacy. After an intensive interview process to be accepted into the program, they were quickly called upon to be diplomats themselves, agents of positive change, in highly sensitive and challenging environments. They were also treated to a night out at the opera by the Spanish Ambassador, in addition to celebrations with their fellow students almost every night, a dinner sponsored by the United States Embassy, and a beautiful dinner at the ancient home of Hind and Samer Kabawat in the Old City.

When you go to places and you make yourself vulnerable and listen, you learn much more than you can learn in books. This is the opportunity I wanted to extend to the participating students. Even the most eloquently articulated narrative in a book cannot compare to the students’ experience of sitting before the Grand Mufti of Syria and hearing his words of unity and peace and optimism about a different future. No written narrative could likewise portray the range of emotions students might experience as they leave one of the most incredible religious experiences of their lives, only to find out within 24 hours that some members of the media, and numerous jihadi websites, had manipulated words of peace and love into that of religious heresy. The students were on the front lines of a public relations battle and stepped up to the plate passionately in response to the media through written and verbal interviews, and online responses. The students were afforded a hands-on introduction to the challenges of “doing peace” in the context of political and social realities on the ground that are less than desirable.

The week of study and touring of cultural and religious sites culminated in the Syrian students’ gala graduation celebration, attended by a number of Syrian dignitaries and embassy representatives, especially from Spain, the EU, and the United States. Plans for the future include a similar course to be held in Israel and Palestine this summer and next year’s program of new students and citizen diplomacy tourism to the region, videos, op-eds, and the development of an international social network of students committed to conflict resolution and citizen diplomacy.