Syria Today | The Past is Not Another Country

The Past is Not Another Country

Words Daniel Neep
Photo Adel Samara

Like many people who go to live overseas, Fawaz Rejouleh eventually decided to come back to his mother country. “I spent 20 years living in Europe,” Rejouleh said, looking out of the window of the old Arabic house with a faint smile on his lips. “But I always longed to go home.”

When he finally did, Rejouleh began to dig deeper into just what it was that had driven him to come back to Damascus – and uncovered a whole host of forgotten stories about his family’s past. “One of my relatives was a prominent rebel who fought against the French during the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925-26,” Rejouleh said, with justifiable pride. “Another ancestor was a business partner of Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’iri” – a national hero of the Algerian anti-colonial struggle. “I didn’t know my family had played a part in Syria’s history before I visited the national archives.”

Preserving memories

Al-Thawra Street – one of the capital’s busiest roads – seems an unlikely resting place for Syria’s historical records, but tucked away off a side street in Souq Sarouja lies the Centre for Historical Documentation. The Centre is housed in a beautiful, carefully restored Arabic house which once belonged to Khalid al-Azm, the 1950s millionaire industrialist turned socialist prime minister. It holds a vast collection of official documents, government records, photographs and private papers which go back as early as the Ottoman period.

“The archives exist to preserve the truth about Syrian history and to safeguard the best interests of the citizens,” Ghassan Ubayd, the centre’s director, said. The facilities are open to anyone to use, whether they are professional historians, amateur sleuths drawing a family tree, or just curious about the past. According to Ubayd, 90 percent of Syrians who use the centre want to learn about their own families; the remainder are university students and researchers.

The centre’s motto may be “preserving the memory of the nation”, but this doesn’t meant that foreign researchers are overlooked. The staff devotes special attention to foreigners, helping them to navigate the dense catalogues in which the documents are indexed. Nadia von Maltzahn, a German PhD student at Oxford University, was full of praise for the archivists at the centre. “They know the archives well and can point you in the right direction,” she said. “Getting hold of what you want can be a slow process, but they do everything they can to help.”

The only thing that you can’t get hold of at the centre is anything related to contemporary Syria. All archives release documents to the public only after several decades, allowing time for hot political issues to become less sensitive. In Syria, the cut-off point lies in the mid-1960s. The problem here is not that these records are not available to researchers, but that the centre holds absolutely no archival records for the post-1960s period. Even worse, Syria has no regulations requiring government ministries to preserve their papers for posterity at all.

“Future generations will wonder why there’s more information about Syria under the Ottomans than there is about Syria in the 21st century,” observed Ubayd. As European historians have long recognised, writing history is not just about uncovering the past; it also unites the nation in a narrative which everyone can share. If the documentary evidence for Syria’s history is lost, on what basis can Syrians write the country’s common history?

New legislation

To solve this problem, experts based at the centre are proposing Syria’s first National Archive Law for the consideration of the government. This law would oblige all state institutions to pass on their documents to be stored in the national archives for a period of 30 years, after which they would be released for public access. The proposed law provides for some exceptions to this general rule: in particular, papers relating to military or intelligence matters, or national security, would be exempt.

The law would also create a fully independent institution to deal with the archives. The present centre falls under the jurisdiction of the General Directorate of Antiquities and Museums within the Ministry of Culture. “The centre has no separate budget, no special status, no administrative independence,” Ammar al-Sumar, an archival expert at the centre, said. “We can’t even spend 25 lira without approval from the ministry.” The proposed solution would be to give the centre a special administrative status, overseen by the Prime Minister’s Office, as well as a budget to be allocated according to priorities established by the centre’s own experts.

While a National Archive Law might sound esoteric, the centre is convinced of its importance to the country’s development in the long term. “Syria’s lack of complete success in [state] planning is related to the absence of national archives,” Ayman Sulayman, a legal expert involved in drafting the proposed law, said. He points out that current projects often fail to learn from similar efforts in the past and end up making the same mistakes. “If we can’t face the past, then how can we face the future?” he said.

The centre wants to rally the nation around its campaign for a new law and will be asking the public for its feedback when it posts the proposal on its website in May. It hopes that the law will also raise awareness of its work, encouraging private citizens to entrust their papers to its care for future generations. Archives can’t do their job without the support of the wider population. “Syria has no problem in passing new laws,” Somar pointed out. “The problem is that we have to make sure they get implemented.”

The centre also faces one other potential problem. If the new law works as it should, the sheer quantity of documents that will need storing in the future might mean relocating to larger premises – surely a blow to researchers like von Maltzahn, who still visits the centre even after finishing her research. While European archives are typically grey and bureaucratic, the stunning surroundings of the centre stimulate the imagination. “It’s such a beautiful place,” she said.

What else could a historian ask for? Perhaps that Syria leaves a documentary record for future generations to learn from – which all depends on the National Archive Law getting the governmental support it deserves.