Syria faces post-dictator stages: Elation, grief, vengeance, discontent
People in Syria are going through the “standard stages” that take place following the ousting of a dictator. These go from elation, to grief, vengeance and discontent, says Robert Geist Pinfold from Durham University.
“At the start, you have that elation that brings everyone together. And why not? You know, this was a brutal dictator,” Pinfold told Al Jazeera, noting that the Assad regime killed at least 600,000 of its own people and made millions more homeless.
“But then you move to the second stage of grieving, mourning – many people finding out that their relatives, who they hoped might be alive, are actually no longer so and then that also opens the door for calls for vengeance,” Pinfold said. That paves the way for questions on whether to rehabilitate or put on trial former regime operatives and fighters.
“And then eventually you get that kind of question of, what does the new normal look like, not just who’s in charge, but also who’s running the schools, the electricity, the healthcare. How many hours of these public services are there a day?” he said.
Following the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Pinfold said, discontent started to boil once people realised “they were getting less of those things” than under the regime.
Syria facing ‘triple crisis’, says World Food Programme
Carl Skau, deputy executive director of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), warned that Syria is facing the fallout from a 13-year civil war, a surge in arrivals from the Israel-Hezbollah war in neighbouring Lebanon, and the unexpected removal of longtime ruler al-Assad.
“It’s a triple crisis, and the needs are going to be massive,” he told The Associated Press.
Skau said even before the current crisis, more than 3 million people faced acute food shortages in Syria, but the WFP was only able to provide aid to two-thirds of those due to funding cuts.
While the situation in Syria’s largest city Aleppo is “quite calm and orderly”, Skau said, there’s still uncertainty in Damascus, where markets are disrupted, currency values have dropped, food prices are rising, and transport isn’t operational.
UN says 1.1m displaced by Syria fighting in just over two weeks
An estimated 1.1 million people have been displaced across Syria since fighting between the forces of the toppled al-Assad regime and opposition groups began to escalate on November 27, the UN said. The majority of the newly displaced are women and children, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in its latest Syria situation report.
According to OCHA, almost 640,000 people fled the Aleppo governorate, 334,000 fled Idlib, and 136,000 fled from Hama. Meanwhile, 438,000 displaced people have arrived in Idlib from other areas, 170,000 in Hama and 123,000 in rural Damascus.
More than 400,000 people are now staying in 240 collective shelters across northeastern areas of the country, where they are receiving humanitarian support such as food, hygiene kits and psychological support.
Nearly 700,000 people in Aleppo, Idlib, Homs and Hama have been provided with food assistance since the start of the escalation in violence, OCHA added.
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