Boston, Massachusetts, June 30, 2003
How the Baath Party Honors its People!
At a dinner organized in celebration of Mr. Nicolas Matar’s nomination as “World Ambassador for Peace” by the Spanish organization World Peace Federation and attended by Lebanese government officials, Minister Assem Qanso who is also head of the Baath Party in Lebanon gave a speech praising Mr. Matar. Here are excerpts from that speech (translated from Arabic and as reported in the An-Nahar daily, June 26, 2003 issue):
“ He (Matar) embodies in spirit and in practice what he learned from the Baath school…proving that peace is a reality we strive for in our life and is a noble goal of our nation which is looking for a just and honorable peace”…“Our contemporary society testifies that honoring the human being is one of our society’s true dimensions, and this society cannot be but a society of peace”
It is difficult to reconcile these words of wisdom with the record of the Baath Party and its “school” in Syria and in Syrian-occupied Lebanon for the past thirty odd years:
Two dictatorial regimes, one ruling in Damascus and one collaborator puppet regime in Beirut, that have no respect whatsoever for their citizens’ human rights and whose provision of social stability to their societies is imposed by harsh oppressive rule and is at the cost of basic human freedom. Never mind the disastrous and archaic socialist economic system that has led to unprecedented economic decline!!!
The Baath Party’s system of “honoring” its citizens is best exemplified with such monuments to human atrocity as the Yarze and Anjar prisons in Lebanon, and the Syrian prisons of Saydnaya, Tadmor, the infamous but now closed Mazzeh, and the most dangerous and secretive Khan Aboul Shamat. In this Baath “school” of peace, torture is the method of choice for rehabilitating political dissidents, freedom-thinkers, writers and journalists who spoke their mind, as well as ordinary Lebanese citizens who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and ended up locked up like animals for decades.
The Syrian Baath Party’s wholesale massacre of 20,000 innocent Syrians in the city of Hama in 1981 in order to quell a popular uprising against the minority rule of the Alawi tribe of the Assads. Not to mention the repeated savage shellings of civilian neighborhoods of cities throughout Lebanon like Beirut, Zahle, and Tripoli, and of Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon during the 1970s and 1980s, that left tens of thousands of dead and wounded. If post-mortem is the Baath School system of honoring people, then Mr. Matar is unique to be honored while alive.
The Syrian Baath regime that “honors” the dead Syrians, Lebanese, and Arabs it kills with mass graves in Wadi Oumayra, Jedeidit Aartuz, and the Sheikh Hassan and Dahdah cemeteries in Damascus.
The Syrian Baath latest “honor” has been bestowed on Joseph Howeiss a Lebanese citizen who has been arbitrarily detained in Syria since 1992 in violation of Lebanese and international laws because of a car accident with a Syrian military vehicle!!! He died in Damascus central prison on June 25, 2003.
These are but a few of the achievements that the Baath Party has contributed to humanity. We call on the World Peace Federation organization to rescind its award to Mr. Matar, and instead give it in absentia or post-mortem to the thousands of true peace-loving ordinary people of Syria and Lebanon who died at the hands of the butchers of Damascus or who languish in Syria’s and Lebanon’s jails awaiting their deliverance.
Long Live Free Lebanon
New England Americans for Lebanon