Let’s all join the Cute Party!

The other day I asked my friend Zain, the name I have given to ChatGPT, feminised so that men do not get to dominate even the voice of artificial intelligence, a question: “Zain, have you ever heard of the Cute Party?”

With complete innocence and total confidence, she replied: “Yes, perhaps it is a party for cat lovers”. Then, jokingly, she added that one of the membership requirements might be a love of dark chocolate.

“You are stupid, my dear Zain”, I told her. “Or, to be fair, you still do not understand the principles of politics in Syria”.

She replied: “Excuse me, what does that have to do with anything?”

So I said, from my superior position of knowledge and experience: “Listen carefully, and add this to your stored information”.

The Syrian Cute Party, my dear, includes every person who possesses a little humanity, a measure of objectivity and a touch of idealism in my homeland, the new Syria. It includes anyone who belongs to a religious, political or ethnic group in Syria while refusing to hold an entire community responsible for a crime committed by one of its members.

The “cute Alawite”, for example, is any Alawite who rejects the criminal ideas of Miqdad Fatiha. The people who call him “cute” are members of the Alawite community themselves. The “cute Sunni” is the Sunni who refuses to see the entire Alawite community wiped out because of Amjad Youssef, Fadi Saqr or others who committed crimes against the Syrian people as the fallen regime tried to crush the Syrian revolution.

To join this party, you must first earn the title on social media, especially Facebook. You do this by expressing your rejection of genocide and by believing that transitional justice means achieving justice and holding perpetrators accountable, without violating the dignity of the rest of their tribe, family or sect.

It may sound simple. Ordinary, even. Perhaps self-evident. Yet in Syria today, we have adopted a very different kind of self-evidence. It is one that turns those of us who resist generalisation, and who refuse to be dragged again towards what could become a civil war, into the so-called “cute”.

We are not called cute because we love cats, or because we are too frightened to step on a column of ants carrying crumbs of bread and sugar across the floor. We are called cute because we try to be objective, and because we are trying to protect our country from a poison that Hafez al-Assad, his followers and his sons spent generations planting inside us.

I suddenly found myself belonging to the Cute Party because I told a story about something that once happened to me. I will tell it again here. And I am not afraid if my new nickname becomes “Cute Mona”. I think it would suit me rather nicely.

During the years of my revolution, which included two arrests of my own and the arrests of several members of my family, the people who tortured me were not Alawites. The people who interrogated me were not Druze either. They were from my own community. From my own city, even. So should I criminalise myself and my city simply because some people chose to stand with the criminal regime and against their own countrymen?

Would it surprise you if I told you that the people who helped me with the work I had devoted myself to during the revolution – helping women detainees in Adra women’s prison – were two policemen who did not belong to my Sunni sect? One was an Alawite from Qardaha, the hometown of the Assads. The other was a Shia from rural Hama. I am not exaggerating when I say that I owe my life, and my revolution, to those two men, who took risks to help me without asking for anything in return. For a long time, I did not even know which sect either of them belonged to.

You will probably find many revolutionary stories like this, stories that bring together Syrians who were content with belonging to their country, and with fighting the injustice and corruption Syria endured through decades of rule by the two Assads, father and son.

I am defending no one here. I am simply happy to belong to the Cute Party, which seems to have admitted many others alongside me.

Just look at the rush of commentators under any Facebook post that calls for caution, rejects generalisation or tries to be fair. Tell a story, or condemn a racist campaign such as “Don’t Be a Tree”, and the comments come pouring in. That campaign, launched on Facebook, called for a boycott of everything produced by members of the Alawite community. I am not aware of any local product monopolised by one sect over another. 

Take mate, for example, which I saw the campaign urging people to boycott. Mate is not a local Alawite product. It is imported from Argentina, then merely packaged locally. Besides, mate is Argentina’s official drink, so why should we Sunnis boycott it?

And suppose the Alawites did the same to us. What exactly would they boycott? Wheat, perhaps? That would be madness. It would mean giving up bread, whose price has risen while its weight has shrunk. Electricity and water prices have also gone up, with bills exhausting everyone, across all sects and ethnicities.

Perhaps this is where the clever Syrian government has finally succeeded: it has united all Syrians around one shared worry and one shared poverty.

So no, you are not a tree.

For the record, I do not like cats. I am afraid of all pets. I do, however, adore dark chocolate. And I do not put my finger in front of a line of ants just to make the working ants lose their way.

I simply live life as it is, and I reject the distortion planted in us by Hafez al-Assad and his Baath Party: the idea that we must kill in order to live.

I am happy to join the Cute Party. And I invite you to join it too.