Before delving into Istanbul again, here is the rest of the Syria border story:
It must be a rare occasion for an American to be denied entry at a border. Billions of people on this planet must go through the oftentimes dehumanizing process of applying for visas, dehumanizing because you and your personality are generally reduced to a set of numbers, such as your income, amount of prior travel, evidence of returning home, and statistical likelihood of your people entering on a tourist or transit visa and sticking around for good. And so I get stamped out of Lebanon, which was itself an interesting experience for they wanted to know the last place I stayed at in the country. By place I specifically mean hotel, which is typically a question that you get asked before entering the country on the entrance form, and is something that never occurred to me would get asked upon my leaving. So, of course, I had forgotten the name of the hotel. The Lebanese officer asks me, I flub the question, recalling only phonetically some bits of the name “Hotel Shawarma” … “Hotel Shamoon” … “Hotel Shamra” … yes, that’s it, “Hotel Shamra” in Baalbek! The guy looks at me skeptically – “I have never heard of a Hotel Shamra in Baalbek.” But yes, yes that was the name, I replied. The man turns to the officer next to him, he had no clue, but offered “Hotel Shouman?” Which of course was right. During this 30 seconds I was terrified of entering the dungeon that must be Lebanese bureaucracy. Thank you border officer, for remembering the name of my hotel for me.
And so the taxi takes us through the no-man’s land that is the space between the Lebanese and Syrian immigration stations. So technically, prior to being denied entry to Syria I did in fact see Syria. And what did I see? Pictures of Bashar al-Assad, the country’s president, on a giant billboard looking very white and Western and with a caption in English about progress. More interestingly for someone who’d lived in Massachusetts the prior 4 years, there was a giant Dunkin Donuts. Right side of the road, big American parking lot, big American coffee and donut shop. In Syria, before the border station. That’s what I saw of Syria: ugly mug of Bashar, and Dunkin’.
So I get back to Beirut with the help of 3 Americans caught in the same predicament as I, one of which was working in Beirut for an NGO, the other two had come from the States to visit her and go on tour of Syria. While I deeply appreciated their generosity as well as that of their Lebanese driver (they took me back to Beirut and fed me, asking for nothing in return), the car ride reinforced my skepticism of Americans who go to “developing countries” and take up positions at NGOs. NGOs, for those not involved in the parlance, means “non-governmental organization” and essentially form what we in the biz call “civil society.” Civil society is the layer of organizations, associations, etc, all the social groupings that exist outside the state government and which help society function. The big thing in developing countries is to reduce the state presence and build these non-state organizations, and often these organizations are of foreign origin, e.g. the USA. In essence, you have an American group formed on foreign soil with the mission to “help” the local people in one way or another, but in particular towards the goal of “development.” This whole scenario reminds me of Thoreau’s quote: “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.” These groups’ basic function for the US is to pave the way for the development of a capitalist workforce and to win over locals to the US’ foreign policy. The idea is to educate, as well as to demonstrate the “soft power” of the US, in order to balance versus the “hard power” on display in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So this woman’s job, predictably, was in education – her group, of which she was the director, was to teach women how to read and provide this service free of charge. So her task was to manage the financial backend of this outfit, to secure funding so that the organization’s target – poor Shiite women in south Beirut – could come to the classes regardless of their income level. Her other task was to demonstrate that they provided these women good language training. Apparently her organization succeeded on both counts. What made me sick in all this was her categorical attitude towards Lebanese people, politics, and the involvement of the US. Shiites needed to be won over by the US, directed away from supporting Hezbollah, which essentially was a regressive entity seeking to destroy Lebanon’s democracy. The US needed to use “hard power,” to use the “stick” in order to show these regressive elements of Lebanese society that the US means business. To which, her friend replies, “but aren’t you here to pursue the soft power approach,” pointing to her role as an educator, a role that sought to educate and lift women out of poverty, and through this act of kindness rehabilitate the US’ reputation in south Beirut – this all consistent with the idea of “soft power”. There was no good answer for this. She was a typical cog in the US’ foreign policy machine. Though a transplant onto a foreign soil, she perceived herself an authority on what the local people need. And the blasé manner in which she spoke of all this made it sound like it was all so obvious, that none of what she was saying was questionable, that there is no possible interrogation of statements like “we need to develop their civil society” and “develop their economy”.
I sat silently, listening, feeling like an anthropologist who is studying the Orientalist in their native habitat.
