Syria is off the list
Syria went on the American terrorism list in 1979 and came off it on Monday. I wrote the careful version for Unblock Syria. This is the one where I'm happy, and still angry.
I spent last week writing a few thousand careful words for Unblock Syria about why this wouldn’t change anything on its own. Then Monday came and I sat there grinning at my laptop like an idiot.
Both are true. The careful version is over there and I stand behind it. This is the other one.
On Monday the State Department took Syria off the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Syria went on that list in 1979, which is the year the list started existing. It wasn’t added to something. It was one of the four names that made the thing a thing, along with Libya, Iraq and South Yemen. Iraq came off in 2004. Libya in 2006. South Yemen stopped being a country. Syria stayed, through Hafez, through Bashar, through the war, and was still there on Sunday.
I have never been alive for a day when it wasn’t.
I’ve spent two days trying to work out who to tell. My family knew before I did. Nobody at work is going to understand why I’ve reread the same short press release about nine times. It’s good news that doesn’t really convert.
And underneath the happy part there’s something I wasn’t expecting, which is anger. Forty-six years. All of my life and most of my parents’. Then it ended with a signature and a clock running out, the way a parking permit expires.
Hafez earned that designation and Bashar spent his entire rule re-earning it, and the cost of it never landed on either of them for a single day. It landed on everyone else. Two generations of people who had no say in any of it paid for what those two men chose to do, and are still paying, and will go on paying for years after this week.
Bashar is in Moscow. I don’t imagine he has any trouble opening an account.
The word
People assume it was the sanctions. Mostly it wasn’t the sanctions. It was the word.
The word is what a compliance officer sees when they type a country into a screening tool, and that is the entire mechanism. It’s why PayPal wrote back to us in March, said no, and cited sanctions Congress had already repealed in December. We pointed that out. They didn’t engage with it.
It cost people money. That gets lost when this is argued as a policy question. Somebody turns down a client because there is no way to be paid. Somebody can’t buy the course. Somebody runs a business for two years through a friend’s account in another country and loses all of it the week the friend has had enough. Every Syrian I know has built some part of their working life around this, and most of us stopped bringing it up, because what was anyone going to do about it.
That part is finished. Not the blocking. The blocking is another year of emails at least. But there is no longer a reason, and I have wanted to write that sentence for a long time.
What happens next
Most of it will be quiet. A company changes one line in a config file and tells nobody, and someone in Damascus tries again out of habit and it works, and they assume it always did.
What I want out of this is small and I’ve said it to about six people this week. A kid in Aleppo opens a laptop, makes an account, and nothing happens. No VPN. No cousin in Germany. No workaround to be proud of. A form that just submits.
Forty-six years for that.