[Debate] Fadwa Suleiman -- bailing out of the "Syrian Revolution"?

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Strange that Fadwa Suleiman couldn't see what FSA was doing before
going to Homs when FSA's jihad promo videos featuring their exploits
were all over the Net long before she visited the city.

<http://bit.ly/HJEOmN>
Sunday, April 01, 2012
Fadwa Sleiman
I got this from a source:  "this is not from me- anonymous
this was filmed shortly before she left. it gets scary at about 01:00
[LINK: <http://youtu.be/-OIzMKg_YP8>] its in khaldiyeh in homs, one of
the areas where she stayed, and those are two very important
demonstration leaders in homs who in the past would have condemned
sectarianism and here are clearly not disturbed by it the younger
leader on the left is of course abdelbasit sarut, who was a friend of
hers, and she is reported to hav been very disappointed by this
incident".
Posted by As'ad AbuKhalil at 8:40 AM

<http://bit.ly/HplgZu>
Actress icon of Syrian revolt warns of sectarian warfare
By Deborah Pasmantier | AFP – Fri, Mar 30, 2012

Fadwa Suleiman, an actress who became an icon of Syria's revolution,
is furious that her country's peaceful protest movement has been drawn
into armed conflict with the regime.
She said she is saddened to see that "the revolution is not going in
the right direction, that it is becoming armed, that the opposition
which wanted to resist peacefully is playing the game of the regime
and that the country is heading for sectarian war".
Her bitter assessment comes as she sits in a cafe in Paris, where she
fled to last week after escaping from Syria.
"I didn't want to leave Syria but I didn't have the choice. I was
being threatened and I was becoming a threat for the activists who
were helping me," she said wearily.
Suleiman became a high-profile member of the opposition movement last
November when she appeared in footage from the rebel city of Homs that
was broadcast on the Al-Jazeera television news network.
The 39-year-old actress, well known in her homeland for her work in
theatre, films and television, belongs to the same Alawite religious
minority as President Bashar al-Assad.
She says that a major reason for her participation in the protests was
to do her bit to stop any slide into a sectarian war between factions
of the Sunni Muslim majority, Alawites or Christians.
"Everyone was saying that salafist Sunnis were going to attack the
Alawites," she said. So, in Homs last November, "I, an Alawite woman,
got up on the stage and declared that we were all united against the
regime."
Suleiman says that even before she publicly declared her opposition to
Assad, she had for months been discreetly working with dissidents in
Damascus and trying to persuade the Allawite-dominated cities Lattakia
and Tartus to join the protest movement.
She stayed in Homs from November to January and then went back to
Damascus, where she lived in hiding and put the fame she had garnered
with her acting to the service of the revolution.
She organised humanitarian aid networks, used Youtube and Facebook to
make appeals and denounce the regime's brutal crackdown, and organised
Alawite demonstrations.
Suleiman said it was during her time in Homs that she saw that Sunnis
who had initially carried weapons only to defend themselves, were
starting to use these arms to attack regime forces.
"It was then that I understood," she said.
And that is why she is furious that those "who are arming the Syrian
street are willing to do anything to take power in the same way that
Bashar Al-Aaasad is ready to do anything to stay in power."
"In the absence of a united opposition and of any real political
proposals, and faced with an international community which is
abandoning the Syrian people to the regime's war machine, today they
believe that the only way to make the regime fall is to take up arms,"
she declared.
Suleiman said that in her own case, she had to get out of the country
because she was being threatened all the time and her presence meant
that other activists might get arrested.
"I was changing my hiding place all the time, I was changing my mobile
phone, my Sim card, but each time the regime managed to locate me. The
area would be surrounded and searched. I was becoming a danger for
others," she said.
After she finally left Damascus, she had to cross on foot into Jordan
-- a country she says is "full of Syrian spies", and from there, with
the help of the French embassy, made her way to Paris.
But even in France she says she does not feel safe.
-- 
Yoshie Furuhashi
<http://mrzine.org/>