Hassan Ammar AP/Press Association Images. All rights reservedIn this interview with The Intercept, Yassin Al-Hajj Saleh re-opens the debate about the position of large sectors of the left towards the revolution in Syria, their tacit or outright support for the Assad regime and Russian intervention, and the reproduction of the 'war on terror' discourse. Arab Awakening is republishing this interview for the importance of Yassin Al-Hajj Saleh's voice in the ongoing debates about Syria, the left, and the Middle East in general.
Yassin al-Haj Saleh has lived a life of struggle for his country. Under the Syrian regime of Hafez al-Assad, he was a student activist organizing against the government. In 1980, Saleh and hundreds of others were arrested and accused of membership of a left-wing political group. He was just nineteen years old when a closed court found him guilty of crimes against the state. Saleh spent the next sixteen years of his life behind bars.
“I have a degree in medicine, but I am a graduate of prison, and I am indebted to this experience,” Saleh said, sitting with us in a restaurant near Istanbul’s Taksim Square. Now in his 50s, with white hair and a dignified, somewhat world-weary demeanor, Saleh, called Syria’s “voice of conscience” by many, has the appearance and bearing of a university professor. But he speaks with passionate indignation about what he calls the Assad dynasty’s “enslavement” of the Syrian people.
