The Human Life Behind Headlines: Media Representation of Syria and Global Conflicts

Photo Courtesy: Opposition fighters shoot in the air as they celebrate in Damascus, Free Malaysia Today

Conflicts and mass atrocities in countries that are under-represented in Western media are often posed as statistics or as functions of regimes. Headline-grabbing narratives that distill tragedy into numerical value respond to the “Oh Dearism” that characterises modern responses to foreign events. 

Numerically, the news coming out of Syria is shocking: 3,000 people were freed from Saydnaya prison, but more than 100,000 people are still trapped underground; the 13-year civil war killed over half a million people, including 306,887 civilians; the refugee crisis displaced more than 14 million Syrians. Politically, the fall of Assad is massive: Russia and Iran lose a major regional ally; Israel gains a momentary advantage in the area; and Turkey may use the regime change to push Kurdish YPG forces further from its border. 

But the end of the war should be about neither abstractions nor regimes. It should be about the human lives lost and reclaimed. 

 The Assad regime imprisoned, tortured, and killed nearly 60,000 thousand people. Families rarely knew what happened to their loved ones. In 2013, a military officer codenamed “Caesar” smuggled 53,275 photographs of the prison system out of Syria. Human Rights Watch used the photos to identify evidence of widespread torture, starvation, and disease in detention centers as well as the bodies of 6,786 detainees. For decades, the Caesar photographs were the only way of knowing what had happened to some of the detainees. 

When the rebels threw open the doors to prisons, families began to search for the answers they had been denied for years. Local and global news outlets documented tearful reunions alongside fear and uncertainty as volunteers sifted through the prison chambers. Uncertainty over loved ones’ fates was mixed with knowledge of the horrifying conditions that they had faced. If they found only a body—or even just a photograph—as one father said to Reuters, “They killed us twice: when they arrested him and took him, and the second time when we saw the pictures… Are we not human?”

Now, scars and trauma mix with hope and elation in Damascus. For those who survived, a legacy of torture lives on their bodies. The Guardian reported, “one shaven-headed, shaking man in Sednaya had been so ill-treated he had lost his memory and struggled to talk.” And for the families of freed prisoners, they bear witness to the effect of Assad’s regime on too many levels. 

The outpouring of emotion that has characterised Syria in the past week should be a reminder that when consuming narratives of foreign events, human lives are at stake, not numbers on a page. Each tally that contributes to a death toll was a person whose loss leaves behind mourning and grief. When a genocide in Sudan is represented by only a number on the ninth page, when we relegate certain nations to the realm of forgotten crises, it creates a hierarchy of life whereby personhood--and the right to have your suffering heard--is determined by situation of birth. 

The desire to be heard and seen is part of humanity, so the turning away from testimonies of suffering functions only as another form of oppression. As a result, media has a moral obligation to provide pathways to people’s individual stories. 

That obligation is both to the people they report on and to the people who need to hear it. Stories contain more truth than statistics can. They speak to what we see in Syria - the complicated, interlocking, convoluted mess of hope and fear, joy and grief, celebration and mourning. They speak to how so many things can exist simultaneously without negating each other. The complete picture is never, and will never be, an easy one to depict. That, too, is humanity. 

‘Oh Dearism’ has gripped audiences for a reason: when hatred is rampant and violence seems the norm, it’s difficult to cope with the world. But the loss of empathy is not the answer. Human suffering requires human mourning, and if we do that together, human mourning can turn into fighting against injustice. 

So a message to the media: Syria should not be the outlier in representation. There are lives being lost all around the world due to political violence. Their stories deserve to be told.