Nicole Prévost Logan

Agatha Christie stayed there. So did T.E. Lawrence, King Faysal from Iraq and General de Gaulle: at the famous Hotel Baron in downtown Aleppo, Syria. At that time, Aleppo was an exotic and cosmopolitan city where Arabic, Turkish, Kurdish and Armenian cultures coexisted.

A photo of the Citadel at Aleppo taken by Nicole Logan in 1957.

But all this was before the Syrian civil war.

Aleppo, like many other historical Syrian cities, is being crushed by daily bombings. The devastation is concentrated on this region with the intent of cutting off the road to the north toward Turkey. Today the Bab el Faraj – one of the main squares – is in ruins; the 11th century minaret of the Omayyad mosque lies on the ground among fallen stones; in July 2015, a bomb placed in a tunnel destroyed part of the citadel. The second largest metropolis of Syria is now a pile of rubble.

Another photo of the medieval Citadel — now partly in ruins after repeated bombings — from the author’s 1957 trip.

In a few magical pages, Mathias Enard, winner of the 2016 French Prix Goncourt for his novel entitled “Boussole” (compass), brings back to life the colorful Aleppo of a bygone era. His hero, Franz Ritter, is a Viennese musicologist fascinated by the Orient. He belongs to the group of “Orientalists” – archaeologists, linguists, historians, architects, diplomats, spies – writes Enard, “found side by side at Hotel Baron dabbling in the pleasure of Arab grammar and rhetoric.”

Enard’s rambling style, oozing with culture, takes the reader from Austria – the outpost of the West on the edge of the Ottoman empire – to the Middle East. Besieged by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1529, Vienna was threatened for the last time by the Ottoman Empire in 1683 in its final effort to flood the Danube valley.

Refusing to draw bitterness from the century-long tug-of-war with the Turks, Franz the hero of “Boussole” believes in cross-pollination between the Western and the Oriental worlds. As a musicologist he is able to detect in the works of Mozart, Rimsky-Korsakov, Schoenberg or Debussy, the influence of Arabic music’s harmony with its microtones and absence of tonal structure.

“The Moroccans” by Henri Matisse.

There has long been a tradition of literary and artistic attraction by the West toward the Orient. But it is Napoleon Bonaparte’s military campaign to Egypt (1798-1801), which opened the floodgates and made the 19th century West smitten with the Orient.

John Singer Sargent’s “Smoke of Ambergris.”

The “Orientalists” could be found around some of cultural centers like the French, German, English or American Institutes in Syria, Lebanon, Beirut or Baghdad. They were a privileged group, somewhat disconnected from the real world.

With some sarcasm but much honesty, the author acknowledges that the “Orientalists” took advantage of the comfort provided by the law and order of the police state of Hafez el Assad, father of Bachar. The “Orientalists” lived their dream, Enard writes, “under the amused look of the Syrians.”

At the present time Aleppo is at the epicenter of an imbroglio of violence and destruction and caught in the middle, tragically, are the refugees.

Why do we not take a brief pause and return to a more peaceful time when wars and religious intolerance were not destroying societies?

Nicole Prévost Logan

About the author: Nicole Prévost Logan divides her time between Essex and Paris, spending summers in the former and winters in the latter. She writes a regular column for us from her Paris home where her topics will include politics, economy, social unrest — mostly in France — but also in other European countries. She also covers a variety of art exhibits and the performing arts in Europe. Logan is the author of ‘Forever on the Road: A Franco-American Family’s Thirty Years in the Foreign Service,’ an autobiography of her life as the wife of an overseas diplomat, who lived in 10 foreign countries on three continents. Her experiences during her foreign service life included being in Lebanon when civil war erupted, excavating a medieval city in Moscow and spending a week under house arrest in Guinea.

Nicole Prévost Logan

During the month of January 2016, 55,000 migrants have crossed the Aegean Sea, or 21 times the number that made the same journey in January 2015.   In 2015, a total of 856,000 arrived in Europe, 90 percent of them coming from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Today, there is an urgency in the face of this inexorable phenomenon, which is bound not only to continue but also to increase.  It is expected that with the spring’s milder weather, there will be a surge of four times that number.  The net result — Europe has a window of six to eight weeks to manage the crisis.

Everybody agrees on what should be done to stop the flow of refugees:  end the war in Syria; defeat ISIS; provide financial help to  the countries that have taken in the most refugees, i.e., Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey;  police the Mediterranean by destroying the derelict boats ferrying the migrants and put a stop to the profitable business of the smugglers.  But there has been an absence of a leadership in carrying out a common plan of action. 

At the outset of the crisis Angela Merkel was the only one to offer a clear strategy.  For her, Turkey was the key country to work with since three quarters of the migrants pass through its territory.  She even made the trip to meet President Erdogan in Antalya.  She supported the European Commission’s decision to pay Turkey three billion dollars for keeping 2.2 million refugees.  The Turks demanded that amount every year, Europe settled for a bi-annual payment.  Driving a hard bargain, the Turks demanded that Europe wave its  visa requirements for Turkish nationals traveling to Europe. Ankara even asked for the resumption of  the process of adhesion into Europe – a demand the European Union is refusing unanimously today as it has for 52 years..

Last September, Merkel announced she would welcome 800,000 refugees in Germany but she had not predicted the ensuing surge and her policy has backfired.  She has become increasingly isolated as those countries, at first favorable to her policies, started closing their borders, practicing more restrictive policies toward the migrants, and expelling the ones not qualifying for the status of “refugees.”

After the alleged mass rapes of women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, German public opinion has become increasingly hostile to the presence of hundreds of thousands of young Muslim men not used to mixing with women in public places.  This event was reminiscent of the plight of many German women at the end of the Nazi period.  “The collective memory of outrage has overcome the compassion for the migrants,” declared Michaela Wieger, the French correspondent for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,  on a radio talk show Jan. 30.

ARTE, the Franco-German television channel gave an overview of the migrant’s situation on Feb. 2.  The three-hour- long documentary takes the viewer from Calais to Montenegro to Spain.

The situation in Calais in northern France is a festering problem.  The number of migrants, who live in abysmal conditions, has grown from 2,000 a year ago to 6,000.   Their lifeline is provided by humanitarian aid.  The mood is explosive and turning ugly.  The migrants are endangering the safety of the Euro-tunnel, which has been turned into a fortress.

The picture so far is positive in Germany, which finds in the migrants a much needed source of labor.  The town of Passau, Bavaria, which is situated on the Danube, is the hub of communications.  This is where the trains full of migrants converge. In an efficient manner, the new arrivals are greeted, trained and encouraged to learn German.  In Leipzig, workers are building wooden homes that can house 60 people.  The houses come in a kit and can be assembled in one day.  A German firm has outsourced the construction of containers – turned into living quarters – to a Polish factory.  The units cannot be built fast enough to meet the demand.  However, all the people interviewed in the ARTE program say that they have already reached their saturation point and will be unable to absorb more migrants

There is consensus today that the priority for Europe is to protect its external borders.  Greece is described as the number one “hotspot” whose job is to screen and process the migrants.  This task is colossal and it is understandable that Greece cannot cope.  Being reluctant to impose its own sovereignty, Brussels has decided to give the country three months to improve its work.  If it does not, a large contingent of  European Frontex officials and additional reserves will be sent as substitutes. 

In addition, the EU may decide to deactivate Article 26 of the Schengen treaty.  This will mean the suspension, for at least two years, of the free circulation of persons, goods and capital between the 28 member states.

Brussels would hate to make that very serious decision.  Schengen has been called an “accelerator of growth,” since its creation, says Wieger, but it was intended to function in normal times, which these clearly are not. The cost to reestablish internal borders will reach at least 100 billion Euros a year.  But, more importantly, the “Schengen Space”  is one of the main pillars of Europe.  Indeed, it is a core principle.   

“The problem of migrants is, in fact, in front of us,” commented Sylvie Kauffman, senior editor of the French daily Le Monde.  “Next, we will have to face massive flows of economic refugees  from Africa, due to its demography”.

It is a difficult time for Europe, and for the French in particular, to abdicate sacred principles such as the right of asylum and to see the very existence of Europe threatened.

Nicole Prévost Logan

About the author: Nicole Prévost Logan divides her time between Essex and Paris, spending summers in the former and winters in the latter.  She writes a regular column for us from her Paris home where her topics will include politics, economy, social unrest — mostly in France — but also in other European countries.  She also covers a variety of art exhibits and the performing arts in Europe.  Logan is the author of ‘Forever on the Road: A Franco-American Family’s Thirty Years in the Foreign Service,’ an autobiography of her life as the wife of an overseas diplomat, who lived in 10 foreign countries on three continents.  Her experiences during her foreign service life included being in Lebanon when civil war erupted, excavating a medieval city in Moscow and spending a week under house arrest in Guinea.