Arab writers and intellectuals expressed their rejection of the meeting held by the permanent office of the Arab Writers Union in Damascus under the sponsorship of the Assad regime after a seven-year boycott.
As many by 150 Arab writers and intellectuals issued a statement denouncing the meeting as an “unacceptable collusion with the Assad regime which has been shedding the blood of innocent people in Syria and destroying its cities and towns over the past seven years and whose barbarity have plunged the country into the abyss of violence and mayhem.”
Signatories of the statement said that the meeting in Damascus “is a regrettable manifestation of the defeat of the Arab writer, his cowardice, false consciousness and of his shirking of his duty to criticize the repressive regimes instead of standing by the oppressed people and their causes.”
The statement regretted the conferees’ “ignoring of the fact that their meeting in Damascus means that they stand by the murderer and abandon the victims.” It deplored the move as a one that “deserved to be condemned by all the free people with a living conscience.”
Echoing the same stance, the Association of Syrian Writers described the Arab Writers Union’s meeting in Damascus as “an utter disgrace reflecting the massive intensification of shame, humiliation, rudeness and intellectual degradation being shown by people who are supposed to be immune or hostile to these qualities and by organizations that are supposed to represent the Arabic culture rather than the tyrannical regimes.” (Source: Syrian Coalition’s Media Department + Al-Sharq Al-Awsat)
