From Akram, Angry Arab's correspondent in Syria:
"Not only
Russia, China and Iran are backing the miserable Syrian regime occupied in
"cleansing" this village or that quarter "from the abomination of the terrorist
gangs". The summer, in turn, offered a great help by removing the burden of many
living issues from the exhausted shoulders of the Syrian government. But
September arrived "unexpectedly" this year, and with it emerged two upsetting
issues: the beginning of the school year and the surge in demand for the heating
fuel. The ball is back to the government's court
.
At
exactly the same date fixed by Hazwan Al-Waz, the Syrian minister of education,
schools opened their doors for more than five million students and 385
thousand teachers… theoretically… in practice the number is far less if we count
300 thousand (1.5 million people considering that 5 is the average number of the
Syrian family members) displaced families inside Syria and about 250 thousand
refugees in the neighboring countries let alone the fact that unspecified number
of parents are considering not to send their children to school due to the bad
situation in at least eight of the fourteen Syrian provinces. Furthermore, many
teachers feel confused: technically, they must attend their work under the risk
of being subject to disciplinary penalties, but they really don't know what to
do when their schools are destroyed, occupied by refugees or located in areas
where the fighting is still raging. To all these cases, the Ministry of
Education has one answer: mute.
But more
problematic is the heating fuel availability and price, a matter that many
consider was, partly at least, in the origin of the Syrian uprising, when the
government tripled the diesel prices between 2008 and 2010 causing the first
wave of mass displacement in Syria ever since the Six-Days war, when thousands
of farmers of Hassakeh Province, unable to afford the cost of pumping irrigation
water from the artesian wells due to the high fuel price, left their lands and
headed towards the poverty belts surrounding Damascus and Aleppo.
Diesel
prices are skyrocketing: only a lucky man can buy it at 30-40 Syrian pounds per
liter (quantity and quality aren't guaranteed) while the official price is only
16. As the winter approaches, the Syrian government is considering the available
options to deliver the diesel and at what price. First, there was a strange
solution, called the "intelligent card", that no one, including the government,
understands exactly. But the concept died quickly, when the government
discovered that the infrastructure required for such a solution exists in
Finland only, and that only the Finns can adapt themselves to it perfectly!!! So
it was decided to return to the traditional method of trade: fuel for liquid
money, though the terms of this exchange are, so far, vague.
Then the
same old story. As in every year, rumors and speculations about the fuel price
are widely spread among the desperate Syrians. According to one of them, a
ministerial committee is charged with the task of identifying the fair price and
that the committee has decided to float the prices. The rumor was denied, or,
more precisely, not confirmed by the secretary of the council of ministers, who
said that such a committee doesn't exist and that it's only a matter of "ideas
on the table" and that the government is "considering multiple options to
deliver the subsidized materials, the diesel included, to the citizens"!!!
Another rumor according to which, each family have the right to buy 200 liters
of heating diesel with the subsidized price.
So the fuel
problem spins and spins without anyone posing the right question: where is the
free Russian and Iranian oil."
