The concert in Palmyra

The music that was played in front of Palmyra by the great orchestra of Valery Gergiev, the director of the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg, was not good at all. However there were a great conductor, and between the ancient ruins the great music by Bach and Prokofiev resonated. The title of the soirée was very inspiring: prayer for Palmyra.

Hundreds officials and people chosen among the Syrian officers and the Russian military advisers have listened to the concert, after hearing a televised message from the Kremlin, by Vladimir Putin.

The aim was to celebrate the liberation of the archaeological site from the occupation of the ISIS, which with its fanaticism had destroyed invaluable relics, such as the Bel temple and the roman amphitheatre, and murdering dozens people, including the museum's director Khaled al-Asaad, who tried alone to save the art heritage, hoping to convince the new occupiers to spare such a precious architectural treasure of the ancient times.

The music was not at all good because that monument, which was fortunately saved from the destructions of the new barbarians, was not restituted to the humanity, but rather to the regime of Assad, who cares more about bombing the rebels, dissidents and hospital than about seeking pacification inside the country and creating a democratic front to free the part of the country that is occupied by the ISIS. 

Assad today loves presenting himself before the world and the remnants of the Syrian population as the secularist who protects minorities, against ISIS' murderous fanaticism. 

It is all false. Not only the Syrian dictator used nerve gas against his own populace, but from the very beginning of the peaceful protests, he tried to politically exploit the ISIS to keep his power, freeing from jails, crammed with opponents, quite a lot of Islamist fundamentalists. 

Only a few people know that near Palmyra, before the ISIS occupation, there was one of the most harrowing prisons where hundreds prisons were massacred. Only a few Western visitors of those marvellous archaeological sites realised that a few steps away from the Roman colonnades such atrocities were committed. Before, in Palmyra the destruction of humanity was carried out, then the destruction of monuments, now people celebrate the liberation of the site but the persecution and murder of people still go on. 

I would like to remember an episode concerning Gariwo and the campaign we have run all over Italy to remember the martyrdom of such a Righteous man as Khaled al-Asaad.

When we held the ceremony in Milan, in the Garden of the Righteous, to celebrate his courage, we received a message from Damascus, where the Syrian archaeologist's most important coworkers told us they could not participate in the celebration as among the organisers there was also Milan's Jewish Community.

Their justification was that had they come to Italy upon the invitation of people including the Jews, their lives would be put at risk. 

But whom did they feel threatened by? Not certainly by the ISIS, which was then very far from Damascus. 
We can find an answer in the visit of 2001 of Pope John Paul II to Syria. 

As remembers Shady Hamadi in his book Esilio dalla Siria, when the pontiff went down the airplane staircase, before entering the Great Omayyadi Mosque, everybody pretended not to hear Assad tell His Holiness that Catholics and Syrians had to be united in enmity against the Jews, as those had tried to kill Jesus. 

This is the man who seized Palmyra again. Even the most beautiful music shall not make us forget.