In a white pantsuit, Hind Kabawat stood out a mile, the only woman in an arrangement of 23 men in suits, all the ministers of the Interim Syrian government just sworn, flanking the president.
“I want more women and I told the president the first day we met,” said Mrs. Kabawat in an interview a few days after her appointment. “This is very important to me because it was not very comfortable to be there.”
Her appointment as Minister of Social Affairs and Labor has been welcomed by many in Syria and internationally, both as a woman and as a representative of the Christian minority of Syria. It was considered a sign that the new leader of Syria, President Ahmed al-ShararaWas widening his government outside his tight circle of rebel hunters with a broader selection of technocrats and members of the ethnic and religious minorities of Syria.
For a long time as a terrorist by the Security Council of the United Nations, Mr. Al-Shara became president in January After leading a rebel offensive that Bashar al-Assad dictatorship oversore Last year. Since then he has consolidated power and is generally accepted as the de facto leader, even while under strong international pressure to combat terrorism and to moderate his rule.
Mrs. Kabawat, the daughter and university teacher of a diplomat, including in the United States, has a long work of work in exile among Syrian refugees and with the opposition against the former dictatorship. She had no trouble accepting a role in the new government of Mr. Al-Shara, she said.
“He listens to people, and this is the good thing about him,” she said about the president. “Every time there is a problem, we can send messages and listen, they discuss. And this is their flexibility.”
“Don’t forget that he is young,” she added to Mr Al-Sharara, 42. “They are all young, and they know that. If they will not be flexible, listen to others, they will not run a country that everyone comprises. And if there is an error, we correct it together.
‘We can help people’
Before the rebels took Damascus, Mrs. Kabawat had experience working with Mr. Al-Shara for the eight years that he led the rebels in northwestern Idlib.
After taking over power, she helped convene a national dialogue conference, bringing together hundreds of representatives from all over Syria to draw up recommendations about a new constitution, a government system and elections in the next five years.
She said she was happy to be offered a serious portfolio, which supervised what was previously two ministries for social affairs and labor, now combined into one.
“It is because of this service that I accepted,” she said. “Because we can help people.”
That will not be easy. She has inherited a vast institution in an almost bankrupt country. She admitted that she did not yet know how many employees she had under her, nor the size of her budget.
On her first day at the office, she gathered her department heads, a collection of bureaucrats from the former regime, officials of the administration and opposition activists led by rebels, including someone who survived detention in the notorious prisons of Syria.
“We have to start working based on trust and working together,” she told them. “Just remember who is our most important boss, it is the Syrian people.”
Her mission, she said, was to use her experience in teaching conflict solution and inter -religious dialogue to reform the ministry of an aid of dictatorship in an aid that the vulnerable serves.
“Even if I leave after a year or whatever, I leave something good for a generation,” she said. “This is what I want.”
Al-assad
Mrs. Kabawat, who refused to give her age, was born in India. She lived with her parents in London and Egypt and then moved back to Damascus for school, first in a Christian monastery and then in the Lycée Francais Charles de Gaulle. She later obtained a diploma in economics at Damascus University.
Her heart is in Damascus, especially the narrow streets of the old city, where she raised her two children – she has a granddaughter – and still lives with her husband, a businessman. Nowadays she walks through rotating alleys in the morning to reach her car to go to work.
For 14 years, she said, she dreamed of returning to smell the orange blossom in her courtyard. But after the repression of pro-democracy protests in a civil war, she was forced to stay away.
Her exile began in 2011 after giving a speech in New York about the multi-ethnic society of Syria, who dissatisfied Mr. Al-Assad. She was told that she didn’t have to return. “He does not like this story that Christians and Muslims can live together,” she said about the former president.
She tried to maintain a dialogue with Mr. Al-Assad, who visited the same school as she and whose wife she knew. When the protests broke out in 2012, she encouraged him to negotiate with the demonstrators.
“I called his mother, I spoke with his wife,” she said. “We have sent him a clear message, do not do this. You cannot kill citizens, because this is our job in life, to defend and protect citizens. He did not listen.”
She had already started an educational career, after obtaining diplomas from the American University of Beirut and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and worked as a lawyer in Canada.
Since 2004 she has directed the Syria program in the Center for World Religions of George Mason University, Diplomacy and Conflict solution, and the Syrian Center for Dialogue, Peace and Reconciliation in Toronto. Over the years she learned thousands of Syrian students the power of inter -religious dialogue and conflict solution. Some of them work with her today.
In 2015, she was co-founder of the Tastakel Association, a non-profit organization led by women aimed at building a democratic society for all Syrians, although she left the organization and resigned from her educational post about the government.
She became known to Syrians when she was named one of only two women next to 30 men to the High Domentiation Committee, which for a few years was the main organ that represented the Syrian opposition in the non-supported peace process for Syria.
“It was very difficult,” she said. “But we have acquired very thick skins.”
Under the many explanations that welcome her appointment, the Ransbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, a non -profit in New York, said her experience Made her a “strong fit” to help secure a more peaceful future for Syrians of all backgrounds.
‘Let’s get things done’
In the course of various meetings with the New York Times, she repeatedly called on the United States to eliminate sanctions against Syria, which were placed in the country during the Assad regime, but are still in force and paralyzing the economy by limiting trade, investments and international transfers.
“If the US preserves the sanctions for us, there will be many refugee women and children, without a future,” she said. “Lifting the sanctions is no longer to do with politics, it has to do with people.”
She said that the Syrian government had met the most conditions that were recently mentioned by a spokeswoman for the White House. “We have checked many boxes,” she said. “If there is something that they don’t like, we can negotiate. Let’s sit at the table and find out.”
“The most important thing is that we have lost a war criminal,” she said. “We have lost the big obstacles, let’s get things done now.”
Saad Alnassife Contributed report from Damascus.
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