When I heard from a Syrian friend that the city of Osnabrück in Germany had awarded the prominent Syrian poet and intellectual Adonis the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize 2015, my first thought was: strange, there is still war in Syria. The orgy of systematic destruction, terror and expulsion is now frightening the whole world.

I then wondered whether it was a cultural, literary or political prize. A prize that bears the name Remarque will basically always be about war and peace. And since war and peace are expressions of political conditions, we are dealing with a political prize par excellence.

Like many other Syrian intellectuals, whether at home or in exile, the award of this prize to Adonis seemed to me at this very time to be an affront to Syria and to the best that its culture has produced, to the insurgency, to the bravery and the victims of the peaceful activists, to the masses of suffering displaced persons and refugees.

What Free Elections?

Adonis had already taken a first strike against Syria and the Syrians during the peaceful initial phase of the uprising, when he described Bashar al-Assad in an open letter as the “elected president” of Syria. This sparked a storm of indignation as there have been no free elections in Syria since 1963 and Bashar al-Assad is only president of the republic as the offspring of a militarybacked dynasty. Mockery and malice were dumped on Adonis, and he had to put up with the sarcastic question of which free elections he had given his vote to the Assads and whether he was foolish enough to believe that his vote had made a difference.

He, who from the outset stood on the dictator's side, recently for the second time spoke derogatorily about Syria and the Syrian people. In an interview with the Beirut daily “As-Safir” he claimed that a third of the Syrian population had “emigrated”. This, too, is an obscene distortion of the facts when he describes the desperate refugees fleeing from poison gas, barrel bombs, rockets and cold-blooded massacres as ordinary emigrants who turn their backs on their own country for the sake of a better life. How deep can you sink? Because a third of the Syrian population has just emigrated, there can be no question of an uprising against a tyrannical regime, the poet, who was born in 1930, continues.