Several students took an unlikely trip during winter break, flying to Syria to meet with political officials in the increasingly conflict-ridden Middle-Eastern nation.
The group, a part of Tufts' New Initiative for Middle East Peace (NIMEP), spent ten days meeting with dignitaries ranging from the Syrian Minister of Expatriates to Khaled Meshal, Hamas' exiled political leader in Damascus.
Meeting with such controversial figures was an impressive feat, according to Tufts senior Mohammed Al-Ghanim, a co-coordinator of the trip. He explained that getting the opportunity to speak with Meshal was uncommon, especially for a group of Western students.
"It was a very important benchmark for us to be able to do that," Al-Ghanim said.
Meshal's political party, Hamas, is a militant Islamic group that controls the Gaza Strip. The United States and a number of other Western governments consider the party a terrorist group. Meshal himself has claimed responsibility for the second intifada, the major, ongoing wave of violence between the Palestinians and Israelis that began in September 2000.
NIMEP members were pleasantly surprised to find that Meshal was so receptive to a student group from America. While the meeting was scheduled to last 25 minutes, it lasted for two hours.
Sherman Teichman, director of the Institute for Global Leadership (IGL) and a member of NIMEP's advisory board, said he was impressed with the mission's outcome.
"[The students] got remarkably interesting, candid comments" from their interviewees, he said.
According to Teichman, the interviewed dignitaries' honesty surprised the students, who had expected to be met with propaganda supporting Syria's government.
"[Syria] does not have a civil society like other countries we have sent [students] to. We made sure they were knowledgeable of that," Teichman said.
Al-Ghanim agreed with Teichman. "We worried about the candidness of the people we met with," he said, but several of the officials with whom the students met expressed disagreement with some of the Syrian government's policies.
According to Al-Ghanim, as recently as seven years ago these dignitaries would not have made such comments for fear of punishment by the extremely repressive government.
"The reform process that has been going on allowed this [dialogue] to happen," he said.
Determining whether to meet with Meshal was a difficult decision for trip leaders to make, especially because the NIMEP group contained members of many different religions, including some who were Jewish.
But NIMEP members said they believed it was important to meet with him. They insisted that a lasting peace in the Middle East required the assistance of everyone, including those whom some label as terrorists.
"It was necessary for us to have conversations with [people] of other viewpoints," Al-Ghanim said. "It was a very important step to realize that there are viewpoints that we don't understand."
Funded and supported by the IGL, NIMEP is an outreach initiative dedicated to finding a solution to the historical conflict in the Middle East through international travel and research.
January's trip was just one of NIMEP's annual fact-finding missions, in which each member of the group conducts individual research throughout the stay. In previous NIMEP trips, students visited Israel and the West Bank in 2003 and Turkey in 2005.
When planning its trips, NIMEP seeks to put together a diverse group that is representative of varying religious beliefs and ethnicities. This year's trip included students ranging from freshmen to graduate students at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
According to senior and co-coordinator of the trip Jacki Silbermann, Syria was a logical place to visit following the group's stay in Lebanon last spring.
"It's very hard to look at Lebanon without Syria," Silbermann said. "Syria is becoming more and more of a key player in the Middle East. Everyone we talked to in Syria wants the world to know that Syria is not a bad country and a country that wants to develop."
In addition to meeting with Meshal, the NIMEP group was able to obtain a UN-guided tour of the Golan Heights, a disputed area between Israel and Syria. Such a tour is usually not offered to students.
"I think we broke a lot of barriers as far as what students are allowed to do," Al-Ghanim said.
The group will offer the findings from the trip during a presentation near the end of the semester. Their research will also be featured in the spring edition of the group's journal, NIMEP Insights.
The NIMEP students were not the only people to spend time abroad through the IGL over winter break. According to Teichman, the IGL sent 70 students to 15 countries including China, Israel, Guatemala, India, Peru, Bolivia and Uganda.
"The students are amazing, and they all have to do preparation," Teichman said. "What you need is to encounter the world."
