Figure of the Syrian opposition in exile, she had devoted most of her career to the democratization of the Arab world, by multiplying initiatives at the crossroads of the university, political and militant worlds. She died on March 2 at the age of 64.
by Benjamin Barthe
Figure of the Syrian opposition in exile, Franco-Syrian political scientist Bassma Kodmani died Thursday March 2 in Paris, at the age of 64, following a long illness. Former spokesperson for the main anti-Assad platform, she devoted most of her career to the democratization of the Arab world, by multiplying initiatives at the crossroads of the university, political and militant worlds.
“Bassma was still full of projects, it was an institution alone,” said Salam Kawakibi, the director of the Parisian branch of the Arabic center for research and political studies, who assisted it in the world of the world. In many of her battles and shared with her the burn of the failure of the Syrian revolution. “Bassma was a mother, a mentor, a friend for many of us,” reacted on Twitter Mazen Gharibah, a young Syrian researcher installed in London.
Bassma Kodmani was born in 1958, in Damascus, in a family belonging to the Sunni nationalist big bourgeoisie. His father is a diplomat, penetrated by the Panarabes of the Baas party, the future springboard of Hafez al-Assad to power. His mother is the niece of Jamil Mardam Bey, one of the great actors in the struggle for the independence of Syria. 2>
Defense of the Palestinian cause
The life of the family changes after the Arab debacle in the Six-Day war against Israel in 1967. For having suggested before his supervisory minister that the government should resign, the father is dispatched six months to prison. When he left, he fled to Lebanon with woman and children, before joining London then Paris.
This is where Bassma studies political science, at the turn of the 1970s and 1990s, a journey crowned by a doctoral thesis devoted to Palestinian refugees. First a researcher at the French Institute of International Relations and then at the Ford Foundation, in 2005 she founded the Arab Reform Initiative, a reflection group working on the question of democratic transition in North Africa and the Middle East.
During these years, the defense of the Palestinian cause is one of the red sons of Bassma Kodmani’s activities, whose first husband is a Palestinian journalist, Nabil Darwich. But at the minute when the Syrian revolution broke out, in March 2011, its native country catches up with it. In October 2021, she became the spokesperson and the head of external relations of the Syrian National Council, who brings together liberal opponents, Muslim Brotherhood and militants in the field.
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