In a white pantsuit, Hind Kabawat stood out a mile, the only woman in a lineup of 23 men in suits, all ministers of the interim Syrian government just sworn in, flanking the president.
“I want more women and I did tell the president the first day we met,” Ms. Kabawat said in an interview a few days after her appointment. “This is for me very important because it wasn’t 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 Syria’s Christian minority. It was taken as a sign that Syria’s new leader, President Ahmed al-Shara, was broadening his government beyond his tight circle of rebel fighters to include a wider selection of technocrats and members of Syria’s ethnic and religious minorities.
Long designated a terrorist by the United Nations Security Council, Mr. al-Shara became president in January after leading a rebel offensive that overthrew the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad last year. Since then he has consolidated power and been widely accepted as the de facto leader, even while coming under strong international pressure to combat terrorism and moderate his rule.
Ms. Kabawat, a diplomat’s daughter and university teacher, including in the United States, has a long record of work in exile among Syrian refugees and with the opposition to the former dictatorship. She had no qualms about accepting a role in Mr. al-Shara’s new government, she said.
“He listens to people, and this is the good thing about him,” she said of the president. “Every time there is a problem, we can send messages and they listen, they discuss. And this is their flexibility.”
“Don’t forget also that he’s young,” she added about Mr. al-Shara, 42. “They’re all young, by the way, and they know that. If they’re not going to be flexible, listen to others, they’re not going run a country that includes everybody. And if there is a mistake, we correct it together. We learn together and we empower each other. So he knows that he cannot run a country like Syria alone.”
‘We Can Help the People’
Before the rebels took Damascus, Ms. Kabawat had experience working with Mr. al-Shara during the eight years he ran the rebel-held northwestern province of Idlib.
After he took power, she helped convene a national dialogue conference, bringing together hundreds of representatives from all over Syria to draw up recommendations on a new constitution, a system of government and holding elections in the next five years.
She said she was glad to be offered a serious portfolio, overseeing what was formerly two ministries for social affairs and labor, now combined into one.
“It’s because of this ministry, that I accepted,” she said. “Because we can help the people.”
That won’t be easy. She has inherited a sprawling institution in a virtually bankrupt country. She admitted 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 from the rebel-led administration and opposition activists, including one who survived detention in Syria’s notorious prisons.
“We have to start work based on trust and cooperate with each other,” she told them. “Just remember who is our main boss, it is the Syrian people.”
Her mission, she said, was to use her experience in teaching conflict resolution and interfaith dialogue to reform the ministry from a tool of dictatorship into one that serves the vulnerable.
“Even if I leave after one year or whatever, I leave something good for a generation,” she said. “This is what I want.”
Falling Out With al-Assad
Ms. Kabawat, who declined to give her age, was born in India. She lived with her parents in London and Egypt, then moved back to Damascus for school, first at a Christian convent and then at the Lycée Francais Charles de Gaulle. She later earned a degree 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. These days she walks through twisting 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 degenerated into a civil war, she was forced to stay away.
Her exile began in 2011 after giving a speech in New York about Syria’s multiethnic society, which displeased Mr. al-Assad. She was told not to return. “He doesn’t like this narrative that Christians and Muslims can live together,” she said of the former president.
She tried to maintain a dialogue with Mr. al-Assad, who attended the same school as her, and whose wife she knew. When the protests broke out in 2012, she urged him to negotiate with the demonstrators.
“I called his mother, I spoke with his wife,” she said. “We sent him a clear message, don’t do this. You cannot kill civilians, because this is our job in life, to defend and to protect civilians. He didn’t listen.”
She had already started a teaching career, after obtaining degrees from the American University of Beirut and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and working as a lawyer in Canada.
She has directed the Syria program at George Mason University’s Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution since 2004, and the Syrian Center for Dialogue, Peace and Reconciliation in Toronto. Over the years she taught thousands of Syrian students the power of interfaith dialogue and conflict resolution. Some of them work with her today.
In 2015 she co-founded the Tastakel Association, a woman-led nonprofit organization focused on building a democratic society for all Syrians, although she has stepped away from the organization and resigned from her teaching post on joining the government.
She became well known to Syrians when she was named one of only two women alongside 30 men to the High Negotiation Committee, which was for several years the main body representing the Syrian opposition in the U.N.-supported peace process for Syria.
“It was very tough,” she said. “But we acquired very thick skins.”
Among the many statements welcoming her appointment, the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, a nonprofit 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 several meetings with The New York Times, she repeatedly called for the United States to lift sanctions on Syria, which were placed on the country during the Assad regime, but are still in force and are crippling the economy by restricting trade, investment and international transfers.
“If the U.S. keeps the sanctions on us, there will be lots of refugee women and children, without a future,” she said. “Lifting the sanctions is not anything to do with politics anymore, it’s to do with human beings.”
She said the Syrian government had met most of the conditions listed recently by a White House spokeswoman. “We’ve ticked a lot of boxes,” she said. “If there is something they don’t like, we can negotiate. Let’s sit down at the table and figure it out.”
“The important thing is we got rid of a war criminal,” she said. “We got rid of the big obstacles, now let’s get things done.”
Saad Alnassife contributed reporting from Damascus.
Carlotta Gall is a senior correspondent, covering the war in Ukraine.
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