by Samar Yazbek
That’s how things are in this country…
My childhood is being stolen from me these days, as if I am being told, “Wake up, little girl, this isn’t the Neverland of Peter Pan.” I do not understand how a child’s stomach can rumble as it contracts in hunger, or how an entire city can be wiped out, only a few kilometres away.
5 May 2011
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These critical days are going to continue. My daughter will refer back to them like a scrap of tattered lace in the closet. Beautiful girlfriends will tell me how I stumbled like a cartoon character whenever I walked. I’ll continue roaming the streets, nervous, out of breath, frightened, biting my fingers. I’ll wilt like a wild mountain plant as I watch your priceless death. Years from now I’ll walk even more hunched over, but every day I bow to you, Oh courageous Syrians, and I’ll continue to bow down until my lips touch the dust left behind by your pure remains. I’ll always be ashamed of my temper when I think about the coolness on your faces in the moment when the bullet passed from the barrel into your chests.
These memories… images of the dead… are going to kill me.
I know that now, as I worry about going to sleep in my new bed after moving downtown. There are no people of conscience opposed to the regime who haven’t had to leave their homes. I know that most of my male and female friends who are former prisoners and spent long years in Syrian jails fled in order to avoid getting arrested, because they never want to go back to that savage injustice. Things were more complicated for me amidst the campaign of detentions and raids and house invasions, since I was also trying to protect my daughter even as she heard them call me a traitor and accuse me of being a spy. I wanted to wipe away the burdensome black days she had spent in the village, when I had to leave her there for fear she might be detained along with me when I left the house for the first time. We lived in fear, not fear in its familiar sense, but the kind of fear that makes me think about my daughter’s destiny and how I have endangered her, and about my family who have patiently and painfully suffered the consequences of my life in a conservative society, especially when I learned that my brother had started thinking about shooting himself after being subjected to attacks from people in the village because his sister was a traitor to the sect. My heart stopped for a few seconds. I realized this was a situation where I had to do whatever I could to protect them, despite the fact that they were with the regime. Like most Alawites, they had been intimidated by the security forces and the Ba‘thists into believing that the Sunnis would kill them all if Bashar al-Assad and his regime were to fall.
I was confused, as dry as a scarecrow. I couldn’t find the time to write in my diary and I started feeling there was no use in writing down what was happening to me anyway. But I soon discovered that these diaries were helping me to stay alive; they were my walking stick these days. I had to go on writing if only to keep my spirits up and to bear the pain of leaving home as I moved into an anonymous house downtown. I was sure they didn’t want to arrest me, just tarnish my reputation and make people believe that what I had written and what I had done recently had nothing to do with my rejection of the regime or with the fact that I wanted to record the truth of what was happening at the demonstrations, but rather was because I was part of a foreign conspiracy, that I was being paid to write, the same ridiculous talk they repeat on state television about the opposition. But how can I believe what they say when I have seen with my own eyes how they kill people, when I have seen the ‘armed gangs’ they are talking about? Every time I went out to the demonstrations to monitor what was happening I didn’t see anyone but peaceful protestors.
Now it is becoming more difficult for me to move around, not only because my daughter would shut the door on Fridays and burst out crying if I tried to go out, but because the security services know what I look like as well. Maybe the last women’s demonstration I went to convinced me that going into the street from here on was like walking myself to jail. Truthfully, I want to stay out of prison as long as possible, at least until my daughter finishes her exams and as long as I can be useful for the young people’s movement. I have been cut off from my family, I have been torn by them and from them. I know how much pressure is on them but I won’t pay the price for the tyranny and brutality of this regime. I will not surrender to their sectarian blackmail. And so, just like every other moment in my life when I have found myself at a crossroads, I bend towards this fate, towards my freedom. This is a moment like the one in which I ran away at the age of sixteen, like the one in which I divorced my husband and took my twoyear- old daughter to live in Damascus. It is like many moments I have experienced; it has nothing to do with any political position or bias toward one party or another. It is, in all simplicity, a tilting toward my own freedom – who I want to be, how I am going to think and write. But none of that means anything. In the end I am just a woman in this little world living alone with her daughter. How narrow this place is for my soul. I can almost reach my hand outside of it and touch the sky.
A woman like me makes life difficult.
Nevertheless I decided to go out into the street again a few days ago. I intended to stay far away from the women’s demonstration that had been called. About five hundred women were supposed to meet at Arnous Square, in the middle of the al-Salihiyyeh district, a sensitive location with great commercial significance. A demonstration like that, calling for an end to the killing and an end to the siege of Dar‘a, would present a challenge to the regime and its toadies. To me, it was a very important demonstration, because it had been organized by Syrian women. It was absolutely imperative for me to be there. One of my girlfriends refused to let me go alone, and even though she had decided to remain neutral she went down with me anyway. We arrived in the al-Salihiyyeh shopping area at around 2:30 p.m. There wasn’t much activity in the market, most of the shoppers were women, and it had to be admitted that the economic situation was starting to deteriorate. The shop owners were apprehensive about the current state of chaos. One of them told me, “If the situation continues like this for another month or two, we’ll be ruined, bankrupt!”
We strolled through the shops, casing the area; the most important thing we needed to find out was, where were the security forces centred? Did they know about the demonstration or had it remained secret? The demonstrators have stopped announcing exactly where they are going to gather, exchanging the time and place in passing on the street instead, as I used to do with the young men. Whenever we want to get the word out about something, we meet in the street for a few minutes, and then everyone takes off in a different direction.
There was no security presence. We searched the place thoroughly and went inside several stores, scrutinizing people’s faces and monitoring the movement of men in Arnous Square. I spotted some other women doing the same thing, even some male friends who were loitering around the square, as protection for the demonstrating women. I won’t deny the fact that I felt a little bad to see them hovering around the young women demonstrators like that, a light sadness, like homesickness, or the yearning for contact with another living creature. Human beings worried about others, people protecting other people, maybe it was the solitude and the extreme independence that made me feel this way, but I felt better when the women started assembling. I observed some male friends watching from a little bit further away. I left my girlfriend with another friend of ours, and the two of them moved aside as I lined up with the other demonstrators.
There weren’t a lot of people there, maybe 60, even though five hundred women had been expected. I knew a lot of the women there, all different ages and types, mostly unveiled. Veiled women also went out to demonstrate two days ago, but this demonstration was different. That’s the way the Syrian street is, no matter what happens it will continue to harbour diversity and difference; that’s part of its essence. The signs being held up brimmed with life, reading, Stop the killing, End the siege on Dar‘a and No to Death, Yes to Life. Signs count off
the basic truths of life, the ABCs of living. The women were all fired up, holding their signs up high and clear. We had only been marching for about ten minutes when a strange vibration rippled through the atmosphere. I could sense it; I was very aware of it as it was happening; I had developed the instincts of a threatened animal. I saw a man walking towards us, and another gesturing at me. Turning to leave the gathering, I started running, certain that they had recognized me. How could the security forces sprout out of the ground so suddenly? As I started running away, men pounced on the demonstrating women, beating and cursing and kicking them. They broke one woman’s finger and slapped her in the face before arresting her. The rest of the women took off, scattering.
How could those men attack us like that? How did they come so quickly? Has half of the Syrian population been turned into security forces? It always happens like that: men in civilian clothes, frightening in their appearance, surging up out of the ground. Syrians know who they are now, the Syrians who come out to demonstrations anyway. As I was running away, I saw my girlfriend and our young male friend. They pushed me out in front of them and we ducked down a side street. We ran as fast as we could until we found ourselves outside the al-Hamra Mosque. The young man left us there and went back to see what was happening with the other young women, after begging us to get out of there as quickly as possible because the security forces were fanning out on the side streets, arresting people and beating them up. We hurriedly jumped in a cab and asked the driver to stop at the edge of Arnous Square. I wanted to find out what was happening to the other women.
Even though only five minutes had passed between when I started running and when the taxi pulled up, I couldn’t figure out what had happened. Security forces had broken up the demonstration; they were the only ones left in the square; we are more likely to see them than ordinary people in the streets of Damascus these days. I told the driver to wait there as I phoned one of the women, telling her, “I’m parked off to the side. If anyone gets in trouble, bring them here.” She said she was fine, and that they had left the scene right away. Watching the square, I noticed one of the young women standing off to the side, where security was present, and suddenly three agents appeared, dragging a young man in his early twenties behind them, beating him violently. They smacked him in the face. Every blow is directed at the face, as though they mean to insult anyone they beat up. How else can a person be known except from his face? They kicked him, yanked his hair and cursed him, people just stood there watching; they were scared, panicked. The taxi driver asked, “Does that guy work for the government?”
I told him to get closer. I wanted to find out where they were taking him. The driver grumbled, but I said, “I’ll pay you double, get closer.”
The security forces stood by a small white van, but they couldn’t seem to get the young man inside; he was remarkably strong. But there were just too many of them. They beat him again and again, severely, his head got smashed against the side of the van, and finally they tossed him inside. Just then I cried out, I couldn’t stop myself. The man who had just been banging the young man’s head turned to face our car as soon as he heard my shout. I stared into his eyes, which were like every other murderer’s eyes that have appeared these days, eyes I had never seen before in Damascus. How could all those murderers be living among us? I know that I am repeating this expression a lot in my diaries, but I never get tired of it. The man’s complexion was dark and his features hinted at a kind of foreignness we were all starting to wonder about.
“Get out of here, quick,” I ordered the driver.
His eyes locked on the car window as we sped away. He would have needed only a few seconds to grab me by the throat, which is what his hand craved to do, because I had stuck my head out the window to watch what they did to the young man. The driver quickly drove us away, and after a little while he stopped and kicked us out of the car. My girlfriend was scared and so was I – my entire body was heaving. We looked out at the street and started running toward a friend’s office not far from where the demonstration took place. I thought we could stay there until things calmed down.
The women were trapped there for about ten minutes, getting beaten and kicked – one would get hurt, another would get arrested. A lot of other women managed to evade the security forces. They had said what they wanted to say. These were the best circumstances we had for demonstrating in Damascus: military checkpoints, tank barricades, machine guns, security forces, thugs and murderers – all of that just to confront people who wanted to step outside, unarmed, empty-handed except for their demands for liberty. In that moment I returned home with a whole lot of bitterness and not so much joy. Standing up and remaining steadfast to tell the regime what we wanted to say had only cheered us up for a few minutes.
Today I’ll prepare myself a little bit more for the next few days, for my new home and my undefined new life, for the financial burdens, more frustration, more of all these painful things. I have to be ready. Tomorrow is the Friday of Defiance, and it will be a turning point for the protest movement.
7 May 2011
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Today I sit down to write about yet another massacre. Tanks besiege Baniyas once again; they shell al-Baida and al-Qumsiyya. Baniyas is a ghost town. The army and the security shell the city on a sectarian basis, bombing only Sunni neighbourhoods. I try to make a phone call, but the lines are disconnected, so is the internet. People are surrounded on all four sides in a square that is no larger than four kilometres.
What’s going on? Is the regime occupying the cities? Do they intend to kill their own people in broad daylight?
Latakia is sliced in four. All communications between the cities are cut. We’re in a state of war, that’s right, we’re living in a state of war. My blood boils. I’ve lost my nerve. Let me try to clear my head, one siege has barely ended when another one begins. They start targeting women. Three women are killed in al-Marqab, outside Baniyas. My internet at home is shut down, and it’s going to be hard for me to get out to an internet caf. because the security forces monitor them, arresting boys and girls at random. I find it’s better just to stay home. What I am able to document on the Friday of Defiance is that a total of 30 people have been killed in all the Syrian cities, killed at demonstrations by the security forces’ bullets. I try better to understand the course the army is taking in its joint operations with the security forces, especially since Friday afternoon when they started shooting people at precisely the same moment in every Syrian city.
This policy is an obvious declaration of war. There is no longer any uncertainty – the regime has made up its mind to kill its own people without making any attempt to listen to what they have to say. The military and repression options are abundantly clear, and perhaps the worst possible scenario is becoming even clearer, the scenario I worried the country might fall into: a sectarian war, in which people are killed indiscriminately. That would mean Syria drowning in a pool of its own blood.
The endless telephone threats make me increasingly nervous. What more do they want from me? I keep silent, I have fled my house and am living in hiding, my relationship with my family has been severed, I even write in silence. Maybe they know I am actually moving around on the ground and among the people.
Now I want to calm down, to try and focus on the details of what has happened, on compiling more testimonies from the people who assembled in various places on the Syrian streets, but even that seems too difficult. The obstacles people face in getting in touch with each other, the security’s surveillance of the phone lines, the shock and the sadness that weigh upon the people – all these details are very difficult to deal with right now. I even cancel my appointment with a journalist I was supposed to meet after he had to flee his house for fear of being arrested. And so I have decided to spend these two days calmly studying the Syrian situation, from the beginning of the protest movement right up to this very moment: What had actually happened on the streets? And why had th
e regime started right away with such repressive tactics? How did the incident involving those young boys in Dar‘a first get started? What had Atef Najib done to them? And what about the echoes that still reverberated about Maher al-Assad opening fire on Vice-President Faruq al-Shar‘a? Before closing this file I am going to try and call people in Baniyas. The lines are still disconnected but I manage somehow to get through to someone who lives near the sea. They tell me they don’t know anything. I would guess they are afraid of the mukhabarat listening to Syrian mobile phones as well as their ordinary eavesdropping. We have all started keeping our cell phones more than ten metres away from us because we believe the security forces are carrying out surveillance even when our devices aren’t in use.
What kind of a siege is this?!
We breathe the security forces in the air.
It isn’t true that we don’t feel terror. After seeing how readily they shoot to kill, I tremble whenever there is an unfamiliar sound. I have somehow become both more fragile and stronger at the same time; that’s right, both those states have become deeply anchored in my heart, to the point that last night, as the wind blew fiercely outside, I heard rattling noises up on the roof and couldn’t fall asleep. The whole time I imagined someone coming. The senior officer warned me they would let me flop around like a fish, in pain and fear, before arresting me. I knew the regime would do the same thing in Baniyas that they had done in Dar‘a: besiege the city, detain people and kill them. But such a move worried me because Baniyas remained an epicentre of sectarian tension, which the regime had been working to feed recently. I know the people of Baniyas won’t remain silent forever, that they are arming themselves, and that a sectarian war is looming on the horizon. As usual, in addition to bombing and terrorizing the city, the regime will resort to turning the Alawites into human shields, taking advantage of the tension that was starting to intensify. Now I get a phone call from a friend, and suddenly information regarding what happened today in the village of al-Marqab is confirmed by people at the heart of the city and its people, including the names of the women who were killed in al-Marqab-Baniyas: Ahlam Huwisikiyyeh, 25; Layla Taha Sahyuni and Amina Taha Sahyuni, both in their forties; fifteen women wounded. The army had moved in and detained people in al-Marqab. When they finally pulled out, women came to demand the return of their detained children. The security forces and the shabbiha started indiscriminately shooting at the women. My source at the heart of Baniyas also adds: The bombardment isn’t only by tanks, there is also gunfire, and two men were killed in the heart of the city, one from the Rustum family and a second from the Qarqour family.