A Woman in the Crossfire

by Samar Yazbek

  I believe that the idea of presenting a political alternative to the regime through establishing an opposition political bloc does not have to take place with the agreement and under the auspices of the regime itself, even if mine may seem to be an extreme and inflexible position. But I am not at all interested in the political game plan or this dress rehearsal between some parts of the opposition and the regime. I am pessimistic, one hundred percent certain that it will not amount to much of anything, to say nothing of the fact that the absence of activism and political mobilization makes the idea of democratic deliberation and difference of opinion among various wings of the opposition very difficult. Like everyone else, I carefully follow what they are saying and it seems to me that some symbols of the opposition now bear the mark of authoritarianism that had been planted over many decades of arbitrary rule.

  25 June 2011

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  Today the phone threats start up again in an awful way. I am terrified to be so closely monitored. The strange thing is that I am starting to become convinced that what the senior officer is doing violates all boundaries. A single nod makes me shut my Facebook account. Less than fifteen minutes after posting a comment about how the Makhlouf family had sold the free trade zone to Kuwaiti investors I get a phone call from him, telling me, Close your account or else I’ll come bomb your building with artillery that will erase you from the face of the earth.

  I close the account, thinking about what I should do next – now even writing on Facebook is forbidden? I am embarrassing them. I know I have been making them nervous and I think that what the crazy officer is doing to me is a sort of revenge against those in the opposition who belong to the Alawite community. Shall I stop watching Syrians get killed and fall silent? Am I going to give up the revolution of the poor and the marginalized? That would drive me to madness. I will not just sit by and watch everything going on all around me: killing and intimidation, imprisonment and disappearing and urban annihilation. How can a person remain neutral in moments like these? How can I be so far from the daily torment I see everywhere I go? All these thoughts make me an even more nervous creature. So they will not come into contact with my extreme anxiety I steer clear of my friends, focusing instead on transcribing the interviews I had conducted.

  Today I am working on the story of a young Alawite man from a village outside of Jableh who requested extreme secrecy and discretion regarding his identity, not only before the fall of the regime but even after as well. Before we even began our interview he asked me, “Do you actually think that after the fall of Bashar al-Assad you’ll be able to just go back to your normal life on the coast? If so, you’re mistaken. Everyone thinks you’re a traitor and it’s going to be years before you can go back there safely.” His words horrified me and I scarcely needed any more horror after living outside of society and convention and the norm for this long. I feel horror though, as this is the first time I have ever been targeted by an entire sect, or at least by most of them, since I know a lot of activists in the uprising who belong to the Alawite sect.

  The Story of the Alawite Young Man

  “In a village near Jableh they waged a campaign against the people of Jableh. Before that there hadn’t been bullets or any substantial military deployment. The governor was going to meet with the people of Jableh and we in the Alawite villages heard that he had even met with demonstrators who insulted and chastised him, that they were nothing but a bunch of thugs who had beaten up the driver of the head of this region and smashed his car. Those turned out to be rumours spread by guys from the Ba‘th Party and security forces. On the day of the massacre in Jableh, 25 March 2011, there was calm in the city and for three days I had not heard any news or any gunfire.

  At 4:15 we heard the sound of heavy gunfire near our village. I went out and saw armed men opening fire into the air, so we ran to get weapons from the village and then blocked the international road facing in their direction. We heard rumours every day being spread by the Ba‘thists and the security forces to the effect that the Sunnis of Jableh were going to attack us and that we had to get ready. The people of the villages got scared and took up arms. A man from the mukhabarat showed up and shouted at the people of the village, asking them to go home. The gunfire continued and the people went back to the village. Some of them stayed behind to guard the entrances and exits of the village with guns. Every half hour, a car would pass by with armed men shooting at the committees that were protecting the village. They were firing indiscriminately and one man from our village was wounded. That night they captured one of the armed men and said he was one of the wanted people. We believed he was one of the Sunnis who wanted to kill the demonstrators but it turned out he was from a small village near al-Qardaha and that he was a well-known weapons smuggler. During this time, while bullets rained down on the roads, leaflets were distributed accusing you of being a collaborator, inciting people to kill you.”

  He fell silent and stared into my eyes. As I tried to ignore his talking about what the security forces had done to me, I felt a searing line slowly creeping along my back.

  The young man continued: “It’s a strange coincidence for the leaflets to be handed out under such conditions. The security services in the coastal region in particular have a criminal and vengeful mentality. They were furious. They seemed to have some kind of vengeance against you, just like the Christians have against Judas!”

  He stared into my eyes as he said this, then apologized and continued, “I’m sorry, but I was there the day they handed out the leaflets stirring people up to kill you.”

  I remained silent, I didn’t want him to notice my trembling fingers, which I hid inside the notebook.

  He went on: “The next day rumours got started about weapons that were found in Jableh, about operations that had been planned to exterminate the Alawites, how the army had moved into Jableh, killed all the armed men and discovered their weapons cache. Jableh was a closed city night and day, most of the Alawites had left and we were forbidden from going down into the city. We were frightened by the heavy daily gunfire, which would start at ten o’clock at night and end at three in the morning. It was happening in the al-Fayd neighbourhood. Then the people of Jableh started to demonstrate and things escalated. We heard that the Sunnis were demonstrating, cursing Imam Ali bin Abi Talib and the president.

  Even though some of the Sunni and Alawite notables were trying to staunch the crisis, the escalation was an obvious consequence of the rumours. Alawite and Sunni clerics walked arm in arm in a joint procession against sectarianism and arrived together at the al-Hasan Mosque in the al-Amara neighbourhood. A delegation from the Sunni community went to a mourning ceremony in the villages of Zama and Harf Matwar, and the imam from the Sunni mosque went along as part of the mourning delegation. People from both communities were trying to mitigate sectarian strife but the next day rumours would spread that stirred it back up again, like making up stories about Sunni men deflowering Alawite women and then spreading them among the Alawite villages. Of course nobody knew who was actually behind the rumours; they would materialize like ghosts, then become unimpeachable.

  Rumours were the main source of information for many Alawites because the internet had been blocked for the most part inside of Jableh, and al-Dunya station and Syrian television were the only other news sources. Obviously someone wanted to ratchet up the sectarian tension, and within two days of the massacre people had become convinced that the army presence was necessary in order to protect the Alawites from the Sunnis. Even some of the Sunnis were convinced by that narrative. During that time, supporters of the Assad family were present in Jableh and making daily visits. We heard rumours that the demonstrators were hitting the army with dynamite and small arms and that the tension between the Alawites and the Sunnis was intermittent, but the spread of rumours wouldn’t stop.

  The demonstrators started going out every day and all we heard about their demonstrations was how they wanted to attack and
curse the Alawites, how they were calling for them to be killed. The security forces and the Ba‘thists kept distributing leaflets in the villages along with the names of people from Jableh who were wanted. The leaflets said they were armed men and they included both their names and their mothers’ names. The security forces passed out leaflets in which they claimed to have captured three Israeli officers, explaining that this was the reason why the army had moved in and opened fire. Then a wild rumour that frightened the Alawites spread, saying there were ten Sunni militiamen with heavy weaponry heading for the Alawite-majority Jableh suburbs. Alawite shopkeepers would close up their stores in fear at four or five in the afternoon even as two Alawite notables then opened their own shops and went back to work. The Sunni stores were all closed, and from then on it became a tradition for Alawites to boycott Sunni businesses, and Alawites who wanted to shop in Sunni stores became afraid of the other Alawites.”

  The young man stopped talking.

  I remember Jableh and I remember the Sunni-majority square. We never thought about the fact that they were Sunnis. We bought from them anyway. The people of the village had all the purchasing power. What united those businessmen with the Alawites was mutual interest and need. I never dreamed that things would become this strained between them.

  The young man continued: “After these incidents the number of armed Alawites grew, suddenly you would see weapons in the villages. When the security forces saw Alawites carrying weapons, they would look the other way. Meanwhile the security forces would expose Sunni men, including doctors and other upright and honest people just for making humanitarian contributions to those who were wounded during the demonstrations. One time they handed out leaflets with the name of a dead man, but for the Alawites these names had become killers and armed men and criminals who wanted to slaughter them, as the security forces and the Ba‘thists and the shabbiha claimed in their flyers. They would put the names of real criminals alongside respectable people. They were deadset on drumming up slander and sectarian strife between Sunnis and Alawites by smearing the reputation of Alawite women. This heightened the fear among the people of the Alawite villages. This one time they spread a rumour in the villages that a porno film of a Sunni man with Alawite women was being circulated among the demonstrators. The incitement reached the most horrible and filthiest point you could imagine. There’s something else I forgot to mention. Before the Jableh massacre, a man from the al-Assad family came to the village of Bustan al-Basha and started handing out weapons to people for free, but there was a catch. He would take their IDs. In the village of Damsarkho outside Latakia, the same guy showed up and asked people if they needed weapons, but the people kicked him out.”

  The young man stopped here as I finish writing down what he said. It’s time for my meeting with one of the guys from the coordination committees.

  We have to organize something for the uprising support fund, which is supposed to be made available to the young people of the coordination committees. Connecting this fund directly to the young people is going to require some precision. I noticed how slow the movement was in keeping up with the movement of people on the street, ordinary people, most of whom had no education or training at all but who came out in defence of their dignity to demand their freedom. And so most of the time I would grumble about that slowness, but I didn’t look at things that way for long. It is imperative to start mobilizing immediately in support of the people.

  Last week I met one of the important young men involved in the coordination committees. He expressed concern that this project was going to go the way of so many other ideas they had discussed which ended in failure. With great determination he said, “We want real support, everybody says they’re going to support us, but we haven’t seen a cent. Real financial support would cover three main causes: monitoring the conditions of prisoners and their families, paying doctors and organizing the demonstrations.” In that young man’s eyes I saw determination and eagerness that pained me more than it brought me joy. That’s right, I saw vigour and movement and action in his eyes whereas I had seen lethargy and bureaucracy and foot-dragging among some personalities in the opposition, both women and men alike. So in my meeting with the other guy today I seized the opportunity to put him in touch with a group of young women active in organizing the support fund. We called one of the women. I left the young man and went to see her right away. She concurred with what I had to say so I put her in touch with the guy. After our meeting we agreed she would be in direct contact with them without going through any other group, not even the women in support of the uprising. That was the only way to hurry up the assistance for the people.

  I knew I needed to act fast and put the different groups I knew in touch with one another. At least they would know about each other, even if that contact didn’t lead to anything. But I had confidence in many of those men and women, and after saying goodbye to that woman who was going to follow up on the matter of the support fund, I went straight home. On the way I felt like my skin was grimy, that a layer of the blazing sun had settled on top of my pores. I wanted to take a nice, long hot bath, to soften my joints and get ready for my daughter’s anger at me for being out all day.

  26 June 2011

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  I am supposed to meet with a young man from the coordination committees in order to discuss a statement they are about to release regarding the dialogue session at the Semiramsis Hotel. They want to announce their opposition to it but I have a different recommendation even though my personal opinion is that those young people are right. I am trying to foster more openmindedness among all the different factions, something I go back and forth over inside myself, something I am trying to ignore. The young man was moderate, saying, “Let’s wait and see, we have a meeting today and then we’ll decide whether or not we’re going to put out the statement.” I plead with him to consider postponing the meeting.

  At this point I am getting ready to start a new phase. The rumours that the security spread about me have even reached the opposition, and one of my intellectual friends wrote to me, “By God, I’m so mad at you. Come back, shut up, and quit doing all these horrible things.” At the time I didn’t understand what he meant. I had met with him in order to discuss a national coordination body and I wanted everyone to know that I wasn’t about to join any group or council, that I preferred to remain an independent writer. My thinking was that the critical intellectual is more important than the idea of lining up within a social movement. I know I will be among the first to criticize whatever group takes over the reins of power in Syria following the fall of the regime, because the process of democratic transition will require a conscience and witnesses of truth. Still, the statement produced by the Semiramsis conference was pretty good, and what it called for matched up with the ideas of those people going out in the demonstrations. I was satisfied, despite my certainty that the concession made by the regime in allowing this sort of conference did not happen without Syrian blood being spilled. It was a step back by the regime with the intention of taking two steps forward. Even so, I kept silent.

  I was also silent about the home movie we had shot. It took a long time before it appeared under the title, The Free Virgin Women of the Syrian Coast, which infuriated me. I called the girl from the coordination committees who had been in charge and I tried to find out from her why they had called it The Free Virgin Women…28 with its Islamic cultural and linguistic connotations. Why couldn’t they have just called us ‘The Free Women’? Talking openly over the phone was difficult. She told me we would meet soon. I called her again to tell her I would not be able to meet. She was an activist in the uprising who planned the demonstrations. She always seemed worn-out and talked very little. We’d meet again some other time. This is why I said I must remain silent – a lot of mistakes are going to be made but we have to move past them. We can point them out and criticize them later.

  27 June 2011

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  Outside the Palais de Justice I wait for the judge to show up. I have to get my daughter permission to travel. Here, we are still governed by unbelievable laws that prevent a mother from leaving the country with her daughter without her father’s permission if she is under the age of 18. I have always lived alone with my daughter and now I need the consent of her father, who has never been her guardian, not for a single day.

  To tell the truth, I am not in the mood to feel any more injustice on top of the injustices I have been seeing on a daily basis. It pisses me off! Sure, I’d be happy to elaborate on this perpetual anger: I have to wait for a piece of paper from my daughter’s father before I can go to the judge in order to get his approval, and from there I have to go all the way back to Emigration and Passports in order for them to certify that her father has agreed before they give me a permission slip. These personal status laws, which I always rail against, violate me. I cannot escape what violates me. These are not issues that only have something to do with injustices against others; they are things that concern me directly. They always make me think about how to deal with the anger in my soul at what is happening all around me, how to think about turning this anger into words, words that are scattered by the wind most of the time, and which inspire the distaste of so many people. But that in itself makes me feel like I am OK. Being satisfied with what is happening all around me would make me feel like I was not OK, especially since I live in a soundless atmosphere; that’s right, intellectuals live in a frozen environment, the world has passed them by. And the mobilization that has taken place in Syria, what spurred people into the street, was not the writers or the poets or the intellectuals.

  Until now the intellectuals have not risen to the level of courage we see in the street. With very few exceptions writers have remained on the sidelines, panicked and afraid. I never expected that those who stood by, neutral, would then direct their arrows and their rancour at the people who are with the uprising. Sometimes a human being thinks himself so important that he is willing to condemn others around him. I expected this from many people and simply ignored it; this was just one more injustice atop all the other injustices we face here.