A Woman in the Crossfire

by Samar Yazbek

  The funny thing is that the shari‘a judge at the court tells me I need renewed consent from my daughter’s father, that the old one has expired, which means I will have to come to court a fifth time and await more paperwork. As several women line up behind me I tell the low-key judge, “But I’m her mother, isn’t it obvious?” Looking up at me indifferently, he says, “Ma’am, these are laws, not a game.” He turns his head and addresses the women standing right behind me. I storm out of the Palais de Justice. I am almost broke, waiting for a payment to arrive for the translation of one of my novels into Italian, so my exasperation is even worse. In that moment I take shelter in thinking about the people being killed and arrested and disappeared every day. I think about them in order to suppress my rage, telling myself, Girl, people are dying for their freedom, and you aren’t bearing this on behalf of your thoughts alone, people are putting their lives on the line for their freedom, and you can’t even handle what’s happening! I always beat myself up just to go on living.

  My daughter is at home waiting for me, and I hurry online to find out what has been reported about the dialogue session that the regime is trying to use to its advantage. For the first time ever a conference is broadcast live on state television. It is intended to play up the fragmentation of the opposition. What the authorities are doing is far from innocent. They are distorting the opposition men and women on the one hand, and welcoming them on the other. Beating some and trying to drag others into line. I know some of those people who are meeting with officers, but my real fear is of an officer who is a relative of the president, whose image is always being given a face-lift by the intellectuals. But he will smash them and break their ranks. Besides, there are no longer any unblemished names in the opposition. I express my concerns to some of my friends who met with him: This officer and Bashar al-Assad are one and the same. Bashar al-Assad is a murderer, how could you let him get so close to you?

  28 June 2011

  ..............................

  Today… heavy gunfire in Jabal al-Zawiya and several demonstrations call for the fall of the regime even as the arrest campaign continues.

  The opposition delegation’s meeting in Moscow concludes with their asking for Russian intervention. Moscow says that Russia is a friend of the Syrian people and those in the opposition argue the justice of their cause and ask Moscow to stand side by side with them in convincing Bashar al-Assad to step down.

  Today I go with one of the young men from the coordination committees to meet a female political prisoner. It was a quick visit. The young woman wears a hijab, is friendly and well-mannered and talks about her arrest with an unusual calm. Agreeing that she and I would meet again, I say goodbye to the guy, heading for a meeting with another young man from the coordination committees. I want to document the genesis of the committees and how young Syrians organize themselves in order to continue the uprising, and, from there, how the revolutionary coordination committees are formed on the ground.

  The meeting takes place at my house, the safest place for us to talk. We had met once before in a café, I think we were watched by the security forces. I make food for us to share, I trust this young man. I always told him and one other guy that I was like their mother. For the most part this is to make them feel at ease, but the sentiment is real. When we are done eating I start the interview.

  The young man, who would be arrested twice, says: “Before the mobilization started in the Arab world and before the revolution in Tunisia, we had a bunch of cultural and social and development projects with a number of intellectuals. Young people would meet with older intellectuals. After the mobilization in Tunisia, but before the fall of Ben Ali, we became optimistic and held a sit-in outside the Tunisian Embassy in support of the Tunisian revolution. We were repressed and kicked out by the security forces. When the mobilization broke out in Egypt we were sure Syria’s turn was coming. The ceiling over our conversations started to rise: Could we start demonstrating and sitting-in in Syria? On February 3, we sat in against the only two telecom companies in the country, Syriatel and MTN. The sit-in was scheduled for three in the afternoon, but when we showed up at the al-Rawdeh café it was packed with security agents. Outside the café there was a substantial security presence as well so we tried to reschedule the sit-in but some of us were detained. Then we started preparing for an even bigger mobilization. We never thought it would be like this, though. After Egypt and Libya the groups got bigger and young men started getting more interested in public affairs. Guys who had been apolitical before poured out into the mobilization, especially after the fall of Mubarak and the regime atrocities in Libya.

  On 14 February about ten or twelve young men and women got together. We were from all different ethnicities and sects and nationalist orientations. A larger gathering had been planned for 15 March and we were nervous. The question was: Will the Syrian people come out into the street? We had decided to go out cautiously on 15 March, thinking that all we needed to do was nudge the street in order for it to mobilize and even if that didn’t happen we would do whatever we could to make it move. We got the idea for mobilization from a bunch of Facebook pages like ‘We are all Khalid Said’ in Egypt, pages with some connection to social, economic and employment demands being made by citizens. Those pages would throw light on the negative effects of emergency laws and political authoritarianism, on Article 8 of the constitution and the Ba‘thist monopoly over the levers of power and chairs in the universities. On an education page that exposed malfeasance in the educational system, especially the universities, we would publish stories on corruption; to give one example, there was a page on hypocrisy in Syria. The point was to identify the people who had a vested interest in the regime.

  “On 15 March we were blown away by how many people came out to demonstrate, which meant there was no need to mobilize and rally them. The people were ready. They came out of the Umayyad Mosque in the heart of Damascus. There were five young men who animated the demonstrations. Then there was the story about the children of Dar‘a on 18 March. We had started a sit-in in Damascus. From the beginning the notion of having the demonstrations in the squares, along the lines of the model of Tahrir Square in Cairo, was on our minds. We tried demonstrating in the squares of Damascus but with the security presence and military checkpoints, we couldn’t make it happen there.”

  I remember those actions. I would tell myself there had to be someone behind them. I would go out during the actions in order to monitor the street. Back then the mobilization really was quite weak.

  The young man adds: “The signs came from Dar‘a, and the mobilization was begun. Even though the street was ready, we were all isolated islands. We hadn’t yet fully processed the movement of the street because we had no political, local or even security expertise. It wasn’t only the fact that we had major security obstacles to face; they were brutal with us. On Saturday 19 March people died in Dar‘a. A group of us was looking into possible ways of protesting in support of Dar‘a. Simple demonstrations were going out into the street. On the morning of Monday, 20 March, a demonstration went out in al-Baramkeh chanting against the regime that was dispersed with force and violence. We had carried out a strike outside the Interior Ministry on 16 March. During the week we started getting ready for Friday.

  The Egyptian model had affected us subconsciously although that wasn’t the only reason we thought about using the mosque. We faced a lot of difficulties, including the heavy security deployment in Damascus, which made gathering outside the mosque impossible. We were well known to the security forces, pretty much all of us. We tried going out to demonstrate as secularists on more than one occasion, but without any religious content we failed, so we had to direct the protest movement from inside the mosque, because there was a social assemblage already there that the regime couldn’t repress. We figured that if we chanted this time then the masses would let us lead them. We believed that the people really did reject the regime because they had gone out before us, and that i
f we stood up and chanted the people would support us. Honestly most of us were young leftists and secularists, but we were through with our hang-ups about Islam or our fear of it.

  On 26 March we took cameras inside the mosque and came out chanting in support of Dar‘a and freedom and the martyrs, decrying all acts of repression. There was more than one demonstration in Damascus. That in itself was a sign of a major popular mobilization against the regime. That day, we came out of the Umayyad Mosque. Some people headed for al-Merjeh while others went toward al-Baramkeh and the demonstration in al-Mezzeh. That meant we weren’t alone, and we confirmed beyond any shadow of a doubt that the popular mobilization had begun to boil and wasn’t going to stop. There’s one other point I’d like to make. In Damascus we would go out without any organization. Because of the extreme repression, security forces started choking the streets of Damascus, the protest movement withdrew to the suburbs. Security started taking IDs from anyone who wanted to go inside the Umayyad Mosque. We searched for other venues and tried using the al-Rifa’i Mosque in Kafr Sousseh but soon there was a sizable security barricade there as well.”

  As the young man talks, I remember going to the Umayyad Mosque. I talk to him about the heavy security presence that had surrounded not only the mosque but also the entire neighbourhood, from Bab Touma to Bab al-Hamidiyyeh.

  He agrees with me and goes on: “Given blood relations and historical ties with the people of Dar‘a, the al-Maydan district came out with us. Al-Maydan is mostly inhabited by people from Hawran and the people of al-Qaboun also mobilized in part because of their ties of blood and kinship with Dar‘a. If anything, it was more about tribal and kinship ties than Islam. The al-Rifa’i Mosque was under siege so we started to look for other ones to use. At first, the preacher at the al-Rifa’i Mosque wouldn’t cooperate with us. He was more inclined to stand with the regime. In al-Maydan the demonstrators came out without any intervention on our part. We started to follow their lead. The preacher in the al-Maydan Mosque was cooperative with us. Douma and Baniyas were both invaded by the army; then both places started to mobilize and we started to feel that the zone of protest was expanding. The general atmosphere became livelier and we started getting ready for something new. We felt like the uprising had really begun.

  We were increasingly in touch with young men abroad, including through the ‘The Syrian Revolution’ page, eventually naming the Fridays together. We needed connections. At first ‘The Syrian Revolution’ page had been naming Fridays without consulting us. As a group inside the country, we opposed this and started to get involved in naming Fridays. After the zone of protest started to expand, the actions grew larger and we felt added pressure from the greater responsibility. At this point the mobilization started to delegate responsibilities. We got to know one another through the demonstrations and the Friday meetings, everyone came in a group. We were young women and men working all the time, and when the security pressure got too intense the young men would get together on their own and the girls would meet by themselves, for social and security reasons. We started being in touch with each other on the ground and on Facebook through these groups we already knew. Our communication was at a high level, everyone met with a group, and we federated each group with another. This happened more often on Friday when we were able to join science students with medical students as the arts and education and economics all staged sit-ins in the quad. After the uprising had been underway for a little more than a month, we started making plans to liberate the squares because that was Evacuation Day and we wanted to take advantage of the symbolism of the day in order to expand the zone of protests.

  Our first mistake: We had been leading the movement in groups. We hadn’t yet shifted to coordination committees. Second mistake: They wanted people to come from the outskirts of the city, particularly from Douma and Harasta and al-Tall, in order to sit-in at the squares. We managed to shoot down any other ideas. One of our guys made a special visit to Douma, where he delivered an oral invitation for the people of Douma and Harasta and Jawbar and al-Tall and Arbeen and Zamalka to come to the sit-in at Umawiyeen Square, and that’s what actually ended up happening. The security forces carried out a massacre in which eleven or twelve people were killed, and they started cruelly closing the streets of Damascus and its suburbs. A lot of checkpoints sprang up between the suburbs and Damascus. That was a strategic blunder. At this point we felt we needed more discipline in the movement and to organize the sit-ins better. Needs we hadn’t noticed before started to come into focus: material needs among families of the martyrs and prisoners, medical needs and assistance. Once these groups were federated together and discussions and conversations had begun, the most active and faithful elements distinguished themselves. Each and every one of us started to work on our own specialty. We came to realize that our clash with the regime had multiple fronts but at the same time the regime was becoming more violent and brutal, just as we started falling into the hands of the security forces. One person would get arrested, another would get killed, a third would disappear… and so on and so forth.

  “Once the groups were federated, we sorted people out on the basis of activism and ability to serve the movement. With all the security pressure we tried to organize ourselves into tight circles. Around the beginning of May, the term ‘coordination committees’ starting rising to the surface. A month and a half had passed since the outbreak of the protests and the tasks of the coordination committees were distributed according to various issues: politics, media, organization, medicine. We started learning that in the bloody protest areas like Douma and Dar‘a and Homs and Baniyas there wasn’t any time for culture and art and so the focus of our activities had to be on humanitarian support and politics. Soon we had an organized group of young men and women working on art design and posters, graphics and communications, media pages and websites; there were others who didn’t understand politics but were able to get people to come out to demonstrate, guys with media connections; lots of other guys had political consciousness and worked on statements that we published. At the same time we began to have real debates when we went out into the streets, because the entire street wasn’t cut from the same cloth – like in the mobilization in Douma, which was led by the Socialist Union, who are Arab nationalists, and on the other side there were a lot of young Islamists with an Islamic way of thinking, but the former weren’t particularly partisan and the latter weren’t fundamentalists or extremists.

  “No matter what, we knew that the mobilization came first on the popular level and attempts were made to pull the mobilization forward for the benefit of all sides. After much debate we concluded that pulling the mobilization in any one direction signalled the victory of the regime and the end of the popular mobilization, a distortion of it. We entered into discussions with them. The young men were open-minded and understanding, regardless of whether they were nationalists or Islamists or leftists. The beautiful thing was that everyone realized that the mobilization had a democratic platform, not just in Syria but across the entire Arab world.

  Some guys tried pulling the mobilization on the ground in one direction, saddling it with ideological baggage, but through marathon discussion sessions we managed to arrive through consensus at the truth that replacing Ba‘thist ideology with another simply wouldn’t help anyone. The mobilization would lose its popular momentum and it would open up questions of the Islamists intimidating minorities in real life, the scarecrow the regime uses to really frighten people. At the same time it would open up a gap separating the secularists from the Islamists from the liberals. We came to the conclusion that the most important thing was for us to work together on the ground in a non-ideological way, that we wouldn’t propose any ideological angle. The notion was that the Islamists weren’t partisan in general.

  Once the popular mobilization had reached an advanced stage we thought it best to divide the committees into specialties and each group of young people would work within that specialization. The political c
ommittee was responsible for negotiating among the coordination committees, for unifying the political vision and formulating the ideas behind the public statements, which would in turn be handed over to the media committee that drew up its final form. The media committee working inside the country had about fourteen young men from all the various governorates, including those who worked in the media field. They were responsible for delivering news to the satellite channels and the news agencies through a network of friends who became correspondents on the ground. We started meeting people who had the desire to report the news in the absence of any functioning media.

  At the same time, for security reasons, we put into place four spokespeople for the local coordination committees abroad – Omar Idilbi, Rami Nakhleh a.k.a. Muladh Umran, Mohammad al-Abdallah and Hozan Ibrahim – who wouldn’t speak without first coordinating with those inside the country. Inside the organizing committee there was a group of young men who were capable of mobilizing on the ground because they had a large number of contacts and who were able to organize demonstrations in Damascus and the suburbs. The cultural and artistic committee was a group of web designers and programmers as well as musicians and artists. We had a game plan with them, each one worked in his or her own field and then the media committee would get it published in the media.

  Our strategy relied upon satirizing the regime – Don’t Call me a Jackass, I’m an Infiltrator – and, along the same lines as the posters put up by the regime – I’m an Optimist, I’m a Pessimist, I’m with the Law. We waged a parallel campaign on Facebook – I’m a Pessimist… We Love You or I’m with the Law, But Where is it, Exactly? or My Way is Your Way, But the Tank’s in the Middle of the Road. We played on more than one angle. Now we have more than one group designing posters for the revolution – a visual culture with a peaceful revolutionary character. We also have people working on consciousness-raising, who take the pulse of certain targeted segments of Syrian society and find out the orientations of the street. Some of us agreed to fan out every Thursday until we all assemble wherever the demonstrations were set to happen. Our guys would go out and try to control the slogans in the demonstrations, in order to ensure things remain peaceful and civil. There was a female human rights activist who worked with us a lot; her job was to link up the coordination committees with friends in every city. We couldn’t use our phones because of the security surveillance, the patchy communications and the iron security fist. At least as far as Damascus was concerned, we had to rely on verbal contact.