by Samar Yazbek
They would come to inquire about the girls, pulling them out of the houses either to rape them or kill them. Sometimes the girls would be raped and then killed. Some girls would pour gasoline all over themselves so they could set themselves on fire before the troops and the officers would be able to come and rape them. There was a beautiful pregnant woman, the officers raped her and then set her on fire. There weren’t any men around, in one week anywhere between thirty and forty thousand people were killed in Hama. I lived in a wooden house. The whole neighbourhood was made of wood. They set the whole neighbourhood on fire and we started throwing ourselves from the balconies. I lived on the third floor and threw my five-month-old son and myself from the building. Some women tossed out their furniture. Before that the army and the security had mined the buildings in order to destroy the al-Kaylani neighbourhood, which was one of the most beautiful neighbourhoods in the Middle East.’”
After an emotional pause, this journalist friend continues. As he tells me about the incident according to the mother he had met in Hama, I feel as if I am inside that mother’s heart. I think about the horror that envelops me whenever I recall the officer threatening to rape my daughter. He didn’t come right out and say it but he hinted at it. When I think about that mother, a salty sting washes over my eyes and I feel like I am on the verge of exploding, but I ask him to go on.
He says: “I went up to the building the woman had directed me to, and I saw a demonstration. I stood where the mines she had told me about had been placed in order to bomb the al-Kaylani neighbourhood in 1982. Right now in Hama there is neither electricity nor water, including in the al-Kaylaniyya neighbourhood that had once been a mass grave where they buried the people from the Hama massacre under their own homes, which had been destroyed by the bombs of Hafiz al-Assad and Rifaat al-Assad.
“Anyone who travels to Hama will feel as though they are entering a giant wound. That was the first time I had ever visited the city. Fate had brought me there in order to investigate atrocities; the city itself was one big atrocity. There wasn’t anyone in Hama who hadn’t lost somebody. They had all lost fathers or mothers or uncles. All the details of Hama have something to do with death and murder. I lived inside that atrocity for four days. I saw Hama heading in the opposite direction. We stayed there from 29 June until 2 July. Every single day there were demonstrations against the regime, even the children were coming out to say, The People Want to Topple the Regime! It was there that I met the leadership of the blocs and the coordination committees. The people were protecting them. On Thursday, 30 June, I met the leadership of the Liberal Bloc of Hama, and we agreed to broadcast live from Hama. They were prepared for anything, and they were working to make a national flag that was 2,900 metres long. They printed the words, Get Out or The People Want to Topple the Regime, on umbrellas and hats. They worked together to bring the demonstrators water. They were simple, ordinary young people. They didn’t have any extremist religious views and I saw secularists among them. That’s what I saw with my own two eyes.
We asked to meet with some religious shaykhs but they refused. Not a single shaykh agreed to talk about Hama. They all said, ‘We don’t represent Hama, the people represent Hama, the Syrian state media would just exploit us.’ The Liberal Bloc of Hama was a group of people who had wide influence on the ground, a lot like the coordination committees, but they had no connection with them. When the uprising broke out in Hama, only 300 people went out to demonstrate. Their demands were similar to those of all the other Syrian cities. They went out three or four times and were arrested and tortured. Before the Friday of The Children of Freedom they went out in large numbers and the leadership on the ground were distinguished and the young people were active. On the Friday of The Children of Freedom there was a massacre and according to what the young people in Hama told me, about 120 people were killed. In the media they only reported about 60 or 70. It was the army and the security forces that killed them. They planned an ambush for them; the demonstrators were drawing closer to the riot police who were holding shields in front of their faces. As the demonstrators got closer, they moved aside the shields and all of a sudden, armed men appeared opening fire on the demonstrators. That happened more than once. A woman told me there was an officer who picked a little boy up by his hair, high enough to look him in the face, and then shot him and threw him back down on the ground.
“On the Friday of The Children of Freedom they moved into the neighbourhoods and broke into the houses, arresting people and beating them up. From that day forward all of Hama came out to demonstrate. About half a million demonstrators went out, and they forced Muhammad al-Muflih, head of the military security branch to step down. A new governor had to be appointed and until 2 July, Hama remained an independent city. When news was reported that Hisham Bakhtiar had gone to Hama twelve days before, the people of Hama knew something was being prepared for them, something the regime calls the military solution. The people of Hama knew all too well what that meant.
“People had been coming out to demonstrate without the security getting near them. Then this governor of Hama was forced to resign, and Muhammad al-Muflih was restored to his position in the security forces. Get Out Friday was the governor’s last day. The people of Hama told me that on 25 June, a delegation of Alawite shaykhs came, this time under the auspices of Hisham Bakhtiar. The authorities came up with this in order to make it seem as though there was sectarian strife in Hama. The Alawite shaykhs went to see the Sunni shaykhs in Hama and told them, ‘We are brothers, and there’s no need for us to fight with one another.’ A Christian man who had been part of the other delegation from Hama told us that the whole thing was made up, because both delegations were close to the security forces and the Christians. He added, ‘I withdrew because attempts were being made to exaggerate the issue and impose the sectarian issue from above. On the popular level nobody knew this was happening.’ The demonstrations continued.”
I know how the security forces work. Once the demonstrations are over they kill both Alawites and Sunnis. Then Alawite and Sunni shaykhs appear in order to declare to the public that what was happening was sectarian strife. So I wasn’t surprised by what my journalist friend said about the matter, when he continued:
“I saw with my own eyes a man speaking into the microphone among the hordes of demonstrators: I’m an Alawite and I’m against this regime, sectarianism isn’t the issue, the regime wants to drum up sectarian strife. The people would repeat in unison: One, One, One, the Syrian People are One! The people in Hama were organized. To me, life there seemed beautiful and awesome, with no security forces and no police. The people were the traffic police, they were the ones who cleaned up the squares and the streets when the demonstration of half a million men was over. The people were cleaning up the square as if it were their own home. They were carrying around the flags of independence as well as the current flag of Syria. They wrote a huge banner that read, Thank you Turkey, Thank you France.
One man told us about the massacres in Hama in 1982: ‘I come out to demonstrate so that my children won’t have to live through the humiliation and orphanhood that we all experienced. My father was killed in ’82.’ We were in a car cruising around the streets of Hama and one of the young men who was protecting us proceeded to tell us, ‘Hafiz al-Assad killed my dad and my grandpa and my uncle. There’s a neighbourhood in Hama called ‘The Widows’, they named it that after ’82 when they killed all the men there, they didn’t spare a single one.’ Women from ‘The Widows’ neighbourhood told us a lot of stories. The neighbourhood is located south of the municipal stadium. When we went to the cemetery, I saw a lot of open graves, the people of Hama told us how they used to dig their graves before every Friday and wait. We filmed the graves and on the night of Get Out Friday I went to the family house of one of the martyrs. They didn’t agree to talk to me at first, they feared for their children who were still alive. We went to see another family of three siblings, the elder brother died in February �
�82 and the second died on 3 June 2011. We filmed the only surviving brother along the Orontes River. He had gone out demonstrating on Get Out Friday and told us he no longer has any trouble with death, seriously, anyone who goes to Hama will have to march in a funeral procession, a funeral heading in the opposite direction, towards the future, not towards the cemetery.
All the people we met had lived through two massacres, Hama had lived through three: 1964, 1982, 2011. One of them was crying as he told us, ‘In ’82 I was coming back to Hama from Aleppo by car when we got stopped at a security checkpoint. The security forces said that everyone from Hama had to get out. The driver was from Homs and he handed over his ID at the checkpoint instead of mine. The Hamwi guy who was sitting in the backseat got out and they immediately shot him in the head and killed him. He fell down on a pile of bodies. That’s how I was saved.’
He was crying as he told us about the incident. His wife was listening from the other room, frightened because her entire family had been killed right in front of her in ’82. For the first time in my life I felt as though I was living in the Syria of the future, the free Syria that knew no fear. During the four days I spent in Hama, demonstrators were coming out every few minutes in spite of the massive memory of death the city had experienced. While we were sitting up on the citadel I told my friend, ‘Hama is grieving. I never dreamt I would experience a city like this. There’s great sadness all over, but Hama has given me strength.’”
The testimony of the young journalist who worked with the coordination committees comes to an end. When the day is done, I try to record the events of that Friday, but instead I listen to a song by Ibrahim al-Qashoush29, who the security forces had slaughtered, slitting his throat and dumping him into the Orontes. I wanted to hear his voice after this news about liberated Hama. Is there anything more barbaric? A young singer sings out against Bashar al-Assad and his family and they slaughter him, they slit open his throat. Here are the words of his song:
O Bashar, you aren’t one of us, just take Maher and get out of here, you have no legitimacy left… Yalla, get out, O Bashar
O Bashar you’re such a liar, beating us with that speech of yours, when freedom’s knocking on the door… Yalla, get out, O Bashar
O Maher you’re such a coward, and an agent of the Americans, the Syrian people will not be insulted… Yalla, get out, O Bashar
O Bashar screw you, and whoever likes you, I swear you’re too disgusting to look at… Yalla, get out, O Bashar
O Bashar there’s something going on, and blood is on your hands in Hama, forgiveness is not in the cards… Yalla, get out, O Bashar
Every once in a while another criminal, Shalish and Maher and Rami, they stole away all my siblings and uncles… Yalla, get out, O Bashar
O Bashar, you’re an infiltrator, you bludgeon us with the Ba‘th Party, go and learn how to pronounce the letter S… Yalla, get out, O Bashar!
1 July 2011
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Get Out Friday
Ambulance sirens wail from time to time under my house that looks out on the intersection of al-Hamra and al-Shaalan streets and the al-Rawdeh neighbourhood. The streets are empty, the sun is blazing. I watch this Friday on the internet and on television. Like every Friday, I sit and wait for sadness. How can a person wait for sadness? We don’t just live it here, we wait for sadness and death and prison. Sadness and death and prison have all become a part of our diaries, like water and the air we breathe.
When I heard the ambulance sirens I tried to figure out in which direction they were going. The news coming out of Barzeh is that people have been wounded and killed there; there is heavy gunfire in the al-Maydan neighbourhood, where people have gone inside three different mosques. With every siren wail, my knees buckle. I think about the blood streaming through the streets of Damascus and about the faces of the demonstrators out in the sun. I remember how at the start of the protest movement I had gone to Jableh in secret, without my family knowing about it, dressed in a disguise: a long dress, black sunglasses and a headscarf. With the help of my girlfriend I managed to get inside the old neighbourhoods in Jableh that were on the brink of death. Death on all sides, from all the shooting. If they had got their hands on me, most of the Alawites in the demonstrators’ neighbourhoods might have killed me; if the Sunni fundamentalists knew I was there, they might have done the same thing. If the security forces and the Ba‘thists got wind of my presence they would have launched a military campaign against the neighbourhood, claiming there was an armed gang there. But I walked in like a visiting relative with a fake ID. My name alone was guarantee of a problem, after I had been marked for death and leaflets against me had been handed out in my city and my village.
My friend got me into one of the fishermen’s houses, where the poor man couldn’t furnish his clean-smelling, one-room house with anything more than an old shabby couch. There were blankets and bedding and sheets piled on top of each other extending as far as the metal door that let out a sharp creak when it was opened. The man told me what the security forces and some Ba‘thists had done at Jableh port and what the shabbiha had done to them. It was a long conversation that required several pages. One day I’ll give it its own folder. After sitting there with him for two hours, I was upset when I left. How could a human being dare to take a cut from those poor people who can barely eke out a living from the sea? How could they take a cut from what kept their empty stomachs alive? The man was in his forties and had three children, who were out playing in the street. His wife was veiled. He was basically illiterate, but he went out for the demonstrations. He told me, “We want them to leave us alone so we can live our lives, nothing more than that.”
This is the people’s revolution of dignity. This is the uprising of a brutalized people who wish to liberate themselves from their humiliation. That’s how the uprising in Syria broke out. I saw it among the people I first interviewed, before I was prevented from moving between the Syrian cities and before the security services and the shabbiha and the Ba‘thists placed a bounty on my head wherever I went.
Now I get back to remembering that day. I hear about two people who are killed in Homs. The bloodshed is starting back up again even as we sit here. My energy flags on Friday. I don’t meet with anyone, I think about answering the call of the young men and women who have been questioned about me by the security forces but any action I take along with them will be in the spotlight. There had been one last warning. My case had truly come down from the office of the senior officer who told me he was going to transfer my file to the security services and leave it to the grunts to take care of me. That’s literally what he said, and after that things were different. Apparently he had actually done it. A number of friends started calling me and asking me to be careful. I took some comfort in the fact that the regime didn’t want to implicate itself any more by detaining intellectuals as part of whatever scheme it was going to hatch next. But I was nervous about getting arrested at the airport. I was intent on getting my daughter as far away from here as possible and on running away from the senior officer who would not stop harassing me, which seemed like the craziest thing I could do. I wanted to find a safe haven in a calm place far away from everything that was happening around me. My life had been ripped open and had reached the point of no return. There at that shadowy point, where I found myself floating in a current of discomfort, I decided to leave the country as soon as possible.
I return to the television. Demonstrations are getting started in Syrian cities and towns and rural areas. In Hama alone half a million demonstrators come out. Nine people have been killed today so far. Numbers have become a game, turning into engineering problems. The three people killed in this city are crossword puzzle trivia: two in that one, one person is killed in another. It’s as if these numbers don’t mean souls and human beings with names. My heart hurts and I feel nauseous. This feeling always comes on Fridays when the demonstrators are going out, but lately, with all the daily ki
lling, I get sick to my stomach, which has to be evacuated of everything inside. As soon as I have thrown up, I open the refrigerator to eat some more, continuing to keep track of what is happening four months on from the outbreak of the uprising. I think about what has happened, what is happening and what is going to happen. The uprising isn’t going to stop. The organization of the local coordination committees and the Federation of Coordination Committees take intelligent steps that reflect a deep consciousness among the young people in organizing an uprising, rising to the occasion and guaranteeing its persistence.
3 July 2011
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I have to get ready to go back to my former home. There’s no longer any pressing reason for me to stay in this downtown apartment that costs half my monthly income, and which everybody knows about anyway. I don’t have to stay in hiding anymore, since it’s now clear to me that they are not going to arrest me. Intimidation and smearing my reputation and frightening me – that is all they are going to do. What else could those trips I had to take have meant, the trips I called ‘Visits to Hell’. They were not visits, maybe ‘Snapshots of Hell’ would be more like it, but they were enough to sow hell in my heart.