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A Woman in the Crossfire

Page 26

by Samar Yazbek


  Story #6

  “In al-Haffeh, Abd al-Qadir al-Sousi ‘the Sunni’, a man who was known for his open-mindedness, moral rectitude and good relationships with a number of Alawites, was killed and his corpse was dumped in the Alawite village of al-Zubar. When his body was found, Alawite shaykhs and Sunni shaykhs got together and disavowed the act. In spite of the incident there was no sectarian conflict. A resident of al-Haffeh confirmed that the shabbiha had killed him and dumped his body in the Alawite village in order to provoke the people to start fighting each other. The shabbiha were killing people and the ordinary people were still licking their wounds when a number of sectarian troubles took place after the discovery of the death of al-Sousi. The people of al-Zubar village got together and went to al-Haffeh and told the people there, ‘We are not responsible for the death of this man. If you have any proof that we killed him, bring it forward now and hold us to account.’ But the matter ended there. That doesn’t mean there weren’t individual acts of revenge, as when security forces or ordinary people from both sects were killed.”

  Story #7

  “A man went into one of the neighbourhoods and said, ‘There’s an infiltrator here!’ The people would run off after him to chase down this supposed infiltrator and hand him over to the security. On another day and in another neighbourhood the same infiltrator appeared and they captured him again. But because the Alawite neighbourhoods were so close together, somebody noticed that they had captured the same person. One of the men told the head of the security detention centre sarcastically, ‘Uncle, change your infiltrator every once in a while if you want the people to believe you!’”

  I stop writing down what the security forces were doing in Latakia to stir up sectarian conflict. My friend supplying me with information said he had dozens more stories about what they did in the city.

  “They were breaking down people’s sympathy and building up walls of hatred,” he tells me. “The security and the shabbiha both, they worked hard at that.”

  His testimony stops with that sentence. I think about how my compiling all these conversations and testimonies is no substitute for redoubling my efforts in the street. Just now I wish I had not written in the newspaper about what I had seen, and I wish I were able to move around with greater freedom, not to be directly in the spotlight. But on the other hand I also think: Somebody has to smash the narrative of this criminal regime with the truth of the revolution. This is a revolution and not a sectarian war, and my voice as a writer and a journalist must come out in support of the uprising, no matter what the cost.

  5 July 2011

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  Today I hear more news about the arrest of a young activist in the uprising, the young man I had been coordinating with and whom I saw on a regular basis. I feel boundless pain, because I knew the young men of the uprising, quite a few of them. I have seen morality and their humane spirits, their determination and their patience amidst the difficult circumstances they were going through.

  This is the young man who had sent me a warning just days before the security forces started asking about me. Apparently the senior officer’s warning that he was going to leave me to his underlings in security had come to pass. This leads me to the conclusion that he was acting on his own. That doesn’t really matter anymore because this young man who left his work and his university education and committed himself to working for the uprising and coordinating demonstrations needed constant support. I have been worried about him lately, him more than others. He is a noble young man. I find myself sobbing in the street. I feel a maternal instinct towards him. I am very concerned about him, but I simply say, “He’ll get out in a few days, no doubt they have nothing on him. Especially seeing as he wasn’t arrested at a demonstration.”

  I go to a mourning ceremony in Harasta with two young girlfriends. They tell me there would be a few military checkpoints, nothing too scary, people coming and going. I put on a headscarf until we are past the checkpoint. There are no expressions of sadness at the mourning ceremony, which is the strangest thing about mourning sessions for martyrs who have fallen in Syrian cities. They always turn into demonstrations. People are gathered together in mourning, chanting for the fall of the regime. I withdraw to a distant corner as the weeping continues. I don’t know whether I am sad for the young people who are killed and who fall like birds or whether I am happy to discover that I belong to such a strong, free and proud people. I don’t budge from where I stand. The people chant. I greet all of the women and embrace them. I have been going to mourning ceremonies in secret, without wanting anyone to know I am there. Two young men help me out. I am supposed to write stories about the martyrs’ mothers, but time is not on my side.

  At the end of the evening I return home, my eyes burning and my heart racing. The bouts of sharp ringing that spread from the base of my head to settle in my ears return, and as I climb the stairs I start to feel dizzy again. My head is like a swing. I have been smoking like a madwoman, but I simply must keep watching the videos that one of the young men had sent me showing how the martyrs’ bodies were returned with their stomachs split open, stitched up in a strange way. The young man who sent them said, “It’s really awful, they steal organs from the young men before killing them, maybe while they were still being tortured. There are testimonies from their families.” I wrote to tell him I could meet with the families of those martyrs, and he asked me to wait a while because they were scared. I continued watching the videos. There truly was something peculiar going on.

  The martyrs’ bodies were stitched up in such a way that proved they had undergone some kind of an operation. I wasn’t sure whether the families ever verified that their children’s organs had been stolen before burying them. I sent the video to a group of friends in Europe and the Arab world so they could follow up on the matter, and I stop working on that issue just before falling asleep on the couch. It isn’t enough for them to kill people; they were buying and selling their bodies. Oh my God, how can we live alongside these murderers? How can they walk freely among us? My shaking fits start up again as I think about the bodies of my young adolescent friends and the criminal scalpels of the security forces cutting them to shreds.

  7 July 2011

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  News of the killing increases by the day. There are many stories of people disappearing and being kidnapped, about the torture of children, stories about prisoners. I sit down to transcribe the testimonies of young men who are barely twenty years old. I record them as they are, in colloquial dialect, because I find this to be fresher than writing them in modern standard Arabic. A female journalist recorded them for me.

  The First Testimony

  “One time when I was little, they brought a file and told me to write my name and sign. ‘What is it?’ I asked them. They told me it was for the Ba‘th Party, and when I asked them what that meant and why I should sign, they beat me up. We learned we couldn’t say anything against the regime. Take the Lord’s name in vain, just don’t curse the regime. You couldn’t go complain, there was nothing you could do. We got older and I went to the army. In the army I learned what a joke we were living. I was one of those planting landmines along the front. And when everything happened on the Day of Return30, I was shocked: Where were the mines I put there? I used to tell my friends, don’t get close to the mines; turns out there weren’t any. How can that be?

  “I served in the army. It was awful. When I first started out, the commanding officer at the barracks came out and said, ‘Pigs on one side, humans on the other!’ The drill was, I’m not serving a homeland, I’m serving one person. Corruption was everywhere, it was shameless. It was always like anyone with connections could get time off. It took seven months before I got leave. There were other people who never showed up.

  “I got tortured in prison while I was still in the army. The first time, they needed to get a presidential convoy through and we were moving people out of the way. This ol
d woman walks by and I tell her, ‘Yalla Auntie, move along.’ The station chief comes over and beats that 70-year-old woman with a stick. I ask him, ‘Sir, why would you treat an old woman like that?’ He says, ‘None of your business, jackass.’ So I tell him, ‘When his Excellency the President comes by I’m going to tell him and he’ll stop the convoy.’ They pulled me out and took me somewhere called the security office. They beat me a lot. I was strapped to a chair while two of them stood over me, beating my chest nonstop. Even Guantanamo would have been better. They put me on the ground and told the guys, ‘The one who gets the most hair off his body gets a cigarette’… so they attacked me and started plucking. There was one guy in there with me who had got drunk and cursed the president… before my very eyes they shoved the whip up so far up his ass that when they pulled it out he threw up flesh… he couldn’t walk and they broke every bone in his body. Meanwhile, we had all been taken out to the bathroom.

  “I got to try ‘the tire.’ I took 235 lashes on my feet and 250 cracks before the stick splintered on my body. After that I spent a month unable to stand on my feet. I couldn’t walk. They took me to the military hospital and I couldn’t stand up for an entire month.

  “This isn’t to boast about how brave I am or how bad I had it. I came forward to complain about the prison guards because the law gives us the right. Later the prison guard came to me and said, ‘I’m an officer at the presidential palace, you can’t touch me.’

  “The second time I was arrested I was still in the army. It was around the time Imad Mughniyeh died. I asked the officer, ‘How come everyone wanted by the Americans here ends up dead? Why is that?’ He told me to shut up and sent me to jail. That place was unreal. Every time you enter a room there are whips coming at you right and left. They say it’s to purify you. I got to try the wooden tire a lot. I was held there for ten days, never allowed to sleep, never allowed to lie down, never even allowed to talk. You had to be naked in there. There was a guard called Issa, who I’ll never forget for the rest of my life. He’d say to me, ‘You. Come on.’ And he’d start beating just to hurt you. He’d come in through the main prison door bellowing, and whenever we heard his voice we all had to turn our heads to the wall. You could never let that guy see anyone wearing clothes. Would you need anything more than that to be against this regime?

  “Then came all the Arab revolutions we had been dreaming about. I would say, ‘When are we going to smell someone setting himself on fire so that we’ll get out into the streets?’ Sometimes we’d ask jokingly, ‘Does anybody smell burning? I’m just saying.’

  “I was arrested on 30 June. The Faculty of Economics demonstration was happening. It was the last day of finals and we were all hopeful that the students were going to mobilize. We demonstrated outside the faculty. It was the peak of defiance because the security could see us but we wanted to demonstrate and raise the banner of freedom despite them. I didn’t stay there for long, and when they started attacking everybody fled. I crouched down outside the Faculty of Arts, shouting at my friends. Some people had run away a little before the demonstration, and I was yelling at them to come back. ‘Why did you all run away, we weren’t that many in the first place, now look what happened, they’re turning everything upside down.’ I was spotted by security, I mean, the Patriotic Union of Syrian Students as they call themselves. The Union even had popular committees. I know for a fact that it’s the Union of Syrian Students. Not the Union of Bashar’s Students.

  “They caught us. My head still aches from the truncheons, the beatings and the curses. What a disaster. They would divide us according to al-‘Ar‘ur. ‘You’re all al-‘Ar‘ur followers, you’re all such-and-such.’ Five of us were taken to the al-Qanawat station. There was so much killing. They put my friend on the ground and started in on him. Then they brought us over to wipe up his blood with our bare hands. He’s a medical student. He left the country and is never coming back. They beat another one a lot just because he’s from Hama.

  “We were transferred to criminal security. How can I describe for you the horror, the beasts, the heroes? I mean, what is heroism? Is it, like, to beat up some defenceless guy with a blindfold over his eyes and smash his head against the wall? Is it heroic to throw down insults on my mother? They brought us in. One of us happened to be gay, just imagine what was in store…

  “There was all kinds of torture. And they had this game called ‘electricity’ they would play with us whenever we were coming or going. They held it to my friend’s neck. He was paralyzed for five minutes. There was interrogation every few minutes, first thing in the morning, at mid-morning, in the afternoon, before and after we ate. Just so you would confess you were at the demonstration.

  “I was kept at criminal security for six days, and then they transferred me to political security. The situation was worse there. They took my friends downstairs and I had no idea what they were doing to them, but we could hear their screams up above. It was like a sort of terrorism for us, so that we would confess, you know, that we were there. They brought us each in turn to see an interrogator… and before you could say anything he would greet you with a slap. We got used to being slapped like that, it became a totally normal thing.

  “They would start questioning me, beating me the whole time, even though I had already told them I wasn’t at the demonstration, that I’m a Druze from Suwayda and we don’t have anything but pro-regime demonstrations.

  “They brought us to the Palais de Justice. We were supposed to spend the night there, but then they sent us to court and we were released straight away. We have a trial on 20 August.”

  A Second Testimony

  “With the outbreak of the events, everything exploded in Dar‘a. The events really hit us hard. The idea of a revolt against this regime had been brewing for years. We were all involved in politics and human rights but there was never the space or enough freedom for you to work on it the right way. There are always immediate causes and more distant ones. Dar‘a was the immediate cause while the distant ones are well known: Syria, the current situation, the state of tyranny, miserable circumstances and widespread corruption.

  “When the events broke out we started building a network and making phone calls and getting in touch with other young people who were involved. We pushed aside what some now call ‘the Islamic character of this revolution.’ We all worked together, young people well known in their fields; intellectuals and others who were concerned. We mobilized on Facebook, through art and writing. We tried to forge relationships during that period. Of course, Fridays were the day people went out demonstrating. Some regions were easier to mobilize than others. Damascus was an unlikely spot because it was encircled. We had the option of the Umayyad Mosque. We weren’t Islamists; I wouldn’t even set foot inside a mosque. It just didn’t seem like a good idea for me to be going inside a mosque. So we searched for another place, but in the end we were forced to use a mosque because it was the only place that many people were allowed to congregate.

  “There was a group working out of Douma who we started coordinating with, and then there was a call for a demonstration in Douma. Some friends and I went and met inside the mosque. It was plain to see that there were a lot of security agents present, foreign faces, they obviously weren’t from Douma. The prayer ended quickly, as if the imam knew what was happening, he rushed through his sermon. We all went out onto the balcony and saw more than two thousand soldiers – not just peacekeepers, they were fully armed with Kalashnikovs and pistols, and there were two convoys around the garden where the mosque was located.

  “Rows stretching out behind them were all shabbiha, in addition to the shabbiha already inside the mosque. That was the moment of truth – either you come out and don’t disappoint the people who are expecting you, or you give it all up and run away because the security forces and weapons are too terrifying. You only have two choices: do the right thing and mobilize the people they way you have come there to do, or run away. We got together and some of us
locked arms and started chanting the first slogan, the second slogan, God, Syria, Freedom, That’s It!, The Syrian People Won’t be Humiliated!, that’s all. Because the shabbiha had already organized themselves inside the mosque, they started beating us from behind. They attacked us from the staircase. There were 70 of us outside and some people still hadn’t made it out. Others were waiting for us outside. They formed a perimeter to prevent anyone from getting inside the mosque. It was the Great Mosque in Douma and there are other smaller mosques all around there. People were coming to the square outside the Great Mosque in order to start a demonstration. “They started hitting people with tasers and all kinds of chains, wooden sticks and truncheons.

  They started beating us from both sides, from behind and from the front. There was only one way out. I remember I tried to get away but the stairs were too far and I couldn’t make it. One of them hit me on the head and I fell down. Next thing I know there are ten guys on top of me. One of them squeezes my head and starts pounding me, something like five batons appeared in the blink of an eye. They broke my teeth. It was a savage beating. They threw me out on the street and whenever I tried to get up, one of them would kick me in the chest. They crushed me on the ground. I tried to get away. There were ten of them. Of course not all of them could get to me at once, so they start spitting on me from afar, so much blame and spite, I have no idea where that came from.

 

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