In 1970, during the coup d’état that brought Hafez al-Asad to power, key figures of the Ba‘thist government, including the deposed president, Salah Jadid, his prime minister, Yusuf Zu‘ayyin, and the then minister of industry, Marwan Habash, among many others, were arrested and incarcerated in the infamous al-Mezzeh prison near Damascus. Arrest and imprisonment of overthrown leaders is not unusual in such circumstances. In the Syrian context, where a degree of political turmoil had prevailed over the preceding two decades, al-Asad’s military putsch was the expression of struggles within the Ba‘th Party and the military. Purges in both the party and the military were carried out to eliminate threats to the vanquishing group led by al-Asad. Such tactics are common for the consolidation of contenders’ political control. However, the new regime exercised the powers of exception that it conferred upon itself through emergency law, not only against its rivals, but also against wider segments of the political opposition. In time, these powers were used against all active groups and individuals in society. Indeed, incarceration, and both targeted and mass killing, became mechanisms of government.
How did the political prison and the massacre become apparatuses of rule in Syria? Conventionally, answers to questions such as this give explanatory focus to the challenge that the political opposition, in particular the Muslim Brotherhood, represented to the regime commencing in the late 1970s. From this perspective, the resort to violence by the group al-Tali‘a al-Muqatila (regarded as an offshoot of the Brotherhood) is seen as the trigger and cause of regime violence. This optic on political violence under the Hafez al-Asad regime presents a simple causality that does not capture either the scope and techniques of violence, or the governmental objectives of violence. In counterpoint to this optic, then, it is relevant to note that prior to the conflict with the Brotherhood and the militant Islamist groups, the application of emergency law had resulted in the continual pursuit, arrest and imprisonment of political dissidents of all backgrounds. Indeed, diaries of communist political activists, dating from the early 1970s, chronicle the setting in of an atmosphere of surveillance and, also, a sense of siege felt by ordinary citizens (‘Abbas 2006; Abu Nijm 2017; ‘Issa 2016).
Commencing in the early 1970s, along with Islamist figures activists in communist and Marxist circles in Syria were being forcibly abducted from their homes and from public spaces. They would thenceforth disappear, often without word and without a trace. In response, much political activism of the period focused on the demand for bringing an end to emergency rule. Despite the expansion of surveillance by the security forces, mobilisation and agitation for change persisted among societal forces ranging from professional syndicates to shopfloor workers to students. The violent actions of the Tali‘a provided a pretext to the regime to generalise and entrench governmental violence. The Tali‘a campaign of assassinations against regime figures and affiliates, and its attacks on public infrastructure, set the scene for the expansion in the security forces’ surveillance and repression activities throughout society.1 The security services pursued a policy of internment on a mass scale, while regime-sponsored paramilitary units committed slaughter in villages and in city neighbourhoods where critics of the regime and opposition activists lived.
As noted in the Introduction, the political prison served as a template of rule and, as an institution, became continuous with the wider society. Indeed, the prison/detention camp became an apparatus through which government was effected by inciting feelings of humiliation and abjection in the subjects of rule. In this respect, I advance a primary argument to the effect that power treats the subject as a feeling as well as a thinking subject. Proceeding from this premise, torture and corporal punishment should be viewed as technologies for unmaking political subjects. The rationalities of these practices may be discerned from their objective of disciplining through the affect. As such, my account of these practices does not uphold the contrast between body-centred punishment and soul-oriented reform advanced in Foucault’s genealogy of modern disciplinary power.
In addition to the detention camp, the massacre also served as an apparatus of governmental violence. Together, the detention camp and massacre were instrumental in establishing what may be termed ‘a civil war regime’, a condition wherein war came to be understood as a ‘permanent social relation’, to use Foucault’s terms.2 The notion of war as a permanent social relation underlines the polarisation of the social body within a biopolitical frame, drawing divisions between those deemed worthy of life and those slated for eradication and death. A related argument, which will be elaborated in greater detail in Chapters 4 and 5, advances the contention that the performative acts of violence have a pedagogical intent: to instruct subject-citizens about the terms of rule and to orient their affective and cognitive states in relation to government.
I begin my discussion of the apparatuses of violence with an overview of the juridico-political frame of ‘the state of exception’ in the Syrian context. I advance the view that the power of the sovereign asserted in this juridico-political frame was deeply invested in a sacralised politics of leader deification and a kind of ideo-theology, akin to what some scholars of totalitarian rule (e.g. Gentile 2000) refer to as ‘political religion’. Against this background, I proceed to tease out the terms of government effected through the political prison, looking at everyday life in Syrian detention camps as described and recounted in former prisoners’ diaries and in fictionalised accounts of incarceration. Next, and finally, I enquire into the Hama massacre as a framework for the practices and strategies that established a civil war regime.
Emergency rule, in effect from 1963 until its nominal abolition in 2011, set the frame of political government and translated into the suspension of the law and the creation of a space outside the law.3 During this period, the emergency law established a condition of ‘a legal civil war’ that, in Agamben’s terms, ‘allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system’ (Agamben 2005, 2). Set out in Law 51, issued in 1962, emergency rule enables the suspension of citizens’ civil rights and liberties. For example, Article 4 of the Law sanctions such measures as the prohibition of assembly, the imposition of restrictions on citizens’ places of residence and limitations on their movement. The Law also invests the ruler or his deputy with the power to detain individuals suspected of representing a danger to public security and public order, and also to conduct searches at any time or place. Although, in principle, the powers of arrest should be confined in the hands of the ruler or his deputy, in practice they came to be invested widely in the numerous departments and branches of the security services. Article 4 also gives the ruler, or whomever he authorises, the right to confiscate property and impose trusteeships on businesses and companies. Further, it allows the authorities to monitor citizens’ mail and communications, thus establishing provisions for the continuous surveillance of the population.
In tandem with the Emergency Law, the ‘Law of Protecting the Revolution’ (1965) criminalises whoever stands accused of opposing or resisting the principles of the Ba‘thist Revolution (unity, freedom and socialism).4 Punishment of individuals deemed ‘resisters to the Revolution’ includes life in prison and execution. Many political activists and dissidents were detained and brought to trial on charges of posing a threat to the Revolution.5 The juridical dimension of the state of exception is theatrically staged in the state security and military courts.6 Yet, additionally, many political activists and others who were randomly arrested were detained without trial for extended periods of time. It should be noted that the generalisation and normalisation of emergency law was achieved through a range of practices, including the securitisation of mundane undertakings and everyday activities, as will be discussed in Chapter 2.
Writing on ‘the state of exception’ as a form of rule, Agamben identifies two seemingly contradictory strategies at work: sovereign power creates and maintains a permanent state of war by nurturing a fracture in the social body, effected through ‘us’ and ‘them’ lines of division; and at the same time, this power puts into operation an apparatus – the political prison/internment camp – that has as its rationale the homogenisation of the people. How do we see these contrasting, yet interlinked, strategies at work in the context of emergency rule in Syria? The main target of internment camps in Syria were dissident populations. In one influential characterisation from the 1980s, Rif‘at al-Asad, the president’s brother and leader of the Military Defence Companies, in a speech to the Ba‘th Party Seventh Regional Congress in January 1980, referred to these dissident populations as ‘the nationally diseased’ (those with a defective sense of nationalism). This speech was made at the time of regime confrontation with a broad political opposition that included diverse Islamist forces as well as secular leftist groups. In the speech, Rif‘at warned of an impending danger that would obliterate the Arab civilisation. He proposed to protect the nation and eliminate the threat through the isolation of ‘the nationally diseased’. His recommendations to the Ba‘th Congress included the establishment of labour camps. Deviant or errant subjects would be used to ‘green the desert’ while being subjected to re-education programmes. Rif‘at proposed the issuing of a law of ‘national purification’ (al-tathir al-watani) for deviants ‘who uphold destructive principles that threaten nationalist thought and national peace’. Following corrective education, ‘the deviant in thought’ would sit annual examinations to assess whether they had been cured. Those who were positively assessed would be issued ‘national purification certificates’. This plan of correction and reform of deviant and errant subjects was never put into effect. Rather, the regime followed the path of abandonment in the terms discussed by Agamben (1998) whereby political detainees are made subjects of the sovereign’s ban, that is, they are cast out and exposed to eradication. In the same logic, the massacre was the mechanism through which the enemy populations were to be eliminated.
How do we understand the political horizon within which there develops such practices and modes of organising and rendering political life? What were the discursive justifications and governmental rationalities behind these practices? Ideological postulates of nationalism and developmentalism were structuring elements of the grand narratives of the Ba‘thist regime. However, an important mechanism of government has been the sacralisation of politics. Many of the features discussed by Emilio Gentile (2000) to elucidate the processes of sacralisation of politics in totalitarian movements and systems of government can be seen to be at work in Ba‘thist rule. For example, in imagistic and discursive representations of Hafez al-Asad there are resonances of the Italian Fascists’ adaptation of religious language to elevate and acclaim the leader (i.e. Mussolini). Further, as in totalitarian systems of rule, the Ba‘thist regime began as a revolutionary movement espousing a project of radical societal transformation (which could be understood, in the terms used by Gentile (2000), as ‘conquering society’). The project included the key precept that the Ba‘th, as the single party, would be the sole leader in state and society (as stated in Article 8 of the Constitution). Societal transformation was to be achieved through the party and its auxiliary popular organisations in charge of mobilisation and collective indoctrination designed to instil the dogmas, beliefs, myths and commandments of the party in the minds of wide segments of the population (see Hinnebusch 1980 and 1990). The doctrinal identity of institutions and groups had to be assured (most importantly, the doctrinal identity of the army known as al-jaysh al-‘aqa’idi, literally ‘the doctrinal army’).
An important aspect of the sacralisation of politics in Syria was the deification of Hafez al-Asad as a figure of national salvation. Al-Asad’s deification should not be understood as his being regarded as a deity in the conventional sense, though the language of divinity was used. Rather, in regime rhetoric, as discussed by Lisa Wedeen (1999), al-Asad was gradually constructed as an omnipotent being in possession of exceptional qualities and attributes. He alone was capable of seeing regional dynamics and interests and grasping all the forces of struggle and dynamics of interaction. He alone could anticipate responses and see far enough ahead to know which plan would best preserve the nation’s interest, stature and role. During the 2011 Uprising, pro-regime commentators reiterated these propositions tirelessly, this time in reference to Bashar al-Asad. In these statements, the idea was advanced that without Bashar al-Asad, the country would break into various statelets, there would be foreign occupation and countless disasters would befall the nation. These claims revive the persona of the saviour and the notion of eternality that were attached to Hafez al-Asad and that were given salience, in Orwellian fashion, through the teaching and memorisation in school of ‘the Eternal Leader’s’ speeches. Furthermore, the project, mission and potentialities of the nation were wrapped up in the body and mind of the leader.
Hafez al-Asad’s elevation to the status of a deity was not only projected by the official discourse but also by its subject-receivers. For instance, subjects gave credence and support to the ascription of a god-like status to the leader in the shouting of slogans such as ‘ya Allah halak halak, yuqu‘d Hafiz mahalik’ (‘Hey God, move over and let Hafez take your place’), reportedly chanted at the time of the assault on Hama and again during the 2011 Uprising.7 Further, evidence for the projection of Asad’s deification can be found in the veneration accorded him by low-level soldiers and security service personnel who expressed disbelief that dissidents should harbour critical views of al-Asad. Faraj al-Biraqdar (2006), a Syrian poet and former political prisoner, recounts in his memoirs of imprisonment an instance when a guard, watching over a group of detainees being transported to a detention centre, scowled and asked, incredulously, what it was about the president that they did not like. Then he swore that the president’s urine was a cure and that the place of his excrement should be a shrine. Besides this folkloric deity status, al-Asad, as deity, was central to the maintenance of the prevailing order in a ‘metaphysical’ sense – he, ‘eternally’, held the keys to the future and represented the mind and encompassed the thought unifying his followers.
Deviation from this quasi-religio-cognitive frame was an act akin to heresy. It was also diagnosed as a kind of mental deficiency that betrayed deviant thought processes and contamination with external and, therefore, diseased thought. The sacralisation of politics posits a hierarchy of modes of cognition and thought. As could be gleaned from al-Asad’s speeches between 1979 and 1984, correct thinking is characterised as secular, scientific, modernist and nationalist. Ba‘thists and their supporters represented the superior group or species. The ranking of others depended on where they stood in relation to Ba‘thist tenets and in relation to the Ba‘thist monopoly over political power. The deviant subjects confined in the internment camps were thus differentiated according to their doctrinal illnesses, with the Muslim Brothers – afflicted with an incurable illness – falling outside the possibility of correction. Hence, Law 49 of 1980 made membership of the group punishable by death. Large numbers of Muslim Brother prisoners were executed or killed en masse (as in the massacre in the Tadmur Military Prison in June 1980).8 At that time, weekly executions of Muslim Brother prisoners were common. In some cases, military field courts issued death sentences after the execution took place. Additionally, countless others perished after being exposed to disease or being subjected to extreme violence. Other political inmates and detainees – mostly leftists and communists – occupied a different place in the hierarchy of opponents. They belonged to a category of subjects targeted for the interruption of life or its suspension until further consideration.
During the war with the enemy population named ‘the gang of the Muslim Brothers’ (‘isabat al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin) – but, in effect, encompassing all opponents of the regime – the leader’s speeches named a caesura or break in which the nation/the Ba‘thists/the nationalists stood aligned against the reactionaries and the agents of imperial powers. Indicative of the severity and depth of the break is al-Asad’s repeated assertion that there would be no dialogue with ‘murderers and reactionaries’ (referring primarily to the Muslim Brothers) and that the only form of dialogue appropriate for dealing with this radically alien opponent was the kind conducted using bullets to kill (Asad 1980a, 1980b).
In Hafez al-Asad’s and Rif‘at al-Asad’s speeches, and in their propaganda war, it is possible to discern the contours of a discourse that is akin to the racist discourse examined by Foucault. However, the break (the caesura) in the domain of the population, effected through this discourse, is ideational. Ba‘thist discourse propagated the idea of ‘a new man’, possessing the ‘correct’ cognitive and moral capacities and abilities (al-Munadil, June 1985).9 The discourse denounced the reactionaries in terms that echo the Stalinist idea of ‘the objective enemy’ noted by Hannah Arendt (1968), among others. In terms parallel to the language of Argentinean generals in the 1980s, in which they referred to the surgical removal of diseased elements or members, Rif‘at al-Asad (1980) spoke of the necessity of performing excisions to the social body to cleanse it of the diseased elements (see Suarez-Orozco (2003) on the Argentinean discourse). The use of medical terminology, though in superficial and limited terms, was, in some sense, a means of introducing a ‘biological’ line of division – the mentally healthy who uphold correct Ba‘thist thought as opposed to the mentally diseased who espouse oppositional views. It is noteworthy that the language of disease and medical cure – e.g. surgical excision – was deployed by Bashar al-Asad during the Uprising with respect to regime opponents and critics.
From the late 1970s onward, tens of thousands of activists and dissidents of diverse political currents, such as Islamists and communists, as well as breakaway Ba‘thists, were rounded up in successive waves of arrest. Members of groups such as the Communist Party-Political Bureau, the Communist Action Party, the pro-Iraq Ba‘th Party, and the Kurdish Democratic Party were interned under emergency provisions. Both the leadership and the rank-and-file members of these groups were kept in prison for long periods of time and often without trial. In the early 1980s, the leader and most of the members of the Communist Party-Political Bureau were imprisoned. They were joined, shortly afterwards, by the leaders of the professional syndicates who, in their annual congresses, voiced critical and dissident views about the regime. The arrests continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Majed Hebo (2001), a writer and former political prisoner, put the total number of political prisoners in the country in 1984 at 14,000, representing a ratio of approximately one in every thousand Syrian citizens being in prison at the time. The number of prisoners had grown in the run-up to the Hama violence and continued to grow in the aftermath of the massacres, as security personnel conducted sweeps of all independent political groups, sometimes arresting the entirety of their membership. For example, by most counts up to 1000 members of the Communist Action Party were arrested and imprisoned in 1987. According to some estimates, the number of individuals subjected to arrest and interrogation for political reasons reached as high as 100,000 during the period of Hafez al-Asad’s rule (Hebo 2001). The scale of internment gives credence to the contention that the regime’s battle was not just with the Muslim Brothers, but also with any independent political grouping that espoused dissident political views. Further, the all-reaching practices of violence and control support the proposition made by one political commentator and dissident that the regime was at war with society (the statement is attributed to writer Abd al-Razzaq Eid). This generalised war produced ‘at risk’ subjects, as individuals could be arrested and detained at any time without charge and in the absence of any explicit justification. Any type of affiliation or encounter with members of dissident groups was deemed sufficient pretext for arrest. Many political prisoners spent years incarcerated as a result of a chance meeting or conversation with someone whom the security services were watching or tracking. Evidence for conviction on charges of political transgression or infraction could be as circumstantial as having in one’s possession a copy of the Muslim Brotherhood publication al-Nadhir or the Communist Action Party’s clandestine newspaper al-Rayya.10 Further, arbitrary detention, combined with forced disappearance, enhanced the sense of threat felt by ordinary citizens and active members of opposition groups alike (see Ziadeh 2010).
Detainees were held in various types of internment institutions and facilities – either prisons or detention centres. Official civil prisons, established mainly for non-political crimes, comprised sections dedicated to the confinement of political detainees. Additionally, different branches of the security services controlled detention centres throughout the Syrian territory. A number of military prisons and detention cells, forming part of a network of prisons, were dedicated to political opponents. The most notable (and notorious) of these prisons were al-Mezzeh Military Prison near Damascus (closed in 2000) and Tadmur Military Prison in Palmyra, located in the Homs desert (reportedly closed in 2001 following a presidential amnesty for several hundred prisoners, and the transfer of remaining detainees to other prisons). Often, the security forces running detention facilities reported directly to the Martial Law Governor, as is the case with the General Intelligence Department (Amnesty International 1983, 13). In practice, and over time, many of the detention facilities became answerable to the generals who ran them.
Approaching the camp as an apparatus of government in Syria brings into view practices of violence that had as their objective the unmaking of certain political subjectivities, specifically dissident subjectivities that were construed as inherently threatening to the health of the body politic. The pursuit of this latter objective may be noted for other political settings where internment was used on a massive scale against dissidents and political opponents but also against anyone engaging in non-conformist behaviour. A range of violent practices often centred on the body were devised and applied to have the subject overturn herself in two senses: by renouncing her political convictions, and by forcing a reversion to a non-human being. I propose a further interpretation wherein these practices are viewed as operating on the detainee’s sense of self with a view to negating her subjectivity. From this optic, I propose to integrate the affectivity of confinement and torture into the analysis of forms of biopolitical government. This is intended, in part, as a corrective to the analytics of biopolitical government – as formulated by Foucault and extended by Agamben – which focuses on the life of bodies in a manner that privileges physicality.
The persistence of governmental violence in penal institutions in the present (as in Syria) sits in tension with Foucault’s (1977) analysis of prisons as institutions of disciplinary power, where physical punishment and humiliation are done away with in the modern period. Indeed, Foucault presents both tactics – physical punishment and humiliation – as relics of a bygone era. It is the case that humiliation appears as an objective in Foucault’s discussion of medieval forms of corporal punishment but, like pain, it does not perform a governmental function. As such, and for that reason, it was abandoned with the rise of modern disciplinary power (Foucault 2015). In Foucault’s account, causing pain and the public display of pain, in premodern and early modern times, were, in and of themselves, the intended objectives. As neither humiliation nor pain was considered for its role in subject formation, they were cast as belonging to a different form of power that was superseded by disciplining surveillance and regimentation. Dissenting from Foucault’s analysis of punishment in various western settings in early modern Europe, some social historians assert that humiliation, incited through physical and verbal assaults on ‘the offender’, was core to punishment until a much later date (see Nash and Kilday 2010, for example). The publicity and sociality of spectacles of humiliation accompanying punishments in the modern period support such contentions. Yet in these same nuanced histories of punishment, governmental work through the affect, accomplished by physical punishment and humiliation, is still absent as an object of analysis.
The continuation and expansion of torture in the modern period points us to a somewhat different conclusion with regard to its use and with regard to the purposes of physical punishment of the type administered to political dissidents and those deemed to be enemies of the state. Causing pain is not the ultimate objective of punishment (except, perhaps, for the outright sadistic guard who derives pleasure from inflicting cruelty). Rather, pain is the entry point for disciplining affective dispositions constitutive of the self. It is a negation of the care necessary for personhood, for the valuing of dignity and integrity. As power treats the population as being made up of thinking and feeling subjects with ideas and affect, it deploys torture and physical punishment with the objective of manipulating and altering the feelings and the thinking processes of the subject. Studies of torture present a near consensus that its main objective is to break the subject’s agency and sense of self and personhood through the infliction of embodied pain (see Wisnewski 2010, 71). Feelings elicited through the experience of being tortured at the hands of another, in particular the feeling of humiliation, destabilise the integrity of the self and undermine the capacities required for agency. In this respect, torture and physical violence proceed on the basis of the type of assumptions about the subject, and about the means of controlling and directing individual conduct, that Foucault identified with the nexus of power and knowledge of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Torture manuals and the production of knowledge on effects, conditions and responses to torture in the field of psychology, and in other social and natural sciences, evidence this nexus.11
If, during the interrogation phase, torture is intended to extract information and to garner confession, at a later stage the purpose of torture is to discipline the subject and to fashion a humiliated subjectivity and thereby force the political prisoner to abandon and renounce his or her convictions. In this sense, torture and physical violence have a location in the political logic of government.
In this discussion of the detention camp as an apparatus of government in Syria, I primarily focus on Tadmur Military Prison, as a paradigmatic case. Of the estimated 100,000 persons who were subject to arrest and interrogation throughout the country during the time of Hafez al-Asad’s rule, about 20,000 went through Tadmur for varying durations (thousands of others were sent to other prisons and detention centres). Many endured a decade or more of incarceration there before being released or transferred to other prisons. Many others perished in Tadmur. While practices of torture and violence are documented for all Syrian prisons and detention sites, the case of Tadmur, as described in the memoirs and testimonials of detainees, serves best to illustrate the enmeshment of practices of violence in processes of subjectivation. I examine memoirs, diaries and fictionalised accounts authored, variously, by Ratib Sha‘bo (2015); Muhammad Salim Hammad (1998); Abdallah al-Naji (ND); Bara’ al-Sarraj (2011); Mustafa Khalifa (2008); Yassin al-Haj Saleh (2003, 2012a); Faraj al-Biraqdar (2006); and Aram Karabit (2010), among others, to analyse practices of subjectivation structuring everyday life in the prison camp.12 In their memoirs these former political prisoners detail practices of violence that are oriented to the undoing of human life. Ratib Sha‘bo (2015), a former detainee, coined the term istidmar (combining damar, meaning destruction and ruination, and Tadmur) to describe the lived experience and being subject to the effects of the Tadmur regime of violence. For over two decades, Tadmur served as the exemplar site of internment where the body of the prisoner was a terrain of struggle between the sovereign, with his powers over life, and the detainees, for whom the preservation of human dignity and a sense of humanity was most at stake.
As a genre of testimonial writing, memoirs and fictionalised diaries of Tadmur tend to share some elements of narrative structure.13 For instance, events are plotted from the time of arrest to the phase of interrogation and detention, and moving on to the journey through various prisons on the eventual road to Tadmur. Although the writings represent eclectic narrative styles – ranging from the documentary to the literary – they often, if not always, cover common experiences structuring life in Tadmur and revealing the relations between prisoners, on one hand, and guards, security service figures and prison authorities, on the other. There is a degree of systematisation of the prison experiences in the writings: descriptions of cells and wards; accounts of initiation rites upon arrival; chronicles of everyday rituals pertaining to morning inspections, food distribution and collection; and testimonial on the guards’ overall and unremitting regulation and monitoring of the minutiae of living in the wards. Despite the commonalities, grids of interpretation of shared prison experiences are, for some writers, filtered through the lens of ideological affiliation. For example, detainees with Islamist affiliation invoked sectarianism to account for the brutality of the guards (Hammad 1998; al-Naji ND). Meanwhile, communist detainees analysed the sectarianisation of the prison resulting from the predominance of guards and security officers of Alawi background (Haddad 2004; Karabit 2010; Sha‘bo 2015).
In various respects, Tadmur localises a zone of abandonment in the Syrian polity. Located in the Homs desert, Tadmur was a military facility inherited from the French mandate administration. Following national independence, it became a space of banishment of political dissidents, alongside military personnel serving prison sentences in a separate compound. Isolated from inhabited areas and surrounded by military compounds, Tadmur prisoners were cut off from the outside in multiple respects. Prison memoirs depict spatial arrangements confirming conditions of abandonment. The facility is described as a large sprawling complex of buildings with individual holding cells and numerous collective wards, estimated to number thirty-nine in total, distributed around seven courtyards. In the memoirs, descriptions of Tadmur spaces emphasise the detainees’ sense of isolation and desolation. This sense of isolation was intensified by the fact that visits were, on the whole, denied, although exceptions were noted and were made for prisoners whose families bribed the warden (al-Naji ND, 140). Newspapers, radio and other means of gaining connection with the outside world were forbidden. Prisoners spent twenty-three hours a day inside the wards, and were only allowed out to the courtyard nearest their ward for the one-hour breathing break (tanafus).
In his memoir of his years of incarceration, Bara’ al-Sarraj describes the prison as exuding an atmosphere of horror that is sensed through characteristic sounds that played as a soundtrack to the day and night rhythms of life at Tadmur. All through the night, prisoners heard the sounds of the guards’ boots thumping on the roofs above their cells. During the day, the pounding of prisoners’ bare feet as they were made to run over the asphalt of the courtyard during tanafus exercises were overlaid with the shouts, insults and scolding of the security men. Their time in the cells and wards was punctuated by the hissing of whips, the piercing screams of the tortured coming through the high windows, the jangling of keys and the screeching of metal gates as they closed. In Bara’ al-Sarraj’s words (2011, 79) these sounds intermingled to compose a symphony of horror. Tadmur, Bara’ al-Sarraj avers, possessed its own quality of fear – a type of fear that was synonymous with the place and that had no equivalent anywhere else.
In design, the compounds exposed the prisoners to the bitter desert cold as much as to the guards’ constant surveillance from their positions on the roofs. Hammad (1998, 39) describes conditions and experiences of abandonment:
The winter set in … the desert winter is merciless … in our ward we possess nothing but our tattered blankets, the windows and ceiling hatches are all open over our heads. Because of the cold and the damp climate and terrible nutrition, colds and rheumatism spread, and within a year tuberculosis reared its head. We only discovered it once it spread.
In the 1980s, prisoners experienced undernourishment as the food supply was meagre. Deprived of nutrition and left to battle the freezing cold of the Tadmur desert, many of the prisoners contracted tuberculosis and the rate of affliction reached an epidemic level. An entry in Hammad’s memoir (1998, 39), dated June 1983, refers to a quarantine set up in Ward 35 for inmates diagnosed with tuberculosis. Having contracted the disease, Hammad was moved to Ward 35. Upon entering the ward, he found ‘more than one hundred brothers consumed by disease’ who ‘were forced to sleep next to each other, exposing one another to contagion willing or not’ (Hammad 1998, 61).
Prison conditions exposed the body to extreme hazards and threatened the physiological life of the detainees. Testimonials and memoirs of prisoners record the frequent outbreak of contagious diseases caused by the dire hygiene conditions of the detention cells and wards, the poor sanitary provisions and meagre food rations. Among the common afflictions were severe skin rashes and diarrhoea (al-Naji ND, 135; Hammad 1998, 46; Mustafa Khalifa 2008, 191–2). Al-Naji (ND, 135) reports that cases of dysentery and typhoid arose regularly for extended periods of time. Such conditions resulted in the death of an as yet undetermined number of detainees.
Recurrent themes in most of the prison memoirs pertain to the violent practices that were applied in a systematic fashion to political detainees. These practices are, in the first instance, inscriptions on the body, while also working on the subject’s sense of self and on her/his sense of self-worth and dignity. The accounts show that conditions were akin to those characterising concentration camps, as noted by Agamben (1998, 135): the organisation of life ‘with … meticulous regulations that do not spare any aspect of physiological life (not even the digestive function which is obsessively codified and publicized)’.
Typically, upon arrival at the prison, prisoners are inducted into the prison regime. Known as ‘the reception party’ (haflat al-istiqbal), the induction initiates new detainees into the practices of violence and humiliation. The reception ritual is designed to shatter the detainee’s sense of personhood and to sap his or her dignity. In his fictionalised account of Tadmur, Mustafa Khalifa (2008, 46–8) records more than the ceremonial kicks and punches of the arrival ritual. In a scene of extreme degradation, one of the new detainees is ordered to drink from an open sewer in the prison courtyard. He resists and is subject to a vicious beating by prison guards that kills him. In the process, the guards make an example of him to elicit dispositions of compliance in other detainees.
The importance of the guards’ bodily inscriptions during the reception ritual is heightened in the practice of ta‘lim, which, in this context, means marking a prisoner for pedagogical punishment. In all collective cells, prison guards choose one or several prisoners upon their arrival to serve as an exemplum of punishment for the instruction of other inmates. The marked prisoner receives extra physical punishment, possibly leading to his death. The power of death is enacted in ‘pedagogical killing’ in the prison, but also in the wider social body through the massacre. Ta‘lim is derived, in Arabic, from two different roots: that of ‘ilm (‘learning’) and that of ‘alama (‘mark’). The practice denoted by ta‘lim is marking, but to mark is also to teach. Marking is achieved by selecting a body for the exemplary inscription of biopower.
Ta‘lim unfolds as a continuous practice and is intimately linked with overnight monitoring of the wards and morning inspection by the guards. For instance, especially during the evening hours guards, positioned on the roofs of the wards and surveilling the prisoners inside through hatches in the ward ceilings, would routinely call one or more prisoners for marking. Prisoners would be subject to marking during the night for making any slight movement or for waking up to use the urinal (Hammad 1998, 36; Bara’ al-Sarraj 2011, 47; Sha‘bo 2015, 264–5). Prisoners assigned to the role of ward supervisors were at greater risk as they stood guard below the hatch and were visible to the guards for longer periods. The marked prisoners were subjected to additional and extreme punishments. Every morning, two or three marked prisoners were taken out of the ward for punishment. Karabit (2010, 80) observes that this practice is a well-studied psychological operation intended to make fear and dread inhabit and consume the prisoner for the duration of the night. As explained by Karabit, the power of ta‘lim derives from the fact that it is a delayed punishment. Often a guard would instruct a detainee to mark himself, but there were times when the ward supervisor was instructed to mark a fellow detainee.
Ta‘lim also took place during breathing time (tanafus) when the prisoners were taken out to the courtyard to perform gruelling physical exercises selected for them by the guards. These exercises were interspersed by instructions to perform humiliating acts such as simulating animal sounds. Tanafus became an occasion to stage spectacles of debasement and ultimately to trigger a sense of worthlessness in the prisoners by implicating them as witnesses to the dehumanisation of fellow detainees or by making them objects of the spectacle. Episodes of ta‘lim confront the prisoners with the dilemmas of being at the threshold of the human-non-human (to be discussed below).
The condition of being humiliated is accomplished, symbolically, if not literally, by ‘fracturing the eye’ (kasr al-‘ayn) so that the subject is rendered unable to look the guard in the eye. Indeed, the required body posture upon arrival at Tadmur was to keep the head down and never lift it to look at the face of a guard or an officer. Failure to maintain this posture led to beatings. In the evening, prisoners were required to cover their eyes with blindfolds (referred to as tamasha, literally a blinder) (Karabit 2010, 65). Kasr al-‘ayn is also practised outside the prison to fashion a non-contesting subject, as will be examined when we turn to the political subjectivities formed in relation to dictatorial government.
The regulation of all aspects of physiological life puts natural life at the centre of practices of punishment. Thus, the period allocated to ‘breathing’ (tanafus) – that is, getting out of the cell into a courtyard – is also the time selected for intensified punishment (see Amnesty International 2001; Hammad 1998). As a consequence, ‘breathing’ is turned into the most dreaded and hated activity. A time assigned to the most basic bodily function exposes the body to the conditions of bare life. Writing about ‘the breather regime’, Hammad (1998, 31) notes the enforced posture and movement:
After breakfast, we remain still, awaiting an hour of torture … at some point, the guards call us for breathing. We go out to the courtyard, our heads down, each one of us grasping the waist of the brother in front of him … the cables and batons that beat down upon us lead us to where [the guards] want.
The regulation of breathing includes the banning of speech and movement and the requirement of standing, without moving, facing the wall (Hammad 1998, 31).
As with breathing, other basic bodily functions involved exposure to punishment. Trips to the bathroom and to the showers were pretexts for lashings and beatings before and after the performances of bodily functions and cleanliness rituals (Hammad 1998, 19). Physical punishment reserved for bathroom trips were also recorded by Begoña Aretxaga (1995) in her work on Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoners. Other body-care practices were marked with physical violence. For example, shaving of the head and face was done by prison barbers using dull razors that caused cuts to the scalp and deep wounds to the face (Hammad 1998, 31–2; Karabit 2010, 25).
Aretxaga (1995) refers to these techniques of punishment as a breakdown of rationalisation and as the excess in the exercises of punishment, whereby power indulges in its own theatrical staging. I would suggest, however, that these exercises contain their own rationalisation, wherein humiliation and producing a humiliated state of being are the objectives. Torture works on affect and its objective is not only to cause physical pain but, also, to bring about the degradation and diminishment of the subject’s sense of human self, heightening the experience of being demeaned, soiled, dirty and violated. These dimensions of torture are clear in the use of methods that involve the penetration of body orifices and in sexual aggression. For example, among the methods of torture reported by those who had been detained in Syrian prisons is making prisoners sit on a bottle with its mouth penetrating the anus. Apparatuses such as al-dulab (the tire), bisat al-rih (the flying carpet) and al-kursi al-almani (the German chair) force the body to be bent and moulded in ways intended to inflict damage and cause disability.14 While these devices tend to be used during the interrogation phase, the assault on the body persists with daily beatings, whippings and battering. Punishments for misdemeanours include slapping the face and banging the inmate’s skull against the wall or the metal bars of the cell. The acts of physical violence that guards in Syrian prisons carried out, as a matter of routine, have been documented for political prisons and camps in other countries.15
In his discussion of torture in Argentina, Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco (2003, 385) argues that we must explain the very action of torture as well as the specific form that the torture takes. He underscores the expressive symbolism of torture, pointing to the signification of certain acts of torture, such as the electrocution of men’s genitals, a practice common to many torture settings in South America and the Arab world. This practice, it has been argued, could be read as a castration metaphor. In accounts of detention and interrogation, techniques of torture that target genitalia figure repeatedly – for example, the crushing of testicles at the hands of the torturers and punches and kicks to the genital area often resulting in damage leading to the excision of the testicles. According to Suarez-Orozco (2003, 385), the encounter between torturer and victim is enacted as a face-off between ‘the macho army’ and ‘dangerous subversives’ targeted for emasculation.
The sexual language of torture and its iterative performance recalls and re-inscribes mythic gods with powers of retribution over the body. In the cosmology of the Eternal Leader – the omnipotent and omnipresent – sexualised torture is a kind of retribution visited on the wicked. In a macabre scene from Mustafa Khalifa’s (2008, 227) novel-cum-memoir of life in Tadmur Prison, Al-Qawqa‘ah (The Shell), the narrator describes an attack by an assistant guard on a political prisoner. While executing the acts of punishment, the attacker, nicknamed Wahsh (beast), demands to know from his victim and the other detained dissidents what it is that they do not like about the leader (Hafez al-Asad). He then bellows that the leader will fuck them and will fuck their mothers and their sisters. The image that develops in the guard’s verbal attack is a figuration of the body of the leader with his sexual organ conjured as the largest (Mustafa Khalifa 2008, 227). The guard then breaks into the slogan ‘long live the president’. Mythology and folkloric tales are integrated into the technologies of domination.
A catalogue of practices of humiliation is compiled in the growing number of Syrian memoirs of detention and imprisonment. Repertoires of humiliation include the forced eating of insects and vermin, the drinking of urine and the kissing of a guard’s boots (see Hammad 1998, 35).16 The cruelty and debasement intended by these punishments are a variation on practices noted for more ‘humane’ and ‘civilised’ detention centres. Aretxaga (1995) also recorded that IRA prisoners were given food that was soiled with urine or had insects in it. Defilement and contamination are designed to soil the body and the person beyond the possibility of ever becoming clean again. Hammad (1998) writes in his testimonial of life in Tadmur that it was routine for guards to force prisoners to lick soiled matter, including spit, off the ground. In Al-Qawqa‘ah (The Shell), the narrator/prisoner describes a scene of repulsive invasion of the body when the guard spits inside his mouth and forces him to swallow the spit (Mustafa Khalifa 2008, 101–2). As a result, he feels his insides soiled to the point that they can never be clean again. In his words, the spit is stuck to the wall of his stomach. The subject’s sense that it would not be possible to be cleansed again captures the tear or rupture in the self.17 The taint and defilement reside within the walls of the stomach, nurtured and kept alive in the memory of being tainted.
Defilement and contamination of the body are precisely the type of threats and dangers that, in their actualisation, create the state of abjection, negating the subject’s personhood. To this end, prison guards inflicted punishments devised to provoke self-repulsion and the feeling of abjection. One of the commonly recounted incidents in detainees’ narratives is that of the prisoner made to eat a dead mouse. Hammad (1998, 76–7), Mustafa Khalifa (2008) and al-Biraqdar (2006, 51–3) recount such stories in much detail. The forced repulsive act, in their narratives, leaves the prisoner shattered and broken. What such accounts point to is that the underlying purpose of forced self-debasement and humiliation is to destabilise the subject’s sense of selfhood.
The destabilisation of bodily borders is a technique of overturning the subject against herself (see Kristeva (1982) on borders). Karabit (2010, 89) gives a troubling account of the forced breaking of borders between his bodily fluids and those of a fellow inmate:
They [guards] knocked on the door and shouted, ‘Get out for the wedding.’ We rolled into the court like terrorised bird formations. ‘Get naked …’ Not long after, the Whips came out … their cables burnt our skin … They went about torturing us in a systematic way. Shouting: ‘On the ground. Crawl on your elbows and knees.’ We proceeded to do as instructed. We did so until we were bleeding. One of [the guards] shouted at me: ‘Ward superintendent [Karabit’s assignment].’ I saluted him and stood guard. ‘Go there and stand by the one at the corner.’ When I stood face-to-face with the person there, he ordered: ‘Spit on him, spit on the old man, the man with white hair.’ I stood in shock, not knowing what to do. I said, ‘Sergeant, he is an old man.’ He shouted: ‘Spit on him.’ I said: ‘He is old, he is like my father.’ I spoke while my face was down. Lifting your face in Tadmur is a crime. He said: ‘You son of a whore, mark yourself (‘alim nafsak). Here there is no “my father”. You are all scum’ … He repeated: ‘Spit on him’ … Silence fell on the place. The guards were waiting for the farce to climax … I was face-to-face with Abu Nijm [the old man]. His eyes in my eyes, the saliva in his throat in my mouth, and mine in his, each spitting on the other. I spit at myself, at my destiny and his, and at the destiny of our countries, my misery, his misery and the misery of our countries.
The narrative of the assault of bodily fluids, also noted for other camps, conveys the kind of battering directed at the human spirit. The assault triggers responses at the level of the affect such as humiliation and estrangement with respect to one’s body seen as being stained beyond cleaning. Karabit’s testimony illustrates the disjunction within the self that Ratib Sha‘bo (2015, 363) diagnoses as resulting from the subject’s human self being assaulted or from standing as a silent witness to someone else’s torture and suffering. In his words, the witness’s feeling of relief for not being the object of torture, even momentarily, and his forced silence kill within him his self-pride and any spirit of rebellion. Reflecting on the practice of positioning prisoners as witnesses of dehumanising suffering, Sha‘bo describes the quandary they face, the fears and the internal rupture that can never be healed:
They take one of the members of the ward to torture, not far from his mates, rather in front of the entire ward and within earshot of everyone. You are forced to accept this. Any rejection is a form of suicide, or worse than suicide: disfigurement and disability. When you accept this, something inside you is broken forever. It will be registered that you were not the man you ought to be. You did not act with the courage worthy of such situations.
Thus, the fashioning of the ‘unheroic’ subject and the engendering of memories of cowardice appear to be at the heart of the duel between the ‘petty sovereigns’ and the recalcitrant subject.18
These affective responses to another’s suffering emerge precisely at the threshold of the human and non-human. In his prison diaries, Ratib Sha‘bo (2015, 244) reflects on the lines/borders between the human and the animal, expressing his anguish that, in Tadmur, the limits are absent and the borders are open. He ponders the possibility that the mind that designed this prison would seek to bring about a human’s reversion to a state of animality: ‘I could not protect myself from the fear that the designers of these tortures and the innovators of counter-humanity would deprive the human of his sense of physiological humanity.’ In a bleak vision of further debasement, Sha‘bo conjures a circumstance where a prisoner was chained to a pole and rendered immobile. Unable to move, he would be forced to meet his physiological needs of expelling bodily waste (urination and defecation) at the spot where he was chained. The question for him is ‘when confronted with the unrestrained imagination of liquidation and not just debasement and humiliation, which is more extreme, liquidation or reversion to animality?’ The anxieties and fears viscerally conveyed through these reflections reference the menace of self-debasement leading to nullifying the human self.
The practices of humiliation, punishment and violence to which prisoners were subjected should not be considered in isolation of the prisoners’ own practices that aimed to claim and affirm a worthy human life and negate the objectives of the camp. Indeed, the accounts and memoirs of Syrian detainees point to how the interned instrumentalised their bodies, turning them into sites of resistance and not just sites of the inscription of coercive and disciplinary power. In this context, and as pointed out by Aretxaga, the body is invested in the intersubjective relations with other prisoners and with the guards. For example, prisoners strove to counter the effects of physical assaults by the guards, which, in some instances, accompanied daily routine occurrences such as the collection of food containers delivered to the front of the cell. As such, they devised tactics to alleviate the risks that these practices posed to the life of the elderly or the ill among them. Thus, volunteers, usually from among the younger prisoners, put themselves forward as food collectors (Hammad 1998, 36; Mustafa Khalifa 2008, 63–4). These men, who exposed their bodies to punishment to spare the more vulnerable detainees, were called the fida’yyin (literally ‘those who sacrifice’ – a term used in reference to front-line soldiers running reconnaissance missions). These acts, intensifying the body’s experience of humiliation and pain, permitted the reintroduction of virtuous subjectivities back into the prisoners’ world – a world of degradation and bare life.
In Tadmur, executions of Muslim Brotherhood detainees were common during most of the 1980s. In the face of routine hangings on a weekly basis, detainees improvised life-affirming practices. For instance, those condemned to death would give away their clothes and other belongings as they prepared for execution. They often did this in association with making wills that included requests for a message to be communicated to their families or friends, asking for forgiveness and bestowing their few material possessions to fellow detainees. The rituals surrounding death in the wards sought to safeguard the humanity of the persons and resist the reversion to the non-human state. Resistance to dehumanisation took the form of such rituals as the preparation for burial of the bodies of ‘martyrs’, the administration of burial rites and rituals – such as reading the Quran and praying – and speaking of and remembering the martyrs after their execution or their death by other means (Hammad 1998; Mustafa Khalifa 2008, 134). In the same vein, practices of memorisation were common and signal a striving to keep alive a hope that there will be time, in the future, for remembering. Bara’ al-Sarraj (2011) writes of memorisation practices that helped the prisoners in preserving the memory of events and of the space of the camp (see also al-Biraqdar 2006). Memorisation appears as a technique of self that is used against the practices aimed at unmaking the subject. Through repetition exercises, detainees committed to memory chapters of the Quran, entire passages from books, names of dead prisoners, specific events and entire days in the prison (al-Naji ND, 130; Bara’ al-Sarraj 2011, 23; al-Biraqdar 2006; Mustafa Khalifa 2008, 76–7).
Along with the arts of human dying which the prisoners strove to enact, arts of human living were cultivated in the struggle to meet simple everyday needs and to improve living conditions in the wards. Detainees learnt, through trial and error, how to make various items out of the nylon wraps of the daily bread rations (Bara’ al-Sarraj 2011, 44). Ratib Sha‘bo (2015, 245–9) describes the wonderment that the communist prisoners felt upon settling into their wards in Tadmur at the time they were transferred there in the mid 1990s as a punishment for refusing to renounce their party affiliations and their political views. Sha‘bo remarks that they marvelled at the nylon nets that the previous detainees left behind on the walls of the ward. The nets were suitable for hanging washed clothes, and were used as such. Through trial and error, the new detainees discovered how to manufacture nylon thread for mending clothes. The needles for mending were made out of the bones that could sometimes be fished out of the food they were given. Creating these primitive implements and resources were essential to fortifying the self and maintaining human living at the threshold of the human-non-human life conditions of the prison.
In highlighting these practices and viewing them as arts of dying humanly and of living humanly, it is not my purpose to romanticise the struggle for survival and for life in the camp. Rather, I want to underscore that these arts were possibly the only means by which prisoners could conduct resistance. The forms of power exercised through the body of the prisoners precluded particular acts of outright resistance or, at best, made them obsolete. It would not have been effective, for example, for the Tadmur prisoners to go on hunger strikes to protest, or to seek to change or draw public attention to their conditions. As a politics of death was at the heart of incarceration practices at Tadmur, a hunger strike to the death would likely be managed by hastening the strikers’ death in the context of isolation and abandonment. Thus, unlike other jurisdictions where such tactics were adopted (e.g. Ireland, Turkey) as ways of mobilising support externally or altering conditions internally, they were of no possible utility in Tadmur.19
The practices of torture documented in Tadmur, and other Syrian prisons, had as their purpose the undoing of the prisoners as political subjects, and their reconstitution in a way that is devoid of dignity and that is incapable of dissenting. Most telling about this objective is the periodic ‘negotiation’ or musawama (literally ‘bargaining’, in the words of former prisoners) sessions that political prisoners were called to attend.20 In these sessions, the exchange or bargain was generally offered to members of secular parties detained in sites less severe than Tadmur (for example in ‘Adra Prison or in the Sheikh Hassan detention facility, both in Damascus). In their memoirs and testimonies, political prisoners recount incidents of bargaining wherein, at different intervals of their incarceration, they were hauled in front of military committees composed of high-ranking officers who reviewed their cases individually and demanded that they renounce their political affiliation and dissociate themselves from their leaders and comrades in return for release from prison.21 In exchange for personal liberty, the prisoners had to declare their allegiance to the president. Both renunciations and declarations had to be signed by the detainees (Hebo 2001; Karabit 2010, 37; Sha‘bo 2015, 174). In his memoir, Karabit (2010, 38) recalls that following the refusal by a number of detainees from the Communist Party-Political Bureau to agree to the bargain and to sign off on the statements and declarations, an army colonel met with one of the group’s leaders to try to enlist him in the conversion task. The exchange or bargain at times involved the condition that the prisoner sign a statement of self-critique denouncing her/his previous views and promising to cooperate with the security services. In their efforts to secure this bargain, the security services and prison officers often drafted close family members to put pressure on the prisoners to agree to the exchange. Refusal to accept the bargain often resulted in an escalation of punishment and transfer to Tadmur Prison (as in the cases of Majed Hebo, Ratib Sha‘bo, Aram Karabit and Yassin al-Haj Saleh, to name a few).
The effects of the internment camp are not limited to the political detainees, but extend throughout society. In fact, the detention system aimed at society at large and not only at the dissidents. As in the disappearances in Argentina (Robben 2000, 95), detention stoked feelings of anguish among relatives, colleagues and friends about the fate of the detainees and the kind of suffering they were likely to be enduring. Additionally, accounts of punishment in prison reached the families and social circles of detainees. Family members, up to fourth-degree relatives, were screened out of public employment and faced restrictions on movement and travel. They were also subject to enhanced surveillance and monitoring, being cast as members of a risky population. Further, family members were, at times, summoned by the security forces to bring about the public surrender of political convictions on the part of the prisoner. For instance, in his prison testimony Majed Hebo (2001), a Communist Action Party activist, recounts that his father tried to convince him to renounce his political views and declare allegiance to Hafez al-Asad in return for his release. Hebo’s refusal to do so led to a break-up of family relations, a common outcome for political prisoners who rejected the deals offered by the security services. Through a wide range of practices, imprisonment and conditions of detention interconnected with everyday life outside the prison. Arrest, interrogation and detention came to be seen as hazards of everyday living that could arise in encounters with the security officers ubiquitously present on the streets, or that could result from entrapment by informants working as taxi drivers and vendors at street-corner kiosks.
Alongside the detention camp, war served as a technique of population government by the Asad regime. The massacres committed in the drive to uproot the Islamist insurgency of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and then again to crush the Uprising in 2011, unfolded as part of a war against a population deemed recalcitrant. In this section, I want to explore the massacres as a manifestation of a ‘civil war regime’. This is a regime that corresponds, in some of its features and styles of operation, to Foucault’s analysis of politics as ‘permanent war’ which, Foucault (2003, 50) suggests, is an originary or primary condition of politics – it founds the state and the law.22 In the Syrian civil war regime, as in the permanent war discussed by Foucault, drawing binary lines through the social body is core to the logic of population government.
To approach the massacres in Syria as expressions of the civil war regime, I draw attention to the rationalities behind them, their specific forms and their intended objectives. Through a constellation of practices and techniques, a division of the population into ‘us’ and ‘them’ was enacted. The ‘us’ part of this division should be read to include supporters of the regime, while the ‘them’ side is comprised of opponents or the political opposition. This latter – the opponents – are constituted as expendable. What can be discerned, in this regard, is the same eradicationist or liquidationist logic found in fascist regimes that presided over civil wars, of which Francoist Spain is a telling example. I use the 1982 mass killings in Hama as an illustrative case of the practices and techniques of the civil war regime in Syria.
The official objective of the assault on Hama was the elimination of the Islamist opposition. This objective was, however, framed in relation to a grand mission. Rif‘at al-Asad, who is thought to have been the strategist of the ground attack, conceived of the regime’s response to the challenge of opposing groups within the frame of grand undertakings or great works that require spectacular sacrifice. In his speech to the Ba‘th Party Seventh Regional Congress in 1980, less than two years prior to the Hama massacre, he invoked Stalin’s vision for a great Soviet state, which necessitated that large numbers of people be eliminated. Extolling chauvinism in support of national ideologies, he exhorted his listeners to embrace chauvinism, citing, as exemplar, Stalin’s actions for the sake of the Revolution: ‘Stalin, O Comrades, liquidated ten million humans for the sake of the Communist revolution, taking into account only one matter and that is chauvinism for his party and for the party’s perspective.’ Rif‘at cites the example of other nations and groups that showed chauvinism in their national ideologies and that were, as a result, models of achievement. He concludes that chauvinism in favour of the Ba‘thist idea is a historical necessity that requires large-scale sacrifices.
In a number of speeches, Hafez al-Asad (1980b, 1982) explicated the necessity and rationale for the liquidation of the Muslim Brothers. Such announcements, as noted by Jacques Sémelin (2003, 198), belong to the discursive repertoires of massacre politics. The will to kill, articulated in the speeches of Hafez al-Asad and Rif‘at al-Asad, was also communicated in announcements and declarations attributed to army generals and governors, in statements asserting willingness and readiness to kill thousands (e.g. General Ghazi Kan‘an declaring a willingness to ‘plant a thousand flowers’ in the Homs desert). The idea of revolutionary violence as an imperative was propagated in the media during Hafez al-Asad’s presidency (al-Ba‘th, 18 March 1980) as it was under his successor.
Rhetoric about conspiracies and foreign plots organised the public discourses of the leaders and loyalists. One of the dominant motifs of this rhetoric was the charge that the Muslim Brothers worked in conjunction with President Sadat in Egypt to facilitate the implementation of the Camp David Accords and, hence, the betrayal of the Arab and Palestinian goals of liberation (al-Ba‘th, 18 March 1980). Reactionary agents of imperialism and plotters against the Arab nation, the Muslim Brothers and, by extension, any opponent of the regime were enemies of the people (a‘da’ al-sha‘b). The sole appropriate response to this enemy was liquidation.
Thus, in public discourse, the regime constructed a category of dispensable subjects, namely the Muslim Brothers. Their status as dispensable subjects was confirmed in Law 49 issued in 1980, which made membership of the group punishable by death. Similarly, the recalcitrant populations of Hama were subsumed under this category of subjects slated for elimination. In some sense, the label ‘Muslim Brothers’ became shorthand for populations that opposed the ruling regime and that, as a result, were rendered dispensable. As elaborated in the discussion of the sacralisation of politics and its articulation with the civil war regime, the massacres in Syria were supported by a murderous discourse (a discourse authorising or sanctioning murder). The murderous discourse of the Syrian regime projected the existence of an enemy population of traitors and murderers – nationally diseased and ill in their patriotism who had to be excised from the body politic. The war was waged as a cultural war and a civilisational war and, above all, as a war of ideas. The old sovereign power to kill must take a cosmic form and assume a transcendental horizon – a quasi-religious order framing war between orthodoxy and heresy or deviance. The cleavage introduced into the population takes the form of a civilisational and a cultural division, thus fracturing the social field in ideological terms, with the line of fracture being that between correct thinking, on one side, and diseased thinking, on the other. Suarez-Orozco (2003) characterises state-sponsored violence in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s in words that aptly describe the state of war unleashed by the Syrian regime against the enemy population:
[T]orture and death of ‘subversives’ was the magical treatment against the spread of an infectious way of life. To simplify their thinking and to focus energy, the armed left, the democratic left, intellectuals, artists, psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, children, pregnant women and other deviants were bunched together as representatives, or potential representatives, or sympathisers with an international assault penetrating the fatherland from the outside, growing, spreading within.
The scale of the Islamist insurgency in Syria in the late 1970s and early 1980s remains undetermined. As estimated by observers and as can be gleaned from accounts provided by the protagonists, the number of Islamist insurgents was relatively small. According to Syrian human rights organisations, there were 300 armed Islamists in Hama belonging, predominately, to the militant group al-Tali‘a al-Muqatila (‘The Combatant Vanguard’). Other observers, and some Hama residents, put the number between 300 and 1000 (interviews with former Hama residents, London 2011, Stockholm 2011). An estimate of 300 active Islamist militants is given for Aleppo in 1980 prior to the army’s mobilisation and crushing of their bases in that city.23 The challenge that the insurgency represented, it could be argued, arose in relation to its tactics rather than its numerical strength or military capabilities. During this period, the Tali‘a launched a bombing campaign, targeting military buildings, Ba‘th Party offices and state cooperatives (Seale 1988; see also the memoir of Ayman al-Sharbaji (ND), a Tali‘a activist). It also carried out a series of assassinations of high-profile figures associated with the regime. The Tali‘a was additionally responsible for the massacre, committed in 1979 by Colonel Ibrahim al-Yusuf, of seventy-nine Alawi cadets at the Aleppo Artillery Academy. In response, the various security branches intensified their surveillance and arrest of youth in activist milieus. Thousands of Muslim Brothers, and dissidents belonging to oppositional leftist groupings, were rounded up and imprisoned. Also, the military and security forces were mobilised to crush opposition in Aleppo and Idlib and, in the process, committed a number of massacres in 1980 and 1981. In this respect, the regime deployed the military option early on in the confrontation with the Islamists and other opponents.
Against this background, the immediate catalyst for the assault on Hama was the continued activism of the Tali‘a group in the city as well as incidents of attack on Ba‘th Party cadres and on a security post. In light of the estimated number of armed insurgents, the extraordinary violence unleashed on the city does not find rationalisation simply in the rules of armed engagement, whereby the mobilised force should be proportionate to the numbers and capabilities of the opposing camp. However, principles of military rationalisation do not apply to this armed onslaught on the Hama population. The massacres in Hama were part of a war against the enemy population, codenamed the Muslim Brothers. Yet, in effect, the war extended beyond them to all opponents of the regime as well as all civilians who harboured some sympathy for the opposition. At the same time, the Islamist insurgency used terrorist methods and articulated a mirror image of the regime’s polarising discourse (al-Sharbaji ND).
The assault on Hama was led and carried out by two paramilitary units, namely the Defence Companies, whose commander was Rif‘at al-Asad, and the Special Units under the leadership of Ali Haydar, and was supported by army divisions, most importantly the Third Division under General Shafiq Fayyad. In the early hours of 3 February 1982, armoured tanks surrounded the city, while forces positioned at the Mahrda barracks nearby shelled homes and neighbourhoods, combined with aerial bombardment. To create a state of siege, water, electricity and telephone lines were cut off. Once the siege was complete and Hama’s isolation secured, the military men dispersed throughout the city carrying out their mission of killing, looting and destruction.
The military forces proceeded to round up residents from their homes and to congregate them in schools, stadiums and sports centres and cemeteries. Documentary material and accounts of the massacres point to a policy of systematic killing of males above fifteen years of age. Groups of women and children were also killed (SHRC 2001). People were amassed into groups and shot collectively. In a number of massacres, entire families and residents of whole streets were brought out into open space and shot. In a report of one of the massacres, named the Sirhin massacre, a survivor testified that people were driven in eleven buses from various neighbourhoods in the city of Hama to the village of Sirhin where they were ordered to disembark and were later shot and thrown into mass graves that were already filled with bodies of those killed in other massacres (SHRC 2001).
Mass killings and detention in makeshift detention camps were a daily occurrence for a four-week period. The Hama massacre, in effect, is a chain of massacres committed in various neighbourhoods of the city. Executions of small and large groups of people took place in private dwellings, in alleyways, in grocery stores, in workshops and factories, thus inscribing the experience of horror throughout a multitude of city spaces. During this period, and in its aftermath, Hama became a spectacle of death. It served as an exemplum of the ruler’s power over life and his right to kill with impunity in a manner that recalls the conduct of the sovereign described by Achille Mbembe (2003) as necropolitics: a form of politics concerned with the subjugation of life to the powers of death.
In the course of the shelling and bombardment, entire buildings, historical quarters and markets were razed to the ground (Amnesty International 1983; SHRC 2001). Neighbourhoods such as al-Kilaniyya, home to great architectural works of earlier historical periods, became rubble. Adopting counter-insurgency tactics, snipers were positioned on the roofs of public buildings in the vicinity of old city quarters. Snipers gave cover to army units as they bulldozed their way into the narrow streets of neighbourhoods such as Suq al-Shajra. These operations were also opportunities for looting of shops in neighbourhood markets.
The military operations and the mass killing were part of a policy of pacification by eradication that extended beyond the rebels to the entire city. The obliteration of entire neighbourhoods and mass slaughter is expressive of a form of sovereignty whose primary objective, to borrow Mbembe’s words, is ‘the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations’ (Mbembe 2003, 14; italics in the original). The attainment of this objective is poignantly expressed in the words of Hama residents to the effect that, in the aftermath of this ruination, ‘the city became lifeless’ (‘asbahat al-madina hamida) – life was sapped out or sucked out (interview with Manhal al-Sarraj, 2011). Hama represents a case where war, instead of being on the margin of the state, is conducted throughout the whole of the social body. War has been a tool of political organisation supported by the militarisation of many aspects of Syrian society. In a speech given at the time of the massacres, Hafez al-Asad (1980b) asserted that it was not possible to end the state of emergency, as demanded by the dissidents, because the country was in a state of war – reference being here to the war with Israel. The declared state of war with the external enemy had the home front as its rearguard. Yet, contrary to the official discourse, the home front was always the primary battlefield. In this sense, Hama was an exemplary site of home-front battlefields where war is conducted against the enemy within.
The civil war regime, as the framework of ruler–ruled relations, draws energy from the lines of friction drawn between loyalists and enemies – between ‘us’ and ‘them’. In his first documentary film titled Step by Step (1979), filmmaker Ossama Mohammed sought to gain insight into the structural foundations of governmental violence. Mohammed follows the everyday life of an ordinary peasant family in one of the villages of the Sahel. Living in poverty and relying on harsh farm work that brings meagre income and crop yields, one of the young men in the family opts to join the military as a non-commissioned officer. Following a period of training, he returns to his village in his uniform, now feeling more confident and secure in his future. Mohammed asks him probing questions about the obligations to which a post in the military may give rise, and the nature of loyalty it invites. In response, the young man assertively and unhesitatingly replies in the affirmative that he is willing and ready to kill whomever the leader identifies as an enemy, including his own siblings. The absolute and unquestioning obedience expressed by Mohammed’s subject may reflect, in part, a certain idealism of youth, but is also undoubtedly the result of a training and indoctrination regime. This loyalty and ideological alignment are, however, produced through myriad ways in which conviction, as much as opportunism, is a motivating factor.
The division of society into ‘us’ and ‘them’ was entrenched through the militarisation of civilian forces and their enlistment in the war against the enemy population. For example, the security services armed Ba‘th Party cadres and youth adherents in the Revolutionary Youth Federation, or ‘Shabiba’, and the National Union of Students. At the emergency congress meeting of the National Union of Students in March 1980 – held to declare allegiance to the leader – the union president, Hassan Hamed, announced the plan to form armed units from among committed university students (al-Ba‘th, 18 March 1980). The role of youth organisations in this war was acknowledged by Hafez al-Asad, in his speeches, as a testament to their valiant patriotism and nationalism. Further, the Popular Army (al-Jaysh al-sha‘bi) was reactivated with the arming of party members and recruits from party auxiliary organisations. According to local observers of developments of the period, the peasants’ armed detachments comprised more than 30,000 members (Batatu 1999, 255). In accounts of the security services’ strategy, some party cadres confirm that they received directives from generals in various security directorates and from members of the Party National Executive to recruit party members and affiliates from among criminal gangs and thugs for the purpose of unleashing them in an unrestrained manner, at the appropriate time, against political opponents (see al-Doghaym 2005). In a short memoir of the period, Mahmud al-Sayyid al-Doghaym (2005), a member of the Ba‘th Party’s Executive Branch in Ma‘arat al-Nu‘man, a town in the Idlib Governorate, recounts being summoned by higher-ranking party officials to the city of Idlib to be given directives on how to implement this particular tactic of the civil war regime.
In the context of the 2011 Uprising and ongoing conflict, both anti-regime activists and regime loyalists provided new information on the role of Ba‘thist branch members in suppressing the Islamist insurgency in 1982 and afterwards, and in crushing the Muslim Brothers. Although their accounts are cast in terms that align with their current political positions, there is agreement that Ba‘thist branch members collaborated with military security, in places like the Idlib towns of Binnish, Taftanaz and Sarmada, in conducting the regime’s war against the Muslim Brothers. The figure of Khaled Ghazala, a teacher, and a Ba‘th Party branch member for Idlib city, emerges as a hero for some and a villain for others. Ghazala, in conjunction with his brother who was a military officer at the time, organised a ‘special task force’ charged with the liquidation of the Muslim Brothers. Residents of the towns where this ‘task force’ operated would later come forward and accuse Ghazala of having masterminded the killing of entire local families (Kuluna Shurka’ fi al-Watan 2012a).
Writing under a pseudonym during the Hama period (early 1980s), Michel Seurat referred to the regime as having formed ‘fascist-like phalanges’ to which peasants, workers and youth were recruited (Michaud 1982, 30). This underscores a structural feature of the regime: the gang-like formations operating as a force against other social groups and creating civil war-like conditions whereby some formations can act as death squads. The formations to which Seurat refers could be seen in operation in the violence that erupted in the town of Jisr al-Shughur in March 1980 and culminated in the massacre of 200 anti-regime civilians. In one of the earlier instances of massacres during the period, the Special Units (al-Wahadat al-Khasa) – a paramilitary formation run by Major-General Ali Haydar – killed protesters who had occupied the headquarters of the Popular Army (al-Jaysh al-Sha‘bi) in the town. The constellation of actors in this bloody confrontation captures the civil war-like conditions that were established through the arming of civilians and the formation of militia attached to key regime figures. As in Jisr al-Shughur, the town of Saraqib (also in the Idlib Governorate) experienced, during the same period, some of the first clashes between citizens and regime forces and affiliated militia.24 One chronicle refers to continued spontaneous mobilisation that became known as the ‘uprising of Saraqib’ (Shilash ND). In response to protests by diverse political groups and increased youth activism, the security forces mounted a campaign of arrests. A cursory look at the list of detainees and disappeared persons in the 1980s maintained by Syrian human rights organisations would reveal a substantial proportion having issued from various towns and villages of the Idlib Governorate as well as from Idlib city (SHRC ND).
The co-optation of civilian forces into the generalised war against all regime opponents served to reinforce the lines of division, bringing popular forces into the orbit of rule and thereby creating the veneer of popularity. The regime recruited heads of clans and tribes as relay points with the security services and the Ba‘th. This was done with a view to reproducing their authority and delivering their constituencies to government. Notably, the regime armed a number of clans in rural Idlib and Aleppo, in places like Saramein, Sarmada and Ma‘arat al-Nu‘man.25 Other accounts indicate that tribes in the Badiya were called upon to monitor the territories around Hama and Aleppo and to act as watchers and informants for the security services (Rae cited in Chatty 2010). Note, for instance, the comments of Diyab al-Mashi in Omar Amiralay’s 2003 documentary Flood in the Country of the Ba‘th. In the interview, al-Mashi, a Member of the Syrian Parliament and the shaykh of al-Mashi clan and of the eponymous village, situated south of Manbij in Aleppo Governorate, affirmed his role in mobilising against the militants and other opponents of Hafez al-Asad (Amiralay 2003). He further recounts that he was rewarded by Hafez al-Asad, who granted him the gift of a new vehicle for his private use. Members of al-Mashi’s clan, including his son, would later engage in the suppression of protests at the beginning of the 2011 Uprising (Tawfiq 2016). Other tribal leaders, besides al-Mashi, enlisted their followers to oversee the flow of arms across the border from Iraq (Rae cited in Chatty 2010). Mahmud Sadeq (1992, 80) notes that Bedouin tribes in Hama and Homs were armed by Rif‘at al-Asad and equipped with tanks and artillery (this armament was later used by the same tribes to settle internal conflicts as was the case in the confrontation between the al-Hasna and al-Fawa‘ira tribes). As Sadeq (1992, 80) points out, such conditions are intended to blackmail society and create a fear of massacre as armed groups are used to terrorise populations and threaten the slaughter of regime opponents.
In response to the March 2011 Uprising, the Syrian regime unleashed its war machine against the population. The immediate use of violence to crush the protests in Dar ‘a and, subsequently, to lay siege to cities, towns and villages across the territory brought war to the surface. The social relationship of war at the foundation of the state/regime became visible once again. Regime–society relations in Syria should be understood in terms of violence as a modality of government in which the detention camp and the massacre were technologies of power applied to the population. Governmental violence nurtured binary divisions in the body politic, polarising society into ‘us’ and ‘them’. This fracture is entwined with the sacralisation of rule in the person of the leader – a deification of sorts – and is grounded in a juridico-political frame of the state of exception.
The political prison was not merely a site of banishing the political opponents of the regime. It developed as an apparatus for the negation of the dissidents’ will and resolve to hold independent views and act upon them. The practices of subjectivation, documented in prison memoirs, aimed to destabilise the dissidents’ sense of self through the incitement of feelings of humiliation, degradation and abjection. Most telling about this governmental rationality is that a national security panel periodically visited prisons to meet with political detainees and assess whether they abandoned their dissident views and were ready to cooperate with the regime as informants. That a signed renunciation of one’s views was required for release after completion of a prison sentence indicates the importance the regime accorded to the objective of having the dissidents overturn themselves.
Alongside the project of long-term rehabilitation of dissidents, the regime mounted large-scale operations of mass killing against ‘insurgent’ populations. In this respect, the Hama massacres were a cornerstone of the civil war regime, setting a template of rule through violence. Tracing the contours of this violence, I outlined key elements of the civil war regime that arose through practices of polarisation and mobilisation around the ‘us’ and ‘them’ divisions.
The analytical lines developed in this chapter highlight a form of politics that framed citizens’ everyday interaction with government and that, through its sites and events, became constitutive of citizen subjectivities. In Chapter 2, I examine the subjectivities formed in relation to practices of government and rule that articulate with violence. The chapter turns to the materiality of the cleavages running through society, looking at the political economy of the ‘us’ and ‘them’ divisions.
1 For an overview of the activities of the Tali‘a group, see Abd al-Hakim (1991) and al-Sharbaji (ND). An early account of the regime’s response, based on interviews with political insiders, is given by Seale (1988).
2 The term ‘civil war regime’ is used by Yassin al-Haj Saleh (2011b) to characterise the regime’s deployment of practices reproductive of socio-cultural divisions that threaten to bring about violence. In this manner, there are similarities in our usage.
3 The actual state of emergency was declared in Military Order 2 issued by the Military Revolutionary Council on 8 March 1963 when the Ba‘thists took over political power through a coup d’état.
4 Crimes specified under Article 6 of the Emergency Law were also named in the Penal Code, as, for example, ‘crimes against state security and public safety’ (Articles 263–311), ‘crimes against public authorities’ (Articles 369–387), ‘crimes undermining the spirit of the nation and public confidence in the authorities’ (Articles 427–459).
5 In a further elaboration of the Law, legislative Decree No. 6, issued in January 1965, designated as ‘criminal’ those acts that violate the socialist order or legislative decrees of the socialist transformation. Actions or activities identified as crimes and as threats to the Revolution include: ‘[o]pposing the Unification of the Arab State or any of the aims of the Revolution or hindering their achievement, whether by way of demonstrations, assemblies, riots or by incitement to such, or by the publication of false news intended to create anxiety and to shake the confidence of the masses in the aims of the Revolution. The taking of money or any other benefit from a foreign state or from an organisation or individuals, whether Syrian or non-Syrian, or communication with a foreign agency, for the purpose of undertaking any action, verbal or physical, hostile to the aims of the Revolution’ (cited in Amnesty International 1983, 10).
6 These tribunals also have purview over crimes specified in the Penal Code, thereby normalising the state of exception.
7 The ascription of divine status to Hafez al-Asad finds remarkable resonance in the deification of Mussolini. For instance, Mussolini was elevated to quasi-divine status in an oath, adopted from Christian prayers, in which the oath taker expressed belief in El Duce commensurate with belief in a deity (see Falasca-Zamponi 1997, 65).
8 It is estimated that between 700 and 1000 prisoners, held on charges of membership of the Muslim Brotherhood, were killed in this massacre. The massacre is attributed to military units under the command of Rif‘at al-Asad, and is understood to have been a retaliatory act for an attempted assassination of Hafez al-Asad.
9 For example, in an article on the training of party cadres from a 1985 issue of the party magazine al-Munadil, some of the ideal traits that should be possessed by partisan Ba‘thists and ordinary citizens alike are presented: ‘To achieve the Socialist Revolution, scientific thinking must occupy the right place in the mind and heart of each citizen’ (al-Munadil, June 1985, 70–9).
10 Arrested in Aleppo in 1980 at the age of 17, Muhammad Berro was convicted of the ‘crime’ of having in his possession a copy of al-Nadhir. He would subsequently spend thirteen years in prison, of which a substantial part was spent in Tadmur (Berro 2015). Nahid Badawiyya (2014), a former prisoner in Douma’s Prison for Women, relates that her period of incarceration during the 1990s overlapped with the imprisonment of two teenage girls, one of whom was charged with ‘disrespecting’ the photo of the president in her civics coursebook.
11 As noted by Rejali (2007), much torture training is done through apprenticeship. The teaching of effective techniques of torture and expounding on Psychology’s assumptions about them have been scrutinised with reference to the School of the Americas (SOA) curriculum and the CIA’s training manuals (see Wisnewski 2010). This knowledge was shared and used in Latin American countries within the US sphere of influence, with the SOA training the likes of Noriega and Pinochet’s military associates. Similarly, knowledge generated by the French military’s practices of torture in Algeria was shared with the post-independence Algerian ruling military (Lazreg 2008). In the Syrian case, both training and apprenticeship in torture can be deduced from the practices of the torturers and the experience of torture as conveyed by the victims and survivors (see, among others, Berro 2015; Karabit 2010). Syrian political dissidents have addressed aspects of this question in their reflections on the production of ‘the whip’ or sina‘at al-jallad (the production of the person who whips in order to discipline) (Berro 2015; Karabit 2010; ‘Udwan 2003).
12 There are memoirs and testimonies of former political prisoners that cover experiences in other prisons. Some of these are by women prisoners. See, for example, Dabbagh (ND) and the testimonies in Hassan (2007). See Haugbolle (2008) for a discussion of prison literature in Syria as an emergent expression of an individual rights movement in the 2000s.
13 In terms of writing style, the memoirs do not fall into a single genre. Some, like Salim Hammad’s testimonial, are closer in form to documentary and eyewitness accounts. Others, such as Aram Karabit’s and Ratib Sha‘bo’s chronicles, are deeply personal in their witnessing and their exposing of internal torments and suffering. Still others, like Biraqdar’s and Mustafa Khalifa’s, are literary, while Yassin al-Haj Saleh’s (2012a) analytical essays on prison life tend more towards social science writing.
14 Al-dulab is a large rubber tire that a prisoner has to slide under his or her neck, placing it under the arms then forcing the rest of the body within the remaining circle, leaving the lower extremities hanging upward from it. Bisat al-rih is a plank of wood to which the prisoner is strapped then strung up to hang while receiving punishments. Al-kursi al-almani is a metal chair to which the hands and feet of the prisoner are tied. The chair’s back is moveable and lifts in a manoeuvre that hyperextends the spine, placing intense pressure on the neck and limbs.
15 There are striking similarities between the punishments involving intense physical violence and extremely demeaning acts detailed in Syrian prisoners’ memoirs and testimonies and those documented for the concentration camps in Nazi Germany, the gulag in Stalinist Russia, the political prison in Greece under the dictatorship, and in South American states under the rule of the military generals in the 1970s and 1980s (Cesereaunu 2006).
16 Such practices of torture are comparable to those applied to Kurds imprisoned in the Diarbakir prison in Turkey. There, they function as ‘softening’ strategies designed to break the prisoners and get them to shout slogans of allegiance to the Turkish state (Zeydanlıoğlu 2009).
17 This manner of soiling and contaminating the prisoner was also used in exemplar camps such as the Russian gulag where guards dropped urine on the bodies or into the mouths of the inmates (Cesereaunu 2006).
18 Lawrence Langer (1991) coined the term ‘unheroic memory’ as a category of Holocaust testimonial recollections.
20 Yassin al-Haj Saleh (2011a) characterises the practice of musawama as a requirement for the dissident to overturn himself or herself.
21 Bara’ al-Sarraj (2011, 66, 68) recounts being summoned to several meetings by these committees, including one that took place in October 1995, and was presided over by General Hassan Khalil and Commander Hisham Bakhtiar.
22 In his account of war as foundational of relations of power, Foucault identifies the emergence, in post-medieval Europe, of a historico-political discourse on society in which war is understood as a permanent social relationship and, as such, the basis of social relations (Foucault 2003, 49–50). The discourse, in its first birth, was used as a tool of organisation for social struggles by different social forces: the aristocracy in both England and France, the bourgeoisie in England, and the popular forces in both countries. Importantly, this historical discourse was a declaration of the rights of ‘peoples’ and of ‘races’ against their lords and, ultimately, against their subjugators. It was out of the wars and battles in these struggles and in the massacres committed in them that the law was born. Foucault cautions that this does not mean that the birth of law meant the end of war or served as an armistice establishing peace. Instead, ‘beneath the law, war continues to rage in all the mechanisms of power, even in the most regular. War is the motor behind institutions and order. In the smallest of its cogs, peace is waging a secret war’ (Foucault 2003, 50). Foucault contends that the historico-political discourse of war had a second birth in which the idea of a perpetual or uninterrupted war takes the form of ‘race war’ whereby society or the social body is divided, in a binary mode, into two races (Foucault 2003, 59–60). Racism, as a technology of government, develops in tandem with the emerging modern rationality of government holding that the state’s objective is to tend to the health and welfare of the population. In other words, racism is fundamentally entwined with biopolitical government – government that has as its object the life of the population.
23 A number of massacres were committed during the military campaign in Aleppo in 1980.
24 These events became known, later, as the ‘Electricity Generator Events’ (ahdath muhawlat al-kahraba’) (see Shilash ND).
25 Interviews with former residents of Idlib and with journalists who were observers of these developments at the time (Damascus, April 2011, Amman 2012).