Two generations survive political imprisonment in Syria
I am a former political prisoner, though personally I didn’t spend a long time in jail myself. The reality is that I am a daughter of a political prisoner who spent twelve years in prison. That was his third arrest. Now my husband is a political prisoner.
I heard a harsh knock on the door, and my colleague screamed. But I didn’t pay attention. As a matter of fact, I didn’t want to pay attention. I had been obsessed with a dark fear for over a year by then. My colleague Hani al-Zitani and I worked in the same office, immediately above the kitchen of our headquarters at the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression. It was located on 29 May Street, in downtown Damascus. Finally, that Thursday, 12 February 2012, we decided to make some changes to our arrangements. Our co-worker Razan Ghazzawi was going to move into our small, badly ventilated office.
I heard a knock at the door. Razan went to check who it was, and did not come back. Hani followed her a bit later. He didn’t come back either. I finally decided to check for myself. At the bottom of the small stairs leading to the main office space downstairs, I saw a man dressed in civilian clothes, standing there with a gun. I went over to him.
‘Excuse me, who are you?’ I asked.
‘Give me your ID card,’ he demanded. ‘Sure, but would you please tell me who you are? Are you security personnel?’
‘None of your business.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘It is my business. How else would I know you are not a member of the armed gangs?’ (The Syrian regime insisted there were no protests, only ‘armed gangs’ trying to sabotage the state.)
He stared at me as if he was about to shoot me. Then he uttered an obscene curse in a very low voice, and said, threateningly: ‘Your ID card!’
I tried to smile. That was to be one of many forced smiles over the course of that night. It was a smile meant to embrace all this insanity to the extreme. You had to be crazy to stand up to all of this.
I was one year and five months old the last time that same harsh knock was heard at the door of my parents’ home. I don’t have a clear memory of that December evening in 1986. My mom told me that my father was trying to put me to bed when they raided our house. The Mukhabarat smashed many things and screamed a lot. I thought, how ironic it was that on both occasions the men knocking at our door were fully armed, pointing their guns and ready to shoot. All the while I kept wailing and crying like some repetitive annoying mobile ringtone. The men finally took both my parents and left me behind in the house with my uncle.
The next morning, my mother returned at nine. Her cheeks were badly bruised because of all the smacks she had received during interrogation. Her ear was bleeding profusely. They threatened that they would use her to put pressure on her husband. They would torture her, and they would torture him in front of her. She would never see daylight again. She would never ever see her daughter or husband again.
I spent the whole night sobbing because my parents had been taken from the house. After my mother came home, she hugged me close to her heart until I calmed down. I was just beginning to speak like all children at that age. I was learning to say my first few words, and mostly saying them wrong. My mom hugged me, and I fell asleep. When I woke up I had lost all the words I knew.
That evening I became haunted with the fear. I don’t know what I was afraid of. I just knew that I was afraid.
Many months passed. It took me over two years to resume talking again.
More than twenty years later they came for us again, although it was a different audience. My parents were not there. Instead it was my husband, Mazen Darwish, and all our colleagues. This time the raiding party wasn’t affiliated with the ‘Palestine’ branch of Military Intelligence. Those who arrested us came from Air Force Security.1
For the second time in our lives, we were taken as a family to the security prisons. This time around, though, I was one of those apprehended – along with my husband.
It is estimated that during the 1980s the Syrian regime detained 14,000 political prisoners belonging to various parties, from various ethnic and religious backgrounds. The accuracy of these numbers is difficult to verify on account of the media blackout imposed by the regime. The figures, of course, don’t include those who died under torture or were executed. Since the Syrian revolution broke out in 2011, the regime has resorted to extreme repression and prevented all legal networks from documenting and defending prisoners of conscience. Although the numbers are unverifiable, at the time of writing it is estimated that over 200,000 Syrians have been imprisoned during the last three years, and that over 1,200 have died under torture, besides the thousands killed during the conflict itself.
When they allowed one of our colleagues to make a phone call, we all queued up for the opportunity. I was about to dial my mother’s number but my courage failed me. I rang my dad instead. I told him that all of us at the centre were ‘being taken for a visit that might last long’. He understood, and before putting the phone down he said: ‘Remain strong.’
Soon after your arrest, when you are in the prisons of the Syrian security forces, you witness the survival of brave individuals and ponder the stories you’ve heard. You don’t need to think hard to remember the dictionary of torture techniques you have been told about – the Flying Carpet, the German chair, the electric chair, solitary confinement … In the darkness of the cell I could see names and words scribbled on the walls by those who had been brought here before me.
I suddenly thought of my dad; I had never asked him if he scribbled my name on the wall of his cell. There was an improvised calendar of lines drawn next to each other. Strangely, it made me think there must be some value in life. It was a desperate attempt on my part to hold on to time, to keep one’s mental capacity, to calculate and keep track of the hours and minutes in a place designed to waste one’s life. I’ll admit I was the first one to rush out whenever they called out our names to go anywhere. We were six women in the cell on our first day, then five during the next couple of days.
The prison manager noticed my haste and mocked me.
‘What are you so eager for?’ he asked.
‘Well, if one must suffer or die, let’s get it over and done quickly. Why should I tolerate it slowly?’
That was such a stupid, silly answer, and I don’t recommend saying such a thing in any similar circumstances. An answer like that could cost a prisoner rounds and rounds of torture, during which you wish for death every split second, and still it doesn’t come.
Once they came during the night for an inspection of all the cells. They led us outside the compound where our cells were located. We all became a number – ‘number four’, for our cell. There were many other numbers and cells there. As I walked out, I could feel the icy wind on my face. I was blindfolded with a thick cotton fabric, and cuffed with a pair of metal handcuffs – a vast improvement on the thin nylon threads they had earlier used to bind our hands together, which is a form of torture in itself. Sometimes they would tie only a couple of fingers together until the blood supply was restricted. The fingers then would swell badly, and the nylon threads would tighten and hurt more and more. I heard testimonies from male prisoners that they used these nylon threads on their genitalia.
I was made to face the wall. I could hardly glimpse the tips of my shoes through the blindfold. There were a few men behind me – I thought four or five. I tried to count them, and it seemed as though there were three standing to my left and two to my right. They were eating and laughing and spitting out the shells of sunflower seeds. I tried to listen intently to their conversation. I just wanted to distract myself to avoid obsessing about being raped.
I prayed to God for the first time that moment, but I thought immediately of the many people who must also have been pleading for God’s help in that same building, at that very instant. I wondered to myself: I am still wearing my clothes, and they haven’t even started torturing me. I thought I needed to stop praying just then and make space for others whose need for God was greater at that moment.
Suddenly, H. forced her way into my memory. H. is a friend of my dad’s and a member of his party. She spent years imprisoned as well, at the Political Investigation Branch. She was arrested while wearing a skirt, and on the first day of her interrogation, the jailer went to one of the dungeons and asked the other female prisoners for a pair of trousers. One prisoner realised what was behind the request and pretended they had none. She thought that if she refused to give him the trousers, then this newly arrested inmate would be spared torture. H. was tortured wearing her skirt, however, and when she told me the story years later she said she forgot about the pain when she was placed on the Flying Carpet, a cross-shaped torture instrument on which prisoners are forced to lie. As the stick kept landing on her feet, all she could think of was trying to hold her skirt to cover her private parts.
The night they took us from our cells, the interrogation started. It lasted for three full days. The sessions were particularly harsh during the early afternoon and at night. The first night I couldn’t fall asleep at all. I was obsessed with time and whether or not the sun had risen. I kept saying to my friend Sanaa, who is married to our colleague Hani: ‘The dawn has not yet broken!’ Thoughtlessly, I repeated the sentence like a parrot. I remembered the stories my father told me. Having spent a year and a half in the Interrogation Branch, he told me that his jailers always preferred to interrogate him in the few hours between midnight and daybreak.
The space of our prison cell was acceptable. We all fitted into it. We tried to do some exercise, but failed. We tried to restrain our emotions and keep smiling, but that proved difficult. We scoured the walls for the scribbled names of those who had been put in the cell before us. There were a lot of names, too many to count. We attempted to scratch the name of our centre on the wall. However, we decided to write it in ornate Arabic calligraphy that they wouldn’t be able to read when they searched the cell, otherwise they would only punish us more. I wrote the name of my husband, Mazen Darwish.
By Saturday, my back was hurting badly. We had only been given a military blanket to sleep on, but there was no use in complaining about that. We were left behind an off-white metal door, where we could hear men crying out during torture. I thought there was no point telling the guards about the pain I was suffering in my back, and that I had had a slipped-disc operation a couple of years earlier. That would be a weakness they would exploit if they decided to torture us later. I kept silent and started praying.
That Saturday evening they released some of us, the centre’s staff. They said we had to report to security headquarters every working day and remain there between 8AM and 3PM. We did just that, and on the following Thursday I felt so pleased that I didn’t have to go and report to them on Friday, the first day of the weekend. I dreamed that I would go to sleep that night and wake up to find this nightmare over, that I would be home and Mazen would be released, and with me.
Sometime later, my phone rang at 2AM. I answered.
‘Come here in the morning on your own. The interrogating officer wants to see you.’
‘How early?’ I asked.
‘Nine.’
‘Something the matter?’
‘You will know tomorrow.’ The man hung up.
I thought maybe they had decided to arrest me again, but why call this late? They could have detained me again when I went there. Was this call just to pressure me? The fear of torture overtook me again. Why me? And why did I have to go there on my own? Had they called any of the other female co-workers who were released with me? I rang my colleague Razan, who tried to reassure me that everything would be fine. She offered to accompany me, although we both knew they wouldn’t allow her. My father tried to hide his anxiety, and my mother choked on her tears.
I thought about the possibilities, and tried to ignore my fear that the reason they rang me was because they would be delivering Mazen’s body.
I got there on time the next morning. I was too weak even to walk. I sat in that cold room. I put my head down, and fell asleep. The interrogating officer walked in three hours later and started questioning me for more than two and a half hours.
That was the last of the interrogations for the female staff of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression. However, the intimidation – having to report to the security branch every working day – lasted for another sixty-seven days after the raid on our offices. On that day, Razan, Sanaa and I held a sit-in. We refused to leave at 4PM when we were supposed to. We demanded an end to this exhausting daily routine.
As a result, we were sent to Damascus Central Prison. The security forces also sent three of our male colleagues with us; Jwan Ahmad, Bassam al-Ahmad and Dr Ayham Ghazoul had been continuously detained since the raid.
Months later, after being released, Ayham was on his way to Damascus University. It was October 2012. He was beaten badly at the headquarters of the Student Union, a pro-regime organisation that has been suppressing opposition at universities. He was arrested again, and eighty-seven days later we heard from an inmate who was released from the same branch Ayham had been sent to. Ayham had died as a result of the beating he had been subjected to, only four days after his arrest. His family never received his body.
Thus I found myself in the Damascus Central Prison. The other female staff members of the centre were sent to the Adraa Women’s Prison.
The first time I stood behind the bars waiting for my parents’ visit, I saw all the images from our past being repeated, only now my parents and I had exchanged roles. Back then, my father spent years in Sednaya Prison, and would be waiting behind the bars for my mom and I to come and visit. That day, my mother came and visited me, accompanied by my father. I was the one behind bars. My dad always kept his smile while we visited. I, too, tried to smile. I rarely saw tears in my dad’s eyes when I visited him, yet now his tears were generous and continuous. My parents were paralysed with fear that I would be kept in jail for a long time. I found the idea ironic, though very cruel. I just smiled as I stood there, and wondered: for how much longer would my family visit me here?
While in Adraa Women’s Prison, our main fight was against time, which passed meaninglessly and ate our souls. I started remembering the stories my father told me of how he conquered time during his life in prison. We started knitting, and I am still proud of some of the pieces I created. We were labelled ‘terrorists’ and not even allowed access to books or television in the early days of our incarceration.
Time in prison is absurd and hollow. How it consumes you! I refused to give in to the idea. Though the irritating repetitiveness of knitting allowed me enough distraction, I felt I had achieved something. I knew that what I made was small, but for me it was a proof I was still alive. The first thing I produced was a small scarf for my father.
We tried to imitate my father and his friends who, while in prison, made rosaries and bracelets out of olive stones. We were given lots of olives with our meals. It was a small yet elegant project that we nine ‘terrorists’ occupied our time with. First we had to dry the stones. Then we had to pierce them and then string them together using a thread. It was not an easy task, and I remembered my dad telling me that one side of the stone is thinner than the other, and easier to pierce. It was such a difficult job that Sanaa cut her fingers repeatedly trying to do it. We all nearly broke our teeth trying to hold the bits to puncture them. After we managed to master that part, though, we found it very difficult to bring the pierced bits together using a thread to make a necklace. (I asked my dad what the best way was to do this, when I was later released.)
The necklaces we produced were not that good, and their colour altered and faded, but I still keep them to this day. I also still keep all the ornaments my father gave me as gifts when I visited him as a child in prison. Most of all, I cherish a bag he made from his torn trousers, a wooden pen and a small toy he made out of matches.
After they raided our offices and bused us all to the security branch, I said to Mazen: ‘Perhaps there is something good in being arrested, for me at least. Otherwise I would not face this great fear that has accompanied me throughout my life.’
Today, as I look back, I believe I am still a captive of that same fear. Although I survived the experience of imprisonment as a daughter, wife and political prisoner myself, it remains my biggest fear. It represents ultimate oblivion. A human being is taken to an undisclosed place where the world will forget him or her, and it reduces people to mere names without identities.
Sure, some people will continue to remember the prisoner, but out there life continues with all its happiness and pain without him or her. Political imprisonment is a lifetime stolen. It is also the agony of surviving unthinkable torture, when the world is oblivious to your pain. A sane person is not able to imagine what it feels like to scream in pain until you faint. Political imprisonment means preventing humans from being able to perform any action – even committing suicide or declaring a hunger strike.
In the security dungeons you discover how vital and grand the invention of napkins is! I had to cut the lining of my jacket to use it as napkins. I laughed when I thought that I understood and shared the utter jubilation my father felt twenty years earlier when he was finally given a piece of soap. A tiny, dirty piece of soap was smuggled to us by one of the jailers, who did at least have a bit of compassion. I was as happy receiving it as one would feel seeing the sun after days on end spent in darkness!
In Syrian jails, you understand what it means to live on the verge on death. You become a Robinson Crusoe, only you are drifting without the sun, the sea and the blue skies. In prison you must tolerate continuous rounds of physical and psychological torture. You don’t have the right to eat at will, to drink or even to use the toilet. Everything is forbidden. You are forbidden to stand. You are forbidden to look. You are absent, in a deep void where no one can reach out to you. You are lost, as though drifting in the sea, waiting for the wind to bring you a sail that will take you back to life.
Mazen Darwish, Hussein Ghrer and Hani al-Zitani from the staff of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression have remained under arrest since 16 February 2012. The centre’s lawyer, Khalil Matouek, was arrested on 2 November 2012. He defended all of the centre’s staff during their trial for ‘obtaining banned documents and publishing them to overthrow the political, social and economic system’. Since his arrest, there has been no news of his whereabouts.
Translated from the Arabic by Leen Zyiad
1 According to the Human Rights Watch 2012 report ‘Torture Archipelago’, Syria has four main intelligence Mukhabarat agencies: Shu‘bat al-Mukhabarat al-‘Askariyya (Department of Military Intelligence); Idarat al-Amn al-Siyasi (Political Security Directorate); Idarat al-Mukhabarat al-‘Amma (General Intelligence Directorate); and Idarat al-Mukhabarat al-Jawiyya (Air Force Intelligence Directorate). These security agencies maintain detention centres in their branches in cities and towns across the country. In Damascus alone, the Department of Military Intelligence maintains five branches, including Branch 235, known as the ‘Palestine’ Branch.