A Woman in the Crossfire Read online

  A Woman in the Crossfire

  Diaries of the Syrian Revolution

  Samar Yazbek

  Translated from the Arabic by Max Weiss

  This book has been translated with the assistance of the Sharjah International Book Fair Translation Fund

  First published in 2012 by

  Haus Publishing Ltd

  70 Cadogan Place

  London SW1X 9AH

  www.hauspublishing.com

  Copyright © 2011 by Samar Yazbek

  Published by arrangement with Raya Agency

  Translation copyright © Max Weiss, 2012

  Foreword copyright © Rafik Schami, 2012

  Cover photo © Press Association Images

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ebook ISBN 978-1-908323-14-9

  This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s Writers in Translation programme supported by Bloomberg. English PEN exists to promote literature and its understanding, uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and promote the friendly co-operation of writers and free exchange of ideas.

  All rights reserved.

  cross-΄fire, n.

  where an individual or a political or military group is within range of two or more lines of fire, from both enemy and ally alike.

  Also fig.

  FOREWORD

  by Rafik Schami

  Sometimes reality is more fantastic than a story created by the imagination could hope to be. A talented documentary filmmaker can, with the help of a good cameraman, turn an occurrence into an outstanding film, which surpasses any movie. To make a non-fiction account sound poetic yet real is much harder, since the author only has words as creative tools. Few have this gift. Samar Yazbek is one of them.

  For one hundred days, the Syrian writer and filmmaker documented the revolution in her country – up close and personal. Not only that: she actively took part in it. And whenever the situation allowed it she wrote down what she had experienced in the hours and days before, what she felt and thought; all in impressive, powerful language. Powerful because despite the brutal murders, all the dead and dying around her, despite the fear for her own safety and that of her daughter, the tears and the interrogations by the security forces, she writes poetically. It is this poetic phrasing, which allows readers to truly experience the intifada in the company of Samar Yazbek, without feeling crushed by it, or struggling to breathe.

  As mentioned, Samar Yazbek was an active witness. And while she was risking her life, she helped wounded demonstrators and comforted children whose parents had been detained. But even more impressive than her courage was her attitude towards her clan, the Alawites, Syria’s ruling minority. It is the stand she took against them that endangered her life. In her hometown she was branded a traitor – the green light for the regimes’s murderous thugs, known as the shabbiha, to go after her. The shabbiha are killers, criminals, mercenaries who do the regime’s dirty work for little pay. They kill without batting an eyelid. Samar Yazbek had to proceed with utmost caution; she knew every step she took in the street could have been her last.

  Where does this extraordinary woman find the courage to abandon all the securities of a well-to-do Alawite family and to declare her solidarity with Syria’s oppressed? The disappointment of her family is palpable on every page. Samar Yazbek was born into a respected Alawite family in Jableh in 1970, the very year that Assad’s father toppled his own associates in a coup and established an unprecedented dictatorship based on clan and religious affiliation. Syria, once a lively and vibrant country, was turned into a kind of Assad family farm. Samar Yazbek, in other words, belongs to a generation that has known no system other than the current one. She wrote short stories and TV screenplays (even for the state TV station) and produced documentaries and she became famous for her novels, in which she crosses boundaries and ignores rules; writing about forbidden love, corrupt politicians and the claustrophobia and hypocrisy of living within her clan. Syria’s professional moral guardians did not hold back their criticism of her books. But she was privileged and hence not punished.

  Samar Yazbek is a feminist and cultural activist. Her family, and the connections they afforded her, allowed her a degree of freedom not enjoyed by others but she was not blinded by it. Long before the outbreak of the revolution on 15 March 2011, she acted with great courage. Her sensitive solidarity with the weak and disenfranchised in Syria led to a direct confrontation with Assad. Samar Yazbek quickly joined the protest movement.

  The Assad regime was happy to overlook an author illicitly inserting erotic passages into her novels; the ruling clan were never overtly religious. When the Alawite President prayed in the Umayyad Mosque, the Great Mosque of Damascus, with the Sunni Mufti, it was nothing more than hypocrisy. No Alawite bought that show, as the Umayyahs were deadly enemies of Ali, the Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law, from whom the Alawites derive their name. The situation became much more serious when the intellectuals began to take action. The regime was being directly threatened, and if these intellectuals belong to the Alawite minority, they are doubly threatening; the criticism is coming from within. When an Alawite professes their opposition to the regime rather than declaring their loyalty, they can expect to be more severely punished. Samar Yazbek lost all her privileges and was branded a traitor.

  To properly appreciate Samar Yazbek’s position one has to look more closely at the Syrian dictatorship. The Assad clan keeps twenty million Syrians locked-up and its head, Bashar al-Assad, is himself is a prisoner of his own system. He lies when he speaks of reforms; not for fun, mind you, but because he cannot do anything else. Because the first step on the road to reform would require the disbandment of all fifteen secret service divisions, the release of 100,000 political prisoners and the punishment of the murderers of over 4,000 innocent people. Until that happens it is absurd to talk about raising wages and improvements to the health service. But the dissolution of the secret service would mean the immediate toppling of the regime.

  Assad has promised several times to withdraw the army and their snipers from towns and cities. Aware that an hour after this command was given these towns and cities would be controlled by revolutionaries, he did not keep his word. That is why there are no fewer tanks, and the snipers are still in position. He had eleven years to instigate reform, but the injustice created by his father has not changed a single iota. How can he now implement reforms in a matter of weeks? Impossible!

  Arab dictators believe they are born heroes. They worship and glorify their mother and father for bringing them into the world. They believe themselves destined to rule forever. And when they die, even if from illness, as was the case with Assad’s father, or in a car crash, as with his brother, Bassel, they die as saints.

  Assad, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi and the Yemeni Ali Saleh all overcame the abject poverty of their childhoods and poor education. They made a pact with the Devil to come to power. They destroyed the state and in its place built something which, viewed from a distance, looked remarkably similar: a Mafia-like network of power, which allowed them to subdue their countrymen. All positions of power were assigned to brothers, cousins, brothers-in-law or sons-in-law. If the clan was not numerous enough, friendly clans, neighbours or childhood friends were roped-in. This is how these corrupt pyramids of power were built, layer upon layer. At the very bottom are the people. The longer such a regime remains in power, the heavier the burden of oppression on the people becomes, the better equipped it is to resist attack. The Assad regime’s bloody rule has lasted for
40 years – the first generation is now old and grey and has been succeeded by second and third generations of the clan.

  Bashar al-Assad’s father, however, was much too clever to overlook the fact that the Alawites could not rule alone forever. That is why he gave the Sunnis a stake in society, allowing them enough influence to become economic beneficiaries, but not enough to politically empower them. So it does not make sense for Islamists to curse only the Alawites. The system remains hierarchical; a Sunni or Christian general fears an Alawite corporal. This is not the law of the military, but of the Mafia.

  In such a system, loyalty is the only means of accessing power. It is not surprising, therefore, that only yes-men reach the top of government, those who learnt quickest that the president wanted to hear nothing but approval. His portraits and monuments became bigger and bigger, all-important innovations were named after him; a reservoir on the Euphrates and the National Library. Books were written about his imaginary heroic deeds and hymns were composed to praise him. The media knelt down in front of him and from that lowly perspective he became a giant. How could Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein and al-Assad (the father and the son) doubt their own genius?

  All this demonstrates a particular characteristic of all Arab dictatorships. Dictators from Ben Ali to Bashar ruled from the isolated peak of a pyramid of power. They could not and would not believe that this army of slaves, whom they called ‘insects’ or ‘rats’, could ever rise up against them. Bashar al-Assad cannot comprehend something as moving as a peaceful revolution and therefore blames the West. By doing so, he inadvertently reveals the remnants of a colonial mindset. In his sick mind, Syrians are too primitive to organise something so perfect, so beautiful, so brilliantly orchestrated. If they do, despite the fifteen secret service divisions and a quarter of a million regime informers, then it has to have been instigated by Europeans. They are the superior beings. That is what the colonial powers beat into his parents. He is simply reciting that belief.

  I had no idea of the grumblings of the people until 15 March 2011. Nobody had. The dictator had no clue, nor did the secret service; the opposition had no inkling, neither had the exiles. Whoever claims to have known is simply lying. On that day, the first letters of a completely new, unprecedented and peaceful revolution were written. It all started in Dar‘a, a dusty, poor city in the South. The town’s youth innocently sprayed words on walls, expressing what we were all thinking: “Down with corruption!”

  The chief of Dar‘a municipal secret service, Atef Najib, a cousin of the president, who is known both for his corruptibility and his sadistic predisposition to humiliating high-ranking Sunni officers, had the youths detained and brutally tortured. When parents asked after their children, they were tortured further. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. In a peaceful demonstration they voiced their grievances. They did not demonstrate against Assad, but against a great injustice for which Atef Najib was responsible, and against the corruption in their town, of which he was the principal exponent. Instead of seeing reason, the secret service fired on the gathered crowd.

  And the president? He sent troops, who shot protestors and encircled the city. Assad is commander-in-chief of all secret service divisions and therefore personally culpable for each of these murders. The first funerals became the starting point for the demonstrations, but soon people gathered every day.

  Word spread to other towns. People flooded into the streets to show their solidarity with the people of Dar‘a. Some had never heard of the town before. Syrians soon learned the geography of their country as open rebellion erupted in hundreds of towns simultaneously, towns whose names nobody had known but now could not be forgotten.

  Samar Yazbek stayed close to these events, all the time fearing for herself and for her daughter. She went underground while criss-crossing the country, meeting activists, listening to their stories and recording all she could. She has rendered her story in A Woman in the Crossfire in straightforward language; it was not the time for exuberant words or small talk. The result is a poetic précis.

  The long arm of the regime hit out harder and harder. Samar Yazbek was interrogated, beaten and detained. The regime did not shy away from using dirty tricks to discredit her. Leaflets accused her of treason, spread defamatory rumours, openly invited a lynch mob to take action against her. But that made Samar Yazbek even more determined to continue.

  This is the miracle of the revolution: the individual becomes the whole, and the whole is embodied by each revolutionary, in the same way Samar Yazbek turned from media personality to passive opponent, and finally to active underground resistance fighter, branded a criminal by the regime and the president, the Syrian people became ever more radical and determined, the more the regime tried to suppress them.

  When Samar Yazbek eventually felt the noose tightening, she fled. She saved herself, her daughter and the diaries of the revolution. Through this record a wider public will find out first-hand what happened in Damascus and other cities. They will find out that wonderful people risked their lives and took to the streets, despite the heavy secret service and military presence that made the city of Damascus such a dangerous place for resistance fighters. Samar Yazbek describes in minute detail how the secret service roamed the streets looking for troublemakers. Orwell’s 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 have left the realm of fiction.

  On 15 March 2011, the Syrians invented a new kind of revolution, a courageous, but peaceful uprising. And Samar Yazbek is the chronicler of that revolution.

  Rafik Schami

  Spring 2012

  These diaries are not a literal documentation of the first four months of the Syrian uprising. They are simply pages I relied upon during those days in order to confront fear and panic as well as to generate some hope. But they are true, real, and have no connection whatsoever to the imagination.

  Unfortunately, significant events in the popular mobilization that took place in cities such as Dayr al-Zur and al-Qamishli are absent either because I was unable to travel to them, or because I did not have the good fortune of recording the testimonies of activists in Damascus about the contributions people there made to the uprising.

  I refer to activists who are still alive by the first letters of their names, and for the most part I intentionally use pseudonyms.

  I have chosen to keep the names of the doctors entirely secret, even though some of them have been martyred, some are still missing and uncertainty shrouds the fate of others.

  Samar Yazbek

  Spring 2012

  25 March 2011

  ..............................

  It’s not true that death, when it comes, will have your eyes!

  It’s not true at all that the desire for love is anything like the desire for death, not in that moment itself. Perhaps they are comparable in their nothingness, though, as they both drown in oblivion. In love: communion with another person. In death: communion with being itself and metamorphosis from tangible matter into an idea. Human beings have always thought death nobler than existence: why else would they venerate the dead? Even those who were still with us just a few moments ago, as soon as they disappear they are turned into radiance!

  I would not say I am calm right now, but I am silent. I can hear my heart thumping like the sound of a distant explosion, clearer than the sounds of gunfire, than the screaming children and wailing mothers. Clearer than the trembling of my mother’s voice as she implores me not to go out into the street.

  There are killers everywhere.

  Death is everywhere.

  In the village.

  In the city.

  On the coast.

  Killers take over, terrorizing the people, fanning out around our neighbours’ houses, telling them how we are going to kill them, only to then come back at us, shouting the same thing in reverse: They’re going to kill all of you!

  I am an incidental visitor here. I am incidental to life. I don’t belong in the environment where I live. Like a wild anim
al I’ve been drifting through the void. I flail around, empty except for the liberty of my very existence. I have been here ever since the protest movement began, looking out of my window and watching. My voice doesn’t come out. I just want this to be over soon. Buried under this deluge of detail, I never knew that apathy could turn me into such a grim and fragile woman. Or that I could cling to life with this much fear: Fear of what, though? What are people so afraid of here? Without realizing it, people subsist on fear, which has become as automatic as breathing. Ever since my daughter and I moved to the capital fifteen years ago, I have a knife I never take out of my bag; I carry it wherever I go. A small, sharp switchblade to be used in self-defence. For years now I have said I’ll plunge it into the body of anyone who tries to insult me for being a single woman living alone. I didn’t use it very often, flashing it a few times in the face of stunned men, but lately I have begun saying that I’ll plunge this knife into my own heart before I let them insult my dignity.

  What’s the point of everything I am saying now amidst this carnival of death? Simply going out into the street means the possibility of dying; this thought hit me, that walking down the street you feel someone might kill you at any moment. A crazy idea, but it’s strange, you go out with your friends to demonstrate, knowing that there are snipers from general security who could shoot you at any time. The same security forces who have stamped on people’s necks for decades, calling them whores and traitors, locking them up, killing them, and then continuing to saunter down the street in cold blood.

  How does the human body get turned into a lethal killing machine? Hands, eyes, hair, brain – all these organs that resemble your own, how are they transformed into giant probes and long fangs? In the blink of an eye, reality becomes fantasy. But reality is more brutal. They say writing a novel requires imagination, but I would say it takes reality: nothing more, nothing less. What we write in novels is less brutal than what occurs in real life.