We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled

by Wendy Pearlman

  We got out of prison and tried again. A group of intellectual and oppositionists issued the “Damascus Declaration.” We emphasized that we were working for peaceful, gradual reform because we didn’t want the country to descend into war.

  The regime again arrested everyone, though this time I managed to escape and hide. All of this proved that it wasn’t a new Assad regime, after all. The torture was the same, the secret police were the same, the government was the same. It was the same regime as under Hafez al-Assad, just with a new face.

  Firas, computer engineer (Aleppo)

  I began my political activity at the University of Aleppo in October 2000, three months after Bashar al-Assad came to power. We organized a sit-in against Israel’s violence against the Palestinians. Three days before, the Baath Party had a huge sit-in, but we didn’t participate. I believed in the same cause, but didn’t want to support it the way the regime was supporting it.

  About three hundred students participated. We blocked traffic for two hours, and the scene shocked everybody. We wanted to test our ability to mobilize people and also wanted to test the regime’s reaction. The next day, Baath Party leaders at the university called us to their office. They understood what we were up to, and their message was very clear: Any political initiative taken in this country can only be done under control of the government and the party.

  Our group kept working in secret. In March 2003 we organized an open sit-in against the American war in Iraq. We worked with a great group of people from civil society. There were some Syrian nationalists, communists, Kurdish youth, more than one person from the Islamic movement. We put blankets on the ground, played revolutionary songs, and posted signs. The whole group sat there from morning until dark, and a few would sleep there overnight.

  One night around eleven, I left to get food. I didn’t get very far before I heard loud noises. Hundreds of people were attacking our demonstration site. They broke everything. After a few days, we realized that the Baath Party had attacked us because we’d organized our sit-in outside its supervision.

  In 2004, Bashar al-Assad made a decree to cancel an old rule that guaranteed government jobs for new engineering graduates. We saw this as breaking a contract between students and the government. We spent ten days raising students’ awareness about their rights and then prepared a protest.

  We were about one thousand students in the demonstration. Members of the security forces and military intelligence and the Baath Party surrounded the protesters. One hundred students were arrested. Eighty-nine were expelled from the university.

  We tried to revive our efforts and work with students from the University of Damascus. Three students from our group went there and met with young people active in civil society. But it was clear that the intelligence services were monitoring us, and they arrested everyone. At this point, our initiatives stopped. We realized that circumstances just weren’t conducive to the type of work we were doing. We had to find new ways to deal with the regime.

  Mohammed, professor (Jawbar)

  I majored in English literature in college. I was friends with the daughter of the minister of finance, and she told me that her dad wanted a translator. Next thing you know, I found myself right in the heart of Assad’s government, getting an inside view of how the state was run.

  My task was mostly to work with visiting delegations from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Sometimes I was even given specific instructions to show them around Damascus and waste their time. It was clear that the state did not want to talk with them seriously.

  Once we were in a meeting and the minister got a call from Assad senior. He told us, “The president wants us to hire seventy thousand young university graduates.” Assad knew that if all those people were going out on the streets with no jobs, they’re going to start protesting. His way of solving this problem was to dump them on the state. You didn’t need to know economics to see that this wasn’t going to work. The state was already huge—the biggest employer in the country. The problem was just going to get worse and one day it was going to explode.

  Assad junior came to power, and the West supported him. But he didn’t have the acumen of his father. Senior built the system. He knew every corner of it and he had the skills to bring people together. Junior didn’t rise through the system himself. He never fought for it. The guy just studied to be an eye doctor in London and suddenly found himself at the helm of the state.

  Assad junior listened to advisers who said, “Let’s privatize. You know this socialist thing is finished, the way forward is capitalism.” That’s great. The only thing is that Syria suddenly came to be owned by two families and their friends. Everybody got a share based on how close they were to the Assad family. Suddenly Syria had new cell phones, but the whole communications network was controlled by Rami Makhlouf, Bashar’s cousin.

  There was no trickle-down economy anymore. Public welfare went downhill. And then there was a drought, and peasants flooded the cities. The slums around Damascus were massive. The state couldn’t manage people’s needs.

  Once in 2006, I was pulling into a parking lot when this kid suddenly threw himself onto my car. Immediately, all of these police officers appeared. The kid wasn’t hurt because the car wasn’t moving fast. The police knew it. They told me, “Look, this is the kid’s job. We’ll help you, but we have to take him to the hospital.”

  We took him to the hospital and X-rayed him, and it turned out that the kid was full of metal. He had plates here and there—all injuries from previous accidents. The nurses couldn’t believe that he’d survived.

  The police officers came with me to the hospital and then we all went to the police station. They said, “Look, we need to settle this.” And you know how much they wanted? About $100. They divided it among themselves. Even at the police station, everybody was in on the plan and wanted a share. The kid got his share, and I told him, “Why didn’t you just ask for the money? You didn’t need to throw yourself at the car.”

  You could see how desperate everyone was. And it was all a result of what Assad senior had done: dumping these people on the state and giving them meager salaries. Do I blame a police officer whose whole salary is $100 a month? When Bashar stopped the trickle-down system, his family became super rich. He and his wife just kept dressing nicely and going out, like cute royalty. He thought, “Everybody loves me and I have no problems.” He had no clue.

  Adam, media organizer (Latakia)

  Health care was shit. They’d say it’s free, but if you wanted real health care you had to pay for it. Universities used to be free. But by the time I went to college, I had to pay for it. And education was crap. I studied economics and business management, but I couldn’t actually attend classes because there were too many people. My first year, I went to the lecture hall. It fit like five hundred people. But then I looked at the registration sheet and saw that we were three thousand students in the freshman class. They’d enrolled a lot of people because they wanted their money.

  The regime had no willingness to reform the problems in public universities. Instead, their answer was to open new private universities, which charged people thousands of dollars. The gap between rich and the poor just increased, and that added insult to injury.

  Wael, university graduate (Daraya)

  If you wanted to get a paper processed or do anything with the state, the employees would humiliate you. If you weren’t a member of the Baath Party, they’d treat you like dirt. My dad always told me to join the party because I might not get a job otherwise. I told him that it was hard to get a job regardless.

  Once when I was out shopping with my mom, my ID card fell out of my pocket without my noticing it. I went to the police station and the officer said that the political division would contact me.

  Later, they called and told me to come to the branch office because the intelligence services were investigating the case of my lost ID. My dad went with me. We entered the room and greeted the officer, who
was young enough to be my dad’s son. The guy had his feet up on the table. My dad started saying things like, “May God give you thanks! May God protect you, for you are protecting our country!”

  The guy asked what I study, and where I work. He asked how many brothers and sisters and aunts I have. He asked whether any of my relatives had traveled outside the country or if I’d traveled outside the country. He knew all of these things, but kept asking anyway. Do you use the Internet? Where do you go online? Do you pray?

  Then he asked, “Are you a party member?”

  I said, “Yes, I’m an active member.” That’s a rank above a normal member. My dad started kicking me under the table. He gave me a look as if to say that he couldn’t believe that I was lying. I simply thought that if I said I was a party member they might give me a new ID.

  The officer continued: “An active member? What division are you in?”

  I told him the Damascus suburbs. He asked for my party number. I told him that I forgot it.

  “You forgot your party number? When did you last attend a meeting?”

  I said about ten months ago. I said that we used to attend every Thursday and talk about Syria’s economic accomplishments and stuff like that.

  “Who’s the leader of your division?” I told him his name was such-and-such, which I knew because some of my friends attended meetings.

  He picked up the phone, called someone, and said, “I have a young man here who says he’s an active member and I want his party number.” The lady on the other line looked me up and couldn’t find my name on their lists.

  He put his hand over the receiver, lowered it, and told me that I was a liar. I denied it. I knew my friends who were in the party would play along if I asked them. I said, “I’m an active member! Ask my friends! Everyone in the party knows me!”

  He told the person on the phone that I seemed pretty dumb. “He doesn’t even know where God has put him on this earth.”

  I started acting even dumber. “I’m in the party! I went to that one meeting and I got this grade, and we talked about this and that.”

  The guy started laughing, talking about how stupid I was. I thought, “Whatever happens, I’ll just keep lying.” In the end, I knew that anything could be fixed with money. My dad would sell the car if necessary.

  My dad took out a cigarette and lit it for the officer. He thanked him for his service, saying how we don’t lack for anything here in Syria.

  Finally the officer told us to leave. After my dad stopped yelling at me, he called a friend who is a Baath member. His friend said, “No problem, I’ll add your son to the party lists. I’ll register him not just as ‘active member,’ but at an even higher rank, and going back ten years.”

  The corruption started from the top and ran throughout.

  Hamoudi, engineering graduate (Aleppo)

  I never remember any of my classmates saying that they wanted to be president. Or prime minister, or anything like that. We didn’t have big dreams. A kid only dreamt of having a mini-market or something. So what kind of future did that mean we were we going to have? Like hundreds of mini-markets!

  This kid raised to want a mini-market sees the kid next to him on track to be a rocket scientist. He is going to feel like nothing and is going to fight him. The regime encouraged that. It didn’t just control resources. It also educated people to be against each other.

  That’s how I felt in college. I have a huge passion for wind energy. For my graduation project, I made a wind turbine. It was just a small one, but it was the first of its kind at the University of Aleppo. It took three months of really hard work and I was proud of it.

  My professor told me that I’d definitely get the highest grade. But two other students got the same grade. They didn’t do anything significant, but they happened to be friendly with the professors.

  It was depressing. There were very smart people who were working hard in Syria. But there was no kind of appreciation. Nobody helped them to achieve.

  Mesud, activist (Qamishli)

  In the 1960s, the government adopted its “Arab Belt” policy to alter the demographics of Kurdish areas. It aimed to Arabize the population and change cities’ Kurdish names to Arabic names. The Baath regime also passed a law to deny identity cards to Kurdish citizens. My grandfather served in the Syrian army, and the regime even took away his nationality. He and others had no documents saying that they were Syrian, which helped the regime Arabize the area.

  Some Kurds got IDs and others did not. It was arbitrary. My brother got an ID card and was considered a citizen. I was one of about four hundred thousand Kurds without IDs. The big problem for us was that we couldn’t own anything. My family had to register our house under the name of my uncle, who happened to have an ID. Our family business’s warehouse was under the name of another uncle. The car was under someone else’s name. Like that. Also we needed the approval of the Political Security Service and State Security Service just to stay in a hotel. When we went to those offices, they spoke to us in such a demeaning way. Because of that, I hated traveling.

  Nadir, activist (Ras al-Ayn)

  March 2004 was the Kurdish uprising. I was about fifteen years old when we went out and demonstrated. This was the beginning of a new phase. It created a consciousness within us. We started to organize gatherings and discuss issues. People began to have more courage to speak up about the situation of the Kurds. About a year after the uprising, a group of guys and I made a small, hidden library of books that focused on Kurdish culture. Books on the subject were banned, but we’d get hold of them and trade them among ourselves in secret. We’d hide them under our sweaters and exchange them at night.

  Musa, professor (Aleppo)

  People felt wronged by sectarian discrimination in employment. For example, Homs is a mixed city with a Sunni majority, but most of the government employees are from the Alawite sect. In Aleppo there are no Alawites, but you find that it is Alawites who are working for the state. If people were hired on the basis of qualifications, that would be fine. But what does it mean when a qualified person does not get the job, and someone from another sect gets it just because he has connections?

  There was a sense of oppression, and this intensified with changes in the economy. People expected more jobs and prosperity. But the shift to the market seemed to enrich some social sectors at the expense of other sectors. High-ranking officers and businessmen close to the regime got rich very quickly through their power, not their skills.

  These upstart businessmen undertook ventures that disrupted existing social relations and traditions. In Homs, residents of different sects respected each other. Then new businessmen proposed a development project called “Homs Dream,” which aimed at destroying the old city. They tried to intimidate or entice people into selling their property. This had a sectarian dimension because it would dismantle the religious makeup of a traditional part of town. The same thing happened in Aleppo, where old buildings around the citadel were turned into touristic areas. Aleppo is conservative, and some of that real estate had religious significance.

  This whole time, poverty was increasing. All of these factors accumulated over Bashar’s ten years in power. The poor got poorer and people got angrier, day after day.

  Annas, doctor (Ghouta)

  Corruption increased and increased. You’d have to pay a bribe even to leave to go on the pilgrimage to Mecca, which is an Islamic obligation. It reached the point that corruption was in everything—everything. There was corruption before, but not to that extent. Everything was getting worse. Things just added up. The glass of water overflowed. There were so many problems that it was ridiculous. Someone had to go out and just say, “No!”

  Part III

  Revolution

  Abu Tha’ir, engineer (Daraa)

  The forced resignation of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia was like a dream. I was one of those Syrians with tears in his eyes. People just couldn’t believe it. Impossible! Impossible! My goodness! Was
it real? It seemed like a miracle from God . . . we wondered: Could a revolution happen in another country, too?

  Tunisia did not have as big a psychological impact as Egypt did. The Egyptian revolution was only eighteen days, but some guys stopped sleeping at night. They followed the news nonstop, all day long: Egypt, Egypt, Egypt.

  When it was announced that Hosni Mubarak had resigned . . . wow, I remember that day. People went outside and started to talk. The words began to come out. They’d mention Egypt and say, “Grace be to God.” They’d curse Mubarak and say, “He was held accountable. The Egyptian people are achieving a democratic government.”

  People didn’t talk about Bashar. But inside, they wanted their own revolution, too. Outwardly, they just talked about Egypt. Inside they were moved, and had other thoughts.

  Adam, media organizer (Latakia)

  So Tunisians had mass demonstrations and Syrians were like, “Hmm, interesting.” And then Egypt started. People were like, “Resign already!” And then he resigned. We thought, “Holy shit. We have power.”

  Then Libya got in line, and this is when Syrians really got interested. Because that guy, Qadhafi, was going to let the army loose on the people straight away. We knew that and Libyans knew that. And Libyans started calling for help, and we thought, “Exactly. This is us.” And the international community intervened, saying, “We’ll protect the Libyans.” And everybody in Syria got the message: If shit hits the fan, people will back us up.