The Morning They Came for Us

by Janine di Giovanni

  Fadwa wasn’t that happy in Paris, she said; she missed her friends, her family and her old life. The life of someone in exile is always hard, more so when your country is in the midst of war and you are outside it, watching through a frosted-glass window. The actress had cut off her long hair when she started marching in Homs, as a symbolic gesture of protest, and in the Paris café that afternoon, with her short hair and big sweater, she looked scrawny, abandoned and cold. But she wasn’t going back, she said, running her fingers through the hair she had willingly and somehow symbolically cut off, until Syria was a country she once again could recognize.

  The pool party at my hotel that Thursday in early summer 2012 seemed to betoken the last days of a spoilt empire that was about to implode. Smoke was rising in the background from shelling in the southern suburbs, and a gaunt Russian Natasha was dancing clumsily near the pool, oblivious to the explosions. Syrian women with complicated hairstyles involving hairpieces and extensions, blow-dryings and coloured gels, paraded in full makeup, bikinis and high heels. The men wore Vilebrequin-style swimming trunks and drank Lebanese beer with a lime down the neck of a bottle and a salt-rimmed glass. A remix version of Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’ thumped from a stage.

  I stood on my balcony and watched the smoke from the bombing in the suburbs, but I also looked at the bacchanalian scene below – at the denial of the beginnings of the drum roll of war. One by one by one, these people’s lives were falling apart, and before they knew it each and every one of them would be betrayed. But the bubble had not yet burst.

  For several weeks running, I watched the fevered hedonism of the Thursday afternoon pool parties at the Dama Rose Hotel. That first week it was like every other start of a weekend. By lunchtime, women were rushing to hairdressers; the roads leading out of the city – those that were still open – were clogged with luxury cars. People who could do so were still heading outside the city to the villages, taking their kids to amusement parks, or en route to country villas for parties, weekend picnics or dinners.

  Restaurants such as Narenj, which takes up nearly half a block in the Old City and served traditional Arabic food to the elite, were still packed. I went to a wedding there one afternoon, and was served plate after heaving plate of lamb, chicken, rice, dates, oranges and honey-drenched sweets. I was painfully aware that less than an hour away by car, assuming there were no roadblocks, people in Homs were starving to death, a massacre was going on in Houla, and refugees were crossing the borders of Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan searching for a way to feed their families.

  The most surreal aspect of the Dama Rose parties was that they were taking place in the hotel, which was home to those 300 frozen, frustrated UN soldiers from fifty different countries, who had been brought in to be ‘monitors’. On a top floor their boss, the Norwegian General Robert Mood, the chief monitor, was installed with his own team.

  On 14 June 2012, their operations would be suspended because it became too dangerous for them. Eventually, most of them were pulled out, and a skeleton staff of UN workers remained behind – frustrated to the end with the encumbering politics.

  Not for the first time, the UN was in an uncomfortable position. The UN is always an easy target for journalists and regional analysts. We like to mock their ‘bloated inefficiency’ (a favourite hackneyed term), and the often too obvious career aspirations of certain officials, which seem to come before their obligation to relieve human suffering. There is the cronyism, the preferential treatment of relatives and friends of senior officials, and vast corruption. But there are also a few committed officials, and more to the point, local field workers, who are determined to help people, to commit their lives, despite being hampered by the international institution’s bureaucratic wrangles.

  This time, the monitors, who wanted to be in Homs and Zabadani doing their job, were tethered to a hotel. They were on the fringe of a war they were unable to navigate or stop.

  For the more honest senior officials, who spoke to me privately, there were deep anxieties that Syria was becoming another failure in the long list of catastrophes that included genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda and Sri Lanka, human trafficking in Kosovo, mass rape in the Congo (under the eyes of peacekeepers), and finally, cholera brought to Haiti in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake.1

  Veteran diplomats like Kofi Annan, Lakhdar Brahimi and Staffan de Mistura were brought in to negotiate with Assad and the rebels. Annan and Brahimi both quit, at an utter loss over what to do, and in the winter of 2015, de Mistura was still pushing on with a plan for ‘freezing’ local ceasefires in Aleppo, which, not surprisingly, never got off the ground.2 De Mistura, a veteran humanitarian, was determined to keep going, to relieve the unbearable suffering. It took a lot of persistence, after four years of war, to continue to try to forge some kind of path to peace.

  The second week in June 2012, people were more sombre at the pool party. There was drinking, the house music blared, the UN staff still complained about the noise, but the Russian dancer was gone. And by the third week, people left early, rushing to their 4x4s with distinctly worried looks on their faces. No one wanted to be out after dark.

  On the afternoon of 28 June, I could see that in the distance, towards the al-Marjeh neighbourhood, across from the Justice Courts, there was a larger than usual curl of smoke. Two car bombs had exploded earlier that day in the centre of Damascus. The day before had been the bloodiest day on record since the then sixteen-month uprising had begun. This Thursday, the partygoers were almost non-existent, and the ones who remained were decidedly less cheerful. There was music, but it was not blaring. There was no dancing. Most people were glued to their phones, texting family or friends for news or information.

  2

  Latakia – Thursday 14 June 2012

  While I was lying on the floor, they stood over me, kicking me in the teeth and punching me and using their hands and feet. One man put his military boot in my mouth.

  I lay there hiding my face as they kicked and thought: ‘They are using my body to practise their judo moves.’

  And the entire time they were beating me, they kept saying: ‘You want freedom? Here’s your freedom!’ Every time they said freedom, they kicked or punched harder.

  Then suddenly the mood changed. It got darker. They started saying if I did not talk, they would rape me.

  The morning they came for her, Nada was still in her pyjamas. The air was cool from the night before, so she judged it to be around 6 a.m. She heard the muezzin call out for morning prayer, and heard her father – a welder who always got up in the early light – rising to pray.

  For a moment, just when Nada opened her eyes, she tried to forget what the day might bring, imagining that her life was normal, as it had always been – before 2011, before the uprising.

  Two days earlier, Nada had received a strange phone call. The number did not register on her caller ID. She stared at the monitor on her phone, then pressed the green button to accept the call.

  ‘It’s me,’ he said, ‘I’m in prison.’

  She recognized the voice. It was a close friend, a colleague. Someone who also called himself an ‘activist’ like her. He had been picked up by Syrian state security and taken to the Central Prison in Latakia.

  ‘Why are you calling me?’ Nada asked, sitting down on the floor, the phone pressed to her ear. But she knew the answer, feeling her stomach turn over in fear.

  ‘Can you get here right away?’ he begged. ‘Can you come to the police station? They want to talk to you, too.’

  It was a signal they had practised since the war started.

  It meant the police had caught him. He was probably being beaten, and was told to hand over the names of any fellow activists who were working against the Assad regime. Maybe they had smashed the bottom of his feet with a club, or attached his testicles to wires and turned on the electricity; maybe they had held his head under water until he thought his lungs would burst. Nada tried not to think of him, vulnerable, exposed, in pain.
Crying.

  Whatever had happened, he had probably cracked and given up Nada’s name. But he had done her a favour by calling: it meant she had time to run.

  She pressed the red button, ended the call, and drew herself into a tight small ball. She had nowhere to run. All she could do was wait.

  Down the road from Nada’s childhood home is the mountain town of Qardaha, the birthplace of Hafez al-Assad, the father of Bashar, who had ruled Syria for three decades. Hafez had been born poor, joining the Ba’ath Party as a student and later becoming a lieutenant in the Syrian Air Force. After the 1963 coup in Syria, which established Ba’athist military control over the country, Hafez al-Assad was put in charge of the Syrian Air Force. In 1966, after yet another coup, he was appointed as Minister of Defence. He gained mass popularity in domestic politics from that point on, allowing him later to overthrow Salah Jadid, Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces.

  Hafez was born and buried in Qardaha. Upon his death in 2000, he was entombed in a white mausoleum next to his son Bassel, his intended successor, who had been killed in a car crash at thirty-two in 1994. His mother, Na’saa, rests down the road, shaded by a line of bowing trees.

  Nada grew up in the Alawite triangle of Syria, and as a minority Sunni, always felt isolated. From relatives, she had heard stories of the Hama massacre in February 1982, of how the Syrian Army and the Defence Companies, under the orders of Hafez al-Assad, besieged the town of Hama for twenty-seven days in order to quell an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood. Led by the Syrian Army, the siege effectively ended the anti-governmental campaign begun in 1976 by Sunni Muslim groups.

  No one knows the exact number killed. Diplomats have reported 1,000, but other sources estimate that as many as 10,000 were slain. Nada was not sure of the number either, when I asked her.

  Nada had grown up with these stories – and stories of the subsequent imprisonment and persecution of religious Sunnis – but her reasons for joining the opposition were not religious in nature. She joined because she ‘wanted the chance to live in a democracy. As you do.’

  In March 2011, as the Arab Spring was spreading in countries all around her, she first heard reports of unrest from the southwestern town of Daraa, just north of the border of Jordan, where the Syrian uprising began.

  It started with kids, with graffiti. Fifteen kids, all from the same family, wrote anti-Assad slogans on the wall of their school. They were arrested, beaten, tortured and thrown into prison cells.

  Every day, their families went to the local authorities, begging for news of their children. They received none. And from the silence of the jail cells to which Syrians had become so accustomed, finally came a spirit of rebellion. Perhaps it was fuelled by what was happening not far away in Tunisia, in Libya, in Egypt; but people who before had been afraid, and had remained submissive to the repression they had lived with for four decades, rose up. ‘It was like watching people who were asleep suddenly wake up,’ she said.

  On 18 March, the beginning of spring, they gathered, hundreds of them, in front of the al-Omari mosque, and they chanted and cried, shouting for reforms: for an end to corruption, nepotism, unemployment, torture, security forces, secret police, paranoia. For an end to the lack of hope, lack of future, lack of political will. For a change from the life they had known under Assad. Within a week, there were thousands of people joined together.

  But from the very beginning, Syrian security forces had been firing on the protesters. Three people were killed the first day. Two days later, seven policemen were killed, and four more protesters. The Syrian War had begun. While it was no surprise that it had started, what was surprising was how quickly it spread throughout the country: from Daraa to Homs, Hama to Aleppo, to Damascus and even to Latakia, the heart and soul of the Assad regime and of his Alawite minority.

  Nada joined the opposition as a volunteer, willing to do anything to help. At first, she acted as a kind of runner. She brought medical supplies to the front lines, where opposition soldiers – not really soldiers, but rather her fellow students and friends – were fighting to overthrow Assad. She also made food – rice, vegetables, fruit – and delivered sandwiches. Then she began broadcasting reports of the opposition’s message: their goals, their strategy.

  It was extremely dangerous work, but important. People took notice of her, and finally, several months after the first shots were fired, she was promoted to chief of the local ‘Revolution Media’ department. Social media played a huge role in all of the Middle East uprisings, and Nada began to coordinate Facebook and Twitter accounts to help amplify the message of ‘a democratic Syria’.

  ‘I believed in what we were doing,’ she said, ‘and yes, I was afraid. We lived in a country where the security forces and the police were always something to be afraid of. It was hard to get that mentality – the one I had grown up with – out of my head, to try to live as though we really were going to be free.’

  She had operated with her colleagues quietly for a year. She now realized that the authorities must have been watching her the entire time. She knew, as did her friends, that it was only a matter of time before they arrested her.

  When Nada got off the phone that June morning in 2012, she sat on the floor for a moment and tried to arrange her thoughts. Think, she told herself. Calmly. She could run. But where would she go? What would she tell her family, who thought she was a student? And how would she get money, a passport and a plane ticket?

  She decided to stay. ‘I knew I could never outrun them. I had to face them.’

  Her first thought was to destroy everything that might link her to the opposition. If she were caught, the rest of the operation would be compromised. She opened her mobile phone, took out the SIM card and shredded it. Then she went through the house, methodically finding and destroying every document, photograph, camera, notebook, memory stick – anything that might be considered evidence.

  As she worked on autopilot, destroying her writings, her thoughts, her notes, she thought about what her father and mother would say when the police came for her. They knew nothing of her secret life. They had been excited for her when she became a part-time ‘journalist’. But as she ripped up her notebooks and papers and went to the garden to make a small bin fire, she regretted nothing. She felt, as did so many others, that she was in the process of building a new country, a free one. Even as she was doing it, preparing for her last moments before her incarceration, she said she still believed it was the right thing to have done.

  Two days later, everything had been destroyed. All Nada could do now was wait for them to come.

  Everyone remembers their last morning of normality. The shaft of early morning light streamed through Nada’s window onto her bed, making a small pool on her blanket. She remembers her mother’s hurried knock on her door. She remembers the whiteness of her mother’s face against her hijab and the tenseness of her mouth as she leaned over her daughter, still in bed, and whispered: ‘There are six police cars outside; they are shouting out your name.’

  Nada sat up and jumped out of bed. There was no time to escape now. She had just thought it would have taken longer for them to come for her.

  Still in her pyjamas, she picked up her laptop from her desk and ran to the bathroom, locking the door. She sat on the cold floor, her head in her hands, until she heard them begin to knock, then pound, on the bathroom door.

  ‘You have to open it, Farrah,’ one of them said, using her nom de guerre. ‘Open the door, Farrah. It’s only wood. We can break it with one punch.’

  They knocked again. And again.

  Nada did nothing. She was frozen. She kept the laptop against her stomach, and rocked back and forth on the floor.

  ‘Farrah? We’re coming in.’

  They kicked the door open easily, and found her on the floor.

  Nada is tiny. Her bones are delicate, and her face is almost doll-like, with large blue eyes that make her seem younger than her twenty-five years. She covers her hair with a hijab, but th
e strands that escape are baby-fine, and a quiet brown.

  One of the men half-lifted her off the ground. Nada weakly asked: ‘May I get dressed?’

  ‘Get dressed. Fast.’

  She went to her room, heart pounding, and pulled on jeans and a sweater.

  What Nada said she remembered most was the stupefied look on her parents’ faces as she was forced into the police car. She walked willingly, but they opened the back door and thrust her inside the car. She looked back at her parents, as her father came forward, insisting that he had the right to accompany his daughter. He and the police argued. Nada hardly heard them, but her father eventually got into the car with her. He said nothing.

  They drove to the military police station, and though he was silent, her father’s presence soothed her. It was only to be a brief respite however, for once they arrived, the police ordered him to leave.

  Her father said goodbye, and told her to be strong. ‘As I saw my father go,’ she remembers, ‘I knew I was all alone and they could do anything they wanted.’

  Hours later, after the beating had started, after the abuse and the sleep deprivation, after their kicks so fierce that they made her childish orthodontia dig into her gums and break her skin, after the gun butts to her head, face and kidneys became routine – she knew that she was entering a place from which, psychologically, she could never return.

  * * *

  The lowest depth that a human being can reach is to perform or to receive torture. The goal of the torturer is to inflict horrific pain and dehumanize another being. The act not only destroys both parties’ souls – the victim’s and the perpetrator’s – but also the very fabric of a society. By subjecting men or women to enforced violence, sexual violation, or worse, you transform them into something subhuman. How does someone return to the human race after having been so brutalized?