A Woman in the Crossfire (28 page)

..............................

Outside the
Palais de Justice
I wait for the judge to show up. I have to get my daughter permission to travel. Here, we are still governed by unbelievable laws that prevent a mother from leaving the country with her daughter without her father's permission if she is under the age of 18. I have always lived alone with my daughter and now I need the consent of her father, who has never been her guardian, not for a single day.

To tell the truth, I am not in the mood to feel any more injustice on top of the injustices I have been seeing on a daily basis. It pisses me off! Sure, I'd be happy to elaborate on this perpetual anger: I have to wait for a piece of paper from my daughter's father before I can go to the judge in order to get his approval, and from there I have to go all the way back to Emigration and Passports in order for them to certify that her father has agreed before they give me a permission slip. These personal status laws, which I always rail against, violate me. I cannot escape what violates me. These are not issues that only have something to do with injustices against others; they are things that concern me directly. They always make me think about how to deal with the anger in my soul at what is happening all around me, how to think about turning this anger into words, words that are scattered by the wind most of the time, and which inspire the distaste of so many people. But that in itself makes me feel like I am OK. Being satisfied with what is happening all around me would make me feel like I was not OK, especially since I live in a soundless atmosphere; that's right, intellectuals live in a frozen environment, the world has passed them by. And the mobilization that has taken place in Syria, what spurred people into the street, was not the writers or the poets or the intellectuals.

Until now the intellectuals have not risen to the level of courage we see in the street. With very few exceptions writers have remained on the sidelines, panicked and afraid. I never expected that those who stood by, neutral, would then direct their arrows and their rancour at the people who are with the uprising. Sometimes a human being thinks himself so important that he is willing to condemn others around him. I expected this from many people and simply ignored it; this was just one more injustice atop all the other injustices we face here.

The funny thing is that the
shari‘a
judge at the court tells me I need renewed consent from my daughter's father, that the old one has expired, which means I will have to come to court a fifth time and await more paperwork. As several women line up behind me I tell the low-key judge, “But I'm her mother, isn't it obvious?” Looking up at me indifferently, he says, “Ma'am, these are laws, not a game.” He turns his head and addresses the women standing right behind me. I storm out of the
Palais de Justice
. I am almost broke, waiting for a payment to arrive for the translation of one of my novels into Italian, so my exasperation is even worse. In that moment I take shelter in thinking about the people being killed and arrested and disappeared every day. I think about them in order to suppress my rage, telling myself,
Girl, people are dying for their freedom, and you aren't bearing this on behalf of your thoughts alone, people are putting their lives on the line for their freedom, and you can't even handle what's happening!
I always beat myself up just to go on living.

My daughter is at home waiting for me, and I hurry online to find out what has been reported about the dialogue session that the regime is trying to use to its advantage. For the first time ever a conference is broadcast live on state television. It is intended to play up the fragmentation of the opposition. What the authorities are doing is far from innocent. They are distorting the opposition men and women on the one hand, and welcoming them on the other. Beating some and trying to drag others into line. I know some of those people who are meeting with officers, but my real fear is of an officer who is a relative of the president, whose image is always being given a face-lift by the intellectuals. But he will smash them and break their ranks. Besides, there are no longer any unblemished names in the opposition. I express my concerns to some of my friends who met with him: This officer and Bashar al-Assad are one and the same. Bashar al-Assad is a murderer, how could you let him get so close to you?

..............................

Today… heavy gunfire in Jabal al-Zawiya and several demonstrations call for the fall of the regime even as the arrest campaign continues.

The opposition delegation's meeting in Moscow concludes with their asking for Russian intervention. Moscow says that Russia is a friend of the Syrian people and those in the opposition argue the justice of their cause and ask Moscow to stand side by side with them in convincing Bashar al-Assad to step down.

Today I go with one of the young men from the coordination committees to meet a female political prisoner. It was a quick visit. The young woman wears a
hijab
, is friendly and well-mannered and talks about her arrest with an unusual calm. Agreeing that she and I would meet again, I say goodbye to the guy, heading for a meeting with another young man from the coordination committees. I want to document the genesis of the committees and how young Syrians organize themselves in order to continue the uprising, and, from there, how the revolutionary coordination committees are formed on the ground.

The meeting takes place at my house, the safest place for us to talk. We had met once before in a café, I think we were watched by the security forces. I make food for us to share, I trust this young man. I always told him and one other guy that I was like their mother. For the most part this is to make them feel at ease, but the sentiment is real. When we are done eating I start the interview.

The young man, who would be arrested twice, says: “Before the mobilization started in the Arab world and before the revolution in Tunisia, we had a bunch of cultural and social and development projects with a number of intellectuals. Young people would meet with older intellectuals. After the mobilization in Tunisia, but before the fall of Ben Ali, we became optimistic and held a sit-in outside the Tunisian Embassy in support of the Tunisian revolution. We were repressed and kicked out by the security forces. When the mobilization broke out in Egypt we were sure Syria's turn was coming. The ceiling over our conversations started to rise: Could we start demonstrating and sitting-in in Syria? On February 3, we sat in against the only two telecom companies in the country, Syriatel and MTN. The sit-in was scheduled for three in the afternoon, but when we showed up at the al-Rawdeh café it was packed with security agents. Outside the café there was a substantial security presence as well so we tried to reschedule the sit-in but some of us were detained. Then we started preparing for an even bigger mobilization. We never thought it would be like this, though. After Egypt and Libya the groups got bigger and young men started getting more interested in public affairs. Guys who had been apolitical before poured out into the mobilization, especially after the fall of Mubarak and the regime atrocities in Libya.

On 14 February about ten or twelve young men and women got together. We were from all different ethnicities and sects and nationalist orientations. A larger gathering had been planned for 15 March and we were nervous. The question was: Will the Syrian people come out into the street? We had decided to go out cautiously on 15 March, thinking that all we needed to do was nudge the street in order for it to mobilize and even if that didn't happen we would do whatever we could to make it move. We got the idea for mobilization from a bunch of Facebook pages like ‘We are all Khalid Said' in Egypt, pages with some connection to social, economic and employment demands being made by citizens. Those pages would throw light on the negative effects of emergency laws and political authoritarianism, on Article 8 of the constitution and the Ba‘thist monopoly over the levers of power and chairs in the universities. On an education page that exposed malfeasance in the educational system, especially the universities, we would publish stories on corruption; to give one example, there was a page on hypocrisy in Syria. The point was to identify the people who had a vested interest in the regime.

“On 15 March we were blown away by how many people came out to demonstrate, which meant there was no need to mobilize and rally them. The people were ready. They came out of the Umayyad Mosque in the heart of Damascus. There were five young men who animated the demonstrations. Then there was the story about the children of Dar‘a on 18 March. We had started a sit-in in Damascus. From the beginning the notion of having the demonstrations in the squares, along the lines of the model of Tahrir Square in Cairo, was on our minds. We tried demonstrating in the squares of Damascus but with the security presence and military checkpoints, we couldn't make it happen there.”

I remember those actions. I would tell myself there had to be someone behind them. I would go out during the actions in order to monitor the street. Back then the mobilization really was quite weak.

The young man adds: “The signs came from Dar‘a, and the mobilization was begun. Even though the street was ready, we were all isolated islands. We hadn't yet fully processed the movement of the street because we had no political, local or even security expertise. It wasn't only the fact that we had major security obstacles to face; they were brutal with us. On Saturday 19 March people died in Dar‘a. A group of us was looking into possible ways of protesting in support of Dar‘a. Simple demonstrations were going out into the street. On the morning of Monday, 20 March, a demonstration went out in al-Baramkeh chanting against the regime that was dispersed with force and violence. We had carried out a strike outside the Interior Ministry on 16 March. During the week we started getting ready for Friday.

The Egyptian model had affected us subconsciously although that wasn't the only reason we thought about using the mosque. We faced a lot of difficulties, including the heavy security deployment in Damascus, which made gathering outside the mosque impossible. We were well known to the security forces, pretty much all of us. We tried going out to demonstrate as secularists on more than one occasion, but without any religious content we failed, so we had to direct the protest movement from inside the mosque, because there was a social assemblage already there that the regime couldn't repress. We figured that if we chanted this time then the masses would let us lead them. We believed that the people really did reject the regime because they had gone out before us, and that if we stood up and chanted the people would support us. Honestly most of us were young leftists and secularists, but we were through with our hang-ups about Islam or our fear of it.

On 26 March we took cameras inside the mosque and came out chanting in support of Dar‘a and freedom and the martyrs, decrying all acts of repression. There was more than one demonstration in Damascus. That in itself was a sign of a major popular mobilization against the regime. That day, we came out of the Umayyad Mosque. Some people headed for al-Merjeh while others went toward al-Baramkeh and the demonstration in al-Mezzeh. That meant we weren't alone, and we confirmed beyond any shadow of a doubt that the popular mobilization had begun to boil and wasn't going to stop. There's one other point I'd like to make. In Damascus we would go out without any organization. Because of the extreme repression, security forces started choking the streets of Damascus, the protest movement withdrew to the suburbs. Security started taking IDs from anyone who wanted to go inside the Umayyad Mosque. We searched for other venues and tried using the al-Rifa'i Mosque in Kafr Sousseh but soon there was a sizable security barricade there as well.”

As the young man talks, I remember going to the Umayyad Mosque. I talk to him about the heavy security presence that had surrounded not only the mosque but also the entire neighbourhood, from Bab Touma to Bab al-Hamidiyyeh.

He agrees with me and goes on: “Given blood relations and historical ties with the people of Dar‘a, the al-Maydan district came out with us. Al-Maydan is mostly inhabited by people from Hawran and the people of al-Qaboun also mobilized in part because of their ties of blood and kinship with Dar‘a. If anything, it was more about tribal and kinship ties than Islam. The al-Rifa'i Mosque was under siege so we started to look for other ones to use. At first, the preacher at the al-Rifa'i Mosque wouldn't cooperate with us. He was more inclined to stand with the regime. In al-Maydan the demonstrators came out without any intervention on our part. We started to follow their lead. The preacher in the al-Maydan Mosque was cooperative with us. Douma and Baniyas were both invaded by the army; then both places started to mobilize and we started to feel that the zone of protest was expanding. The general atmosphere became livelier and we started getting ready for something new. We felt like the uprising had really begun.

We were increasingly in touch with young men abroad, including through the ‘The Syrian Revolution' page, eventually naming the Fridays together. We needed connections. At first ‘The Syrian Revolution' page had been naming Fridays without consulting us. As a group inside the country, we opposed this and started to get involved in naming Fridays. After the zone of protest started to expand, the actions grew larger and we felt added pressure from the greater responsibility. At this point the mobilization started to delegate responsibilities. We got to know one another through the demonstrations and the Friday meetings, everyone came in a group. We were young women and men working all the time, and when the security pressure got too intense the young men would get together on their own and the girls would meet by themselves, for social and security reasons. We started being in touch with each other on the ground and on Facebook through these groups we already knew. Our communication was at a high level, everyone met with a group, and we federated each group with another. This happened more often on Friday when we were able to join science students with medical students as the arts and education and economics all staged sit-ins in the quad. After the uprising had been underway for a little more than a month, we started making plans to liberate the squares because that was Evacuation Day and we wanted to take advantage of the symbolism of the day in order to expand the zone of protests.