A Woman in the Crossfire (29 page)

Our first mistake: We had been leading the movement in groups. We hadn't yet shifted to coordination committees. Second mistake: They wanted people to come from the outskirts of the city, particularly from Douma and Harasta and al-Tall, in order to sit-in at the squares. We managed to shoot down any other ideas. One of our guys made a special visit to Douma, where he delivered an oral invitation for the people of Douma and Harasta and Jawbar and al-Tall and Arbeen and Zamalka to come to the sit-in at Umawiyeen Square, and that's what actually ended up happening. The security forces carried out a massacre in which eleven or twelve people were killed, and they started cruelly closing the streets of Damascus and its suburbs. A lot of checkpoints sprang up between the suburbs and Damascus. That was a strategic blunder. At this point we felt we needed more discipline in the movement and to organize the sit-ins better. Needs we hadn't noticed before started to come into focus: material needs among families of the martyrs and prisoners, medical needs and assistance. Once these groups were federated together and discussions and conversations had begun, the most active and faithful elements distinguished themselves. Each and every one of us started to work on our own specialty. We came to realize that our clash with the regime had multiple fronts but at the same time the regime was becoming more violent and brutal, just as we started falling into the hands of the security forces. One person would get arrested, another would get killed, a third would disappear… and so on and so forth.

“Once the groups were federated, we sorted people out on the basis of activism and ability to serve the movement. With all the security pressure we tried to organize ourselves into tight circles. Around the beginning of May, the term ‘coordination committees' starting rising to the surface. A month and a half had passed since the outbreak of the protests and the tasks of the coordination committees were distributed according to various issues: politics, media, organization, medicine. We started learning that in the bloody protest areas like Douma and Dar‘a and Homs and Baniyas there wasn't any time for culture and art and so the focus of our activities had to be on humanitarian support and politics. Soon we had an organized group of young men and women working on art design and posters, graphics and communications, media pages and websites; there were others who didn't understand politics but were able to get people to come out to demonstrate, guys with media connections; lots of other guys had political consciousness and worked on statements that we published. At the same time we began to have real debates when we went out into the streets, because the entire street wasn't cut from the same cloth – like in the mobilization in Douma, which was led by the Socialist Union, who are Arab nationalists, and on the other side there were a lot of young Islamists with an Islamic way of thinking, but the former weren't particularly partisan and the latter weren't fundamentalists or extremists.

“No matter what, we knew that the mobilization came first on the popular level and attempts were made to pull the mobilization forward for the benefit of all sides. After much debate we concluded that pulling the mobilization in any one direction signalled the victory of the regime and the end of the popular mobilization, a distortion of it. We entered into discussions with them. The young men were open-minded and understanding, regardless of whether they were nationalists or Islamists or leftists. The beautiful thing was that everyone realized that the mobilization had a democratic platform, not just in Syria but across the entire Arab world.

Some guys tried pulling the mobilization on the ground in one direction, saddling it with ideological baggage, but through marathon discussion sessions we managed to arrive through consensus at the truth that replacing Ba‘thist ideology with another simply wouldn't help anyone. The mobilization would lose its popular momentum and it would open up questions of the Islamists intimidating minorities in real life, the scarecrow the regime uses to really frighten people. At the same time it would open up a gap separating the secularists from the Islamists from the liberals. We came to the conclusion that the most important thing was for us to work together on the ground in a non-ideological way, that we wouldn't propose any ideological angle. The notion was that the Islamists weren't partisan in general.

Once the popular mobilization had reached an advanced stage we thought it best to divide the committees into specialties and each group of young people would work within that specialization. The political committee was responsible for negotiating among the coordination committees, for unifying the political vision and formulating the ideas behind the public statements, which would in turn be handed over to the media committee that drew up its final form. The media committee working inside the country had about fourteen young men from all the various governorates, including those who worked in the media field. They were responsible for delivering news to the satellite channels and the news agencies through a network of friends who became correspondents on the ground. We started meeting people who had the desire to report the news in the absence of any functioning media.

At the same time, for security reasons, we put into place four spokespeople for the local coordination committees abroad – Omar Idilbi, Rami Nakhleh a.k.a. Muladh Umran, Mohammad al-Abdallah and Hozan Ibrahim – who wouldn't speak without first coordinating with those inside the country. Inside the organizing committee there was a group of young men who were capable of mobilizing on the ground because they had a large number of contacts and who were able to organize demonstrations in Damascus and the suburbs. The cultural and artistic committee was a group of web designers and programmers as well as musicians and artists. We had a game plan with them, each one worked in his or her own field and then the media committee would get it published in the media.

Our strategy relied upon satirizing the regime –
Don't Call me a Jackass, I'm an Infiltrator
– and, along the same lines as the posters put up by the regime –
I'm an Optimist, I'm a Pessimist, I'm with the Law.
We waged a parallel campaign on Facebook –
I'm a Pessimist… We Love You or I'm with the Law, But Where is it, Exactly? or My Way is Your Way, But the Tank's in the Middle of the Road.
We played on more than one angle. Now we have more than one group designing posters for the revolution – a visual culture with a peaceful revolutionary character. We also have people working on consciousness-raising, who take the pulse of certain targeted segments of Syrian society and find out the orientations of the street. Some of us agreed to fan out every Thursday until we all assemble wherever the demonstrations were set to happen. Our guys would go out and try to control the slogans in the demonstrations, in order to ensure things remain peaceful and civil. There was a female human rights activist who worked with us a lot; her job was to link up the coordination committees with friends in every city. We couldn't use our phones because of the security surveillance, the patchy communications and the iron security fist. At least as far as Damascus was concerned, we had to rely on verbal contact.

“We had to come up with ways of staying in touch with the other cities through communications channels that the internet would have provided ordinarily. The human rights activist was the one who put coordination committees in Damascus in touch with the provinces. We managed to find a way of working together in order to come up with a unified political vision. In the end what helped us the most was the revolutionary atmosphere in the Arab world and our democratic vision. There were other groups of young people working on the ground, but because of the communications obstacles and the security crackdown we weren't able to be in touch with them consistently. They all coordinated with another group and launched another Facebook page, ‘The Union of Local Coordination Committees.' We collaborate with them. We work together collectively and there are no dividing lines between the two projects. Currently we are working to unify the coordination committees completely all over Syria, under the name, ‘The Federation of Local Coordination Committees'. On the ground we have no disagreements and we are making every effort to convene a meeting within the next ten days in order to come out with a single framework unifying the local coordination committees and the union of coordination committees.”

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My head is swimming with all the political mobilization that is now taking place. Popular committees are revitalizing civil society, new coordination committees are announced, young men and women are getting together to form federations and affinity groups – the kind of political mobilization Syria hasn't seen for nearly half a century. History will later record these days as exceptional. There is no horizon beckoning me. I am stultified by insomnia and consumed with all the details of the past few months of my life. There is a rift between me and my daughter, a psychological boycott between me and my family – it's unimaginable just how distant they have become – a break between me and my childhood friends, between me and my entire environment in the village, between me and my sect. I never thought such a day would come.

My sect is being persecuted for the third time in history. The first time was when the Alawites were subjected to slaughter and massacres. The second time was when the al-Assad regime in Syria was labelled an Alawite regime, which was historically inaccurate. The third time is now, as they are subjected to a misinformation campaign by state media, the security services and some of those who benefit from the regime, by making the Alawites line up behind the regime and defend it. All this despite the fact that they would turn them into human shields if their path ever got too narrow and they had no option in front of them but to kill the people from their own community and force them into a civil war with the other sects. My girlfriend and I were getting ready to visit a young woman who had been arrested. My friend asks me, as usual, “Why are you so depressed?” I look at her with the expression she used to give me for years; she smiles, because she knows that her question is the same thing I would always ask her. We used to sit together for a long time in silence, without speaking. Ever since the uprising broke out we have become even more silent.

The young woman is an engineer in her thirties. She has been arrested twice, the first time on 16 March when she remained in jail for sixteen days. I find this bit of information odd and tell her I was at the same sit-in but did not see her there. She smiles and says, “Who saw anybody?” We all laugh because she is right. We barely had time to assemble outside the Interior Ministry to demand the release of the prisoners when the security forces pounced and dispersed us with beatings and detentions and stampings. The second time she got arrested was in an ambush the security forces had set up for her. She and a group of young people had been preparing a food convoy to break the army and security siege of Dar‘a. Security agents would arrest anyone who helped the people of Dar‘a, even killing doctors and emergency workers. They seized one of the young men who had been helping her, then called her from his cell phone and pretended to be him. She fell into their trap and the security forces captured her in the middle of the street. She was screaming and people tried to save her but the security forces responded savagely. She managed to shout her name out loud so that people would know who it was being arrested.

She says: “They wanted me to put my thumbprint on a statement but I refused, and they threatened to go get the lieutenant colonel, who came and demanded that I give my thumbprint, but still I refused. He told me, ‘We have two ways of doing things here: the human way and the animal way. Your choice.' In that moment I stared back at him with strength and defiance, I didn't blink. They beat me hard and I screamed loudly. The beating and kicking continued. I didn't budge so they started beating my face. Then he shouted at me, ‘Down on the ground!' He wanted me to fall down. I remained standing, and he started pulling my head out from under my
hijab
, so I said, ‘God alone is sufficient for us, and He is the best disposer of affairs.' He responded, ‘The Ba‘th Party above all else.' He punched me square in the face and blood gushed from my nose. Then he started cursing me with filthy, slanderous, vulgar and cheap insults, cursing Dar‘a and its people. When he threatened to rape me I signed the papers finally and then went inside the cell. They brought me out one more time and said, ‘The lieutenant colonel orders you take off your hijab.' I refused defiantly at first, but eventually took it off. One of them was kind and said, ‘Let her go into solitary. She can take off her hijab there.' And that's what happened.

They left me there overnight. I slept deeply. It was very cold and there wasn't even a blanket on the ground. They woke me up early the next morning. A female prison guard came and asked why I wouldn't eat anything, saying that if I didn't eat the lieutenant colonel was going to torture me. I was scared. She brought an orange and I ate it. Some of them pretended to be nice. They waged all kinds of awful psychological warfare. For example, they would call me by the name of the female prison guard and when I would tell them my real name they wouldn't listen and just say, ‘No, you're so-and-so,' and at that point I feared they were going to keep me hidden forever. I started telling all the prisoners in there with me my real name so that some news might eventually reach my family. I was held there from Monday to Friday, and then they moved me to a better cell. Other prisoners took care of me when they could.

On Saturday they transported us to political security, where there were young men walking around with shackles on their hands binding them to one another. Their crime was delivering food to besieged Dar‘a. When we went inside the political security branch they took our stuff and insulted us, the security agents were rough and vulgar, whereas the officers were nicer. I was sent into a solitary cell. It was filthy and crawling with cockroaches but I was too tired to feel anything and fell asleep with all the bugs.