National Post (National Edition)
There was no turning back after Damascus demonstration.
THE DAMASCUS DEMONSTRATION WAS EXISTENTIAL — FOR ALL SIDES
In No Turning Back, Rania Abouzeid revisits the beginnings of unrest in Syria. This is part of a series of excerpts from books shortlisted for this year’s Lionel Gelber Prize, an award for exceptional writing on foreign affairs. The winner will be announced on Feb. 26.
Revolution is an intimate, multipart act. First, you silence the policeman in your head, then you face the policemen in the streets. In early 2011, the Middle East was electrified by an Indigenous democratic fervour, not the cynical imported kind that exploited the slogans of democracy to cloak military coups and foreign interventions. Ordinary men and women unlearned fear. Their demands, powerful in their simplicity, ricocheted from Tunisia to Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, and Yemen: Dignity! Freedom! Bread! They didn’t call it a “spring.” This was a new revolutionary pan-arabism, born of shared humiliation and frustration, spread by the tools of social media and satellite television. In Syria, it began timidly, with small public gatherings in solidarity with protesters elsewhere — such as the one on Feb. 23, 2011, in front of the Libyan Embassy in Damascus, and the detention in the southern city of Daraa of a group of teenagers accused of writing anti-regime graffiti on school walls.
Protests were banned in Syria under an emergency law in place since 1963 — as long as the ruling Baath Party. News of the vigil on Feb. 23 spread through word of mouth and Facebook, the social platform recently unblocked by the government (to better monitor calls for dissent, many suspected). The plainclothes, not-so-secret, police, or mukhabarat, arrived more than 40 minutes before the scheduled 5 p.m. start, followed by black-clad policemen carrying Kalashnikovs. Anti-riot police, in olive-green uniforms and black helmets, transparent face shields at the ready, blocked both ends of the narrow, tree-lined street housing the Libyan Embassy. They wielded worn truncheons, the stumpy ends flayed of the black skin that still covered their handles. There’d been a small, peaceful vigil in the same place the night before, but this night would be different.
Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak had resigned two weeks earlier. Tunisia’s Zine el Abidine Ben Ali had fled in midJanuary, and Libyan opposition fighters had just seized control of chunks of the east of their country. In Damascus, President Bashar alAssad gloated over the fall of his much older counterparts.
This was the fate of lead- ers who didn’t listen to their people, he said. Syria was different, he added, largely because of its foreign policy — because Assad’s rhetorical hostility to Israel and the hegemony of the United States, his support for Palestinians and the militant groups Hamas and the Lebanese Hezbollah, were in line with perceived popular Syrian sentiment.
Assad was 45, his carefully crafted image that of the everyman. He was the husband who casually dined in Damascene restaurants with his glamorous wife, Asma. The father who strolled through a souq with his children. The reformer who introduced the internet to the general public in 2000, the same year he ascended to power after the death of his father and predecessor, Hafez al-assad. Bashar alAssad was the young leader with plans for change, hamstrung by his father’s old guard and regional crises. He just needed time! Or so the popular narrative went.
In a region where power is measured in generations, by 2011 Bashar had “only” been president for 11 years. And he had proven his resilience. He’d outlasted American neoconservative threats of regime change. He’d overcome global isolation after the 2005 murder of former Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri (widely blamed on Damascus and its Lebanese ally, Hezbollah). He mitigated the effects of U.S. sanctions and the Iraq War next door, while strengthening Syria’s longstanding ties to Iran. Like his father, Bashar al-assad knew how to play the waiting game of Middle East pol- itics. He waited until his enemies, foreign and local, were voted out of office, died or were killed, or realized they needed him. All he had to do was survive and wait.
Facebook calls in the first week of February for “days of rage” against the Syrian regime had fizzled. A selfimmolation in late January, imitating the Tunisian produce vendor Mohammad Bouazizi, who ignited the Tunisian uprising, did nothing but harm the Syrian man involved. Syria was different. One of the most pivotal states in the Middle East, Iran’s lynchpin in its “axis of resistance” linking Syria to Hezbollah and Hamas, would not yield easily — but it would bend a little, as it did on Feb. 17, 2011.
On that day, the son of a store owner in Hariqa, near Damascus’s Souq alHamidiyeh, was insulted and beaten by traffic police. Nothing unusual, but then, in defiance of the state of emergency, a crowd of thousands massed, their chants of “The people will not be humiliated!” and “Thieves! Thieves!” bringing the interior minister to the scene. The minister, caught in the throng, stood on the ledge of his car door, promised an investigation, and wagged his finger at the crowd: “Shame on you! This is a demonstration!”
“No! No! It’s not a dem- onstration!” those nearest to him replied. “We all love the president!”
Perhaps that’s why Damascus, the “beating heart of Arabism,” decided not to allow a sizable display of pan-arab solidarity outside the Libyan Embassy on Feb. 23, less than a week later. Its people, after all, might get used to protesting.
The minutes rushed past 5:30 p.m. Few things in Damascus started on time, and the vigil outside the Libyan Embassy was no different. Dusk fell, extinguishing the muted warmth of a shy winter sun. Uniformed men outnumbered the crowd of 200 or so (double the night before) congregated in a nearby park. Unable to get any closer to the embassy, they chanted where they stood. “Ambassador resign!” “You are a traitor, not one of us!”
The crowd inched forward. It was dark now. “OK, you’ve made your point,” an officer told them. “If you don’t mind, retreat and go back to where you were.”
“If you don’t mind, we want to walk,” said a woman in the front line.
The crowd sensed an opportunity, picked up a new chant, crept closer. “Peacefully!” somebody shouted. “To the embassy!” came the reply.
The security forces’ response was swift, like a pirouette in combat boots. The anti-riot police lowered their face shields and surged forward as Kalashnikovwielding police officers retreated in tandem. Truncheons shattered the mass of bodies. Shrill cries. Fists and black boots pummelled backs and legs. Mukhabarat agents shoved men into a minibus. A 28-year-old university student clung to the metal bars of a fence as blows thrashed his slight frame. “Leave me alone! Why can’t you just talk to me?” he pleaded. The protester was ripped from the fence and tossed into the minibus. The vehicle was moving now, with 14 detainees, all men. “You traitors! You animals! You want to demonstrate?” the security men onboard shouted as they beat the protesters. “You dogs, you sons of bitches!”
The wheels stopped at a mukhabarat branch. Syria’s mukhabarat were divided into four main intelligence agencies: Military Intelligence, Political Security, State Security (also known as General Security), and (the most feared) Air Force Intelligence. The agencies were headquartered in Damascus and divided into dozens of branches and subbranches extending throughout the country, each with its own detention and interrogation facilities. They operated independently, with little low-level co-ordination, in a tangled surveillance matrix known as the jihaz il amnee, or security apparatus, its many tentacles spying on the population and each other.
The 14 men were directed to plastic chairs, expecting further beatings. Instead, they were offered water and the use of the bathroom before being addressed by an officer who didn’t introduce himself. “We are all the sons of this country, we don’t doubt your nationalism or your love for your country, but we would prefer that this episode not be repeated,” the officer said. Some of the men, perhaps emboldened by the civil reception, asked why they’d been called traitors and beaten. “Ignorance,” the officer said. “Some people are smart and aware, and others are not. Perhaps you came across some of those who are not. We also support the Libyan people,” he added, “but if demonstrations were useful, we’d all take part in them, but they’re not.”
The 14 men were released hours later. Some, like the 28-year-old, had never been detained before. The young man had gone to the Libyan Embassy, like many others that evening, to test the boundaries of what the Syrian state would tolerate. He went because he wanted freedom of the press and a law to allow political parties other than the Baath. He went because he didn’t think it right that his personal ambitions — a job and a home — seemed unattainable. He left the mukhabarat branch that night emboldened. He would protest again, he said, until something in Syria changed: “It’s a conscious decision that I have taken. I don’t know where it will lead me, but there is no turning back.”
At the same time, in the southern city of Daraa, bordering Jordan, some two-dozen young men and teenagers had been rounded up by security forces, blamed for scribbling graffiti on school walls that said let the regime fall, and it’s your turn, doctor, referring to Assad’s training as an ophthalmologist. The “Daraa children,” as they were dubbed in the media, weren’t children, and many had nothing to do with the writing on the walls, but tales of their harsh treatment in custody (real and embellished) sparked protests for their release, demonstrations that ignited the Syrian revolution in midMarch and christened Daraa as its birthplace. Protesters shed the pretence of panArab solidarity and called for reform (but not regime change) in Syria. The state’s initial tepid response of violence and lectures reverted to its more familiar violence, but Syria had already changed. The great wall of fear had cracked, the silence was shattered. The confrontation was existential — for all sides — from its inception. There was no turning back.
RESPONSE WAS SWIFT, LIKE A PIROUETTE IN COMBAT BOOTS.