The Syrian Security State

“She’s not coming.  She won’t meet with you.”  It wasn’t the first time I’d been told that a Syrian was afraid to meet with me because I was a foreigner and that would mean extra scrutiny for her and her family from the Mukhabarat, the secret police, and it wouldn’t be the last.  All Syrians, it doesn’t matter what your class, age, religion or gender, are subject to the Big Brother phenomenon; the State insidiously encroaching in their lives and watching over everything they say, write, do, in case it is perceived in any way to be threatening to the regime’s ‘security.’  As a result, interaction with foreigners is viewed with alarm and suspicion by the authorities, in case Syrians are being ‘infected’ by their liberal, Western ideas and then try to apply them to Syria.   Several times while travelling with Syrian friends, we would pass the journey sitting apart from one another, feigning to be strangers, in case the authorities became curious and started to ask questions about why Syrians and non-Syrians were travelling together.  This was during the year of 2010, which I spent in its entirety in Syria, during the time that Facebook and YouTube were banned in case they too gave Syrians ‘dangerous’ beliefs about freedom.  But what the government didn’t realize was that the Syrians didn’t need contact with foreigners to be ‘infected’ with such notions as democracy and human rights; those notions were already there, whispered in clandestine exchanges and lurking in the hidden corners of peoples’ minds.  In the age of the internet’s global village, information could be accessed and contacts could be established despite government attempts to shut down all ‘subversive’ sites and communications.  In fact, in almost every internet café I walked into in Damascus, most Syrians were busily tap tap tapping away on Facebook’s blue and white screen via a proxy web address.  So the government’s removal of the ban on Facebook and YouTube in February 2011, in an attempt to try and avert civilian unrest spreading to Syria in the wake of the ‘Arab Spring,’ was irrelevant.  Syrians had been revolting against the Security State long before the news of tanks and snipers obliterating peaceful protesters reached our screens.

As a foreigner from Britain, I never felt totally comfortable being in Syria because I never felt totally free, as I do back home.  When you travel within Syria as a foreigner, in order to board a bus, you have to register your passport details and your destination with the authorities before you can leave.  You also have to register your address with internal security every time you change apartment.  This way, the authorities can know where you are at all times.  It is said that when the landlord gives you a key to your apartment, he also keeps one for himself and gives a third to the Mukhabarat.  Several of my foreign friends had their apartments raided and their laptops and cameras removed, whilst money, passports and other such valuables were left untouched.  Sometimes the laptops and cameras were returned after the Mukhabarat were done checking them, sometimes they weren’t.  It happened, on occasion, that I was followed by the none too subtle Mukhabarat, dressed in their uniform dark trousers, shirts and wrap-round sunglasses, with the conspicuous bulge of a gun tucked into their belts, or, alternatively, one of them would sit down unnaturally close to me and a friend, leaning in close to listen as we sat chatting about anything from history to the weather.  At other times, I would here interference on the telephone line and an ominous click sound that implied that someone had tapped into my conversation.  A Syrian joke has it that two Frenchmen are talking on the phone in their incomprehensible Parisian slang, when the poor, textbook trained Mukhabarat officer listening into the call interrupts them in his impeccable, classical French, to ask the two gentlemen if they can please speak properly so that he can understand what they are saying.  Meanwhile, in a real, Skype conversation that took place between me and a friend of mine back in Britain, she asked me if I had been involved in any activism since I’d been out there.  Somewhat flustered and alarmed that we might not be speaking just to each other but also to a third, uninvited listener, I asserted, as firmly as I could, that it was best not to discuss these things over the internet.  But of course, being the tenacious and inquisitive interrogator that she is, this only spiked her curiosity so she went on and on asking, despite my protestations, what I could mean by this and why I wouldn’t talk, until finally she joked, “why, is someone listening?”  Maybe I was being paranoid but I didn’t want to tell her that someone could well be listening.  But whilst all of this was merely somewhat unsettling, it remains the case that if I, as a British citizen, were caught criticizing the State and advocating for democratic reform, in all likelihood the worst that would happen to me is that I would be quickly spirited off on a return flight home to Britain and banned from returning to Syria.  Not so for the Syrians.

Even before the recent uprisings in Syria, if one were to visit Amnesty International’s website and look at the reports filed under Syria, one would be confronted with a long list of people who had been disappeared, detained as prisoners of conscience, tortured and/or killed by the State’s security arm.  These people ranged from being human rights activists to artists, lawyers, Islamists, writers and opposition politicians.  In a country where all political parties, bar the ‘President’s’ ruling Ba’ath Party and where Amnesty International are illegal, it is not surprising that anyone who dares to challenge the State, whether publically or privately, is dealt with swiftly, violently and in contravention of international, human rights law by the very same ‘service’ that is allegedly there to protect the Syrian people from actual threats to their safety.

Another Syrian joke has it that when a government official excitedly tells Hafez al-Assad, the current dictator, Bashar al-Assad’s father and the former Dictator ruling from 1970 to 2000, that he has won the latest election with 97% of the votes and asks, “what more could you want?”  Hafez coolly replies, “the names of the other 3%.”  Western governments may have comforted themselves with the myth that the young, new, British educated Bashar al-Assad was far less draconian than his father, as they tried to cosy their governments up to his in an attempt to divert Syrian support for and further isolate Iran but the evidence of the young successor’s brutality was glaringly obvious, albeit ignored for reasons of ‘national interest.’  One of Bashar al-Assad’s first maneuvers upon seizing the reins of power was to shore up his base of support by changing his father’s security forces with new men, loyal to himself.  The brief interlude between 2000 and 2001, whence new civil society organisations and non-governmental organisations previously banned under the old regime were allowed to be established and to flourish, was rapidly followed by a crackdown, wherein they were forcibly closed down and government detractors were once again rounded up and herded into Syria’s overcrowded jails.  So it is not surprising that the Syrian ‘President’ has reacted to the ‘Arab Spring’ in the way that he has; he is his father’s son and witnessed firsthand how successful Hafez’s brutal 1982 crackdown on Hama was in crushing the Muslim Brotherhood, who were then challenging his regime.

But whilst it is not surprising, it is scary, and I cannot help but think of my friends still in Syria, both the politically active and those who are just trying to lead a normal life but who might get caught up in the brutality nonetheless.  I think about my friend Mohammad, who works for SANA, the Syrian Arab News Agency, and who, despite his position as a reporter for the State, could not leave the country without a ‘minder,’ even before the ‘Arab Spring,’ for fear that he would spread truthful news to the outside world about Syria. Although Mohammad has already spent a stint in prison, merely for being a member of Amnesty International, he still takes every opportunity he can to ring them, on what he hopes is a secure line, and tell them of the atrocities being committed in his homeland.  And I think of Mustafa, an activist who already, in 2010, had two travel bans prohibiting him from leaving Syria, due to his refusal to carry out compulsory military service and his public critique of the government’s continuous human rights’ violations.  Mustafa now risks his life daily by disseminating news of Syrian State brutality and by going to anti-government demonstrations in Damascus, despite their small and easily targetable size.  And I think of the family with whom I lived for several months, one of whom has recently had a baby and just wants to bring her son up in a country where he can be free to laugh and say what he wants, as you or I can, without fear of State repression and reprisal.  The Syrians are brave and warm people, who are always ready to share their homes and anything else they might have with you but, tragically, they live in one of strictest security states in the world, which means that they themselves are far from safe.