The Girl From Aleppo: Nujeen’s Escape From War to Freedom. Christina Lamb

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ to Al Jazeera. My family all know I don’t like the news: it was always bad – Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, war after war in fellow Muslim countries pretty much since I was born.

      ‘Something has happened!’ he said. On the screen we could see thousands of people gathering in the main square in Cairo, waving flags and demanding the removal of their long-time President Hosni Mubarak. I was scared. Dictators fire on people. We knew that. I did not want to see it. I started shaking my head.

      ‘I was watching my programme,’ I protested. One of what I call my ‘disability benefits’ is that my brothers and sisters all knew they weren’t supposed to upset me. Even when I threw Nasrine’s things out of the window, like her blue pen and the CD of Kurdish songs she used to play all the time.

      As I predicted, soon came the teargas and rubber bullets and water cannons to drive the demonstrators away. The thud of the bullets made me jump. After that Bland let me switch back. But the protests didn’t stop. Mustafa, Bland and Nasrine talked of nothing else, and whenever I was out of the room they switched to the news. I gave up trying to resist and soon I too was glued to Al Jazeera watching those crowds in Tahrir Square grow and grow. Many of the protesters were young people like Bland and Nasrine and had painted the Egyptian flag on their faces or sported bandannas on their heads in red, white and black.

      One day, we watched – hearts in mouth – as a column of tanks advanced into the square like monsters. Dozens of protesters bravely blocked their way and I could hardly watch. Then something astonishing happened. The tanks didn’t open fire but stopped. The crowd chanted and people climbed on top, scrawling ‘Mubarak Must Go!’ on their sides, and we could see they were even chatting to the soldiers.

      A couple of days later, me, Bland and Nasrine were again on the edge of the sofa as crowds of pro-Mubarak supporters pushed their way into the square like a demon cavalry on horses and camels. They were beaten back by the protesters, who hurled stones and ripped out paving slabs from the square to use as shields. The tanks formed a line between the two groups and it was hard to see what was going on, as there was so much dust and things were on fire. Finally, the Mubarakites were chased out and the democracy people erected barricades of street signs and bits of metal fencing and burnt-out cars to stop them coming back.

      Where would it end? we wondered. The protesters made a kind of tent city in the square with a field hospital to treat their wounded, with sections of the crowd handing out food and water and even doing haircuts and shaves. It almost looked like a festival, a bit like our annual Newroz. I could see children my age stamping on pictures of Mubarak. The journalists reporting it all were excited too. They even had a name for it. The Arab Spring, they called it. For us that sounded a bit like our Damascus Spring and that hadn’t ended well at all.

      The occupation went on for eighteen days. Then around 6 p.m. on 11 February, Nahda and Nasrine had just come back from my uncle’s wedding which woke me up from a nap. We switched on the TV and there was Egypt’s Vice President announcing, ‘President Hosni Mubarak has decided to step down.’ Soon came the news that the Mubaraks had been flown out in an army helicopter to exile in the Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh. That was it, gone after three decades. I was happy for Egypt. Afterwards there were fireworks, soldiers climbing out of their tanks to hug the demonstrators, people singing and whistling. Was it that easy? If I fell asleep again in the afternoon would I wake up and find Gaddafi gone from Libya? Or even Assad?

      And Egypt wasn’t all. At the time we hadn’t realized it was a ‘thing’, but the Arab Spring had actually begun the previous December in Tunisia, when a poor twenty-six-year-old fruit-seller named Mohamed Bouazizi poured kerosene over his body and set fire to himself outside a town hall. This was shocking for us Muslims as our holy Koran prohibits the use of fire on Allah’s creation, so he must have been completely desperate. We didn’t know if he would go to heaven or hell. His family said he had been fed up with local officials humiliating him and had become desperate when they confiscated his fruit cart which was their whole livelihood. When he died of his burns in January there were massive protests in the centre of Tunis and ten days later President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and his family ran away to Saudi Arabia after twenty-three years of power.

      Soon every day on the TV there were uprisings somewhere new. Yemen, Bahrain, Jordan, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, even Oman, all had demonstrations against their rulers – it was like an epidemic across North Africa and the Middle East. Of course we knew about the forty years of Assads, but we hadn’t realized how long all these dictators had been in power. People would gather after Friday prayers then swarm into the streets and congregate in some central square. Days of Rage they called it.

      When would it be Syria? Like those other countries, our population was mostly young and unemployed, and we had had our rights trampled on by a dictator and the rich elite. Even in my room on the fifth floor I could sense that the whole country seemed to be holding its breath. Nasrine said that at the university nobody was talking about anything else. My brothers and sisters came home with reports of odd incidents – a Kurdish man in the north-eastern city al-Hasakah had set fire to himself; some small demonstrations here and there; even a protest in Damascus after police assaulted a merchant in one of the main souks. But nothing quite caught hold.

      When the spark finally did come it was in an unlikely place – the small farming town of Deraa in the south-west, near the border with Jordan, which we knew as a bastion of support for the regime that had long sent its sons to top posts. In recent years, they had produced a prime minister, a foreign minister and a head of the ruling Ba’ath party.

      The catalyst was the arrest in late February of a group of teenage boys who had been scrawling anti-regime graffiti on school walls. ‘Al-Shaab yureed eskat el nizam!’ they wrote – ‘The people want to topple the regime’ – just as the crowds had shouted in Cairo. ‘Bashar out!’ wrote another. A third was writing, ‘Your turn next, doctor,’ when he was spotted by security forces.

      Over the next few days they rounded up ten more teenagers, making fifteen in total, and took them to the local Political Security Directorate – I told you we have many secret police – which was under the control of General Atef Najeeb, the President’s cousin, who everyone was scared of.

      Since Assad father’s time, and the Six Day War in 1967 when Israel seized our Golan Heights from the Sea of Galilee in the south to Mount Hermon in the north, our police and security services have had absolute power to arrest and detain anyone indefinitely without trial. They use the excuse that we are in a permanent state of war with ‘the Zionist entity’, which is what we call Israel, though when we fought them again in the 1973 war we didn’t get back the land. Assad’s jails are notorious for torture. People say death is easier than a Syrian prison, though I don’t know how anyone would know that.

      Soon there were reports that those boys were being beaten and tortured, the usual Assad specialities like pulling out fingernails and electric shocks to their private parts. Their desperate parents went to the authorities and were told by General Najeeb, ‘Forget your children, go and make more.’ Can you imagine? Round the country young people tried to organize a Day of Rage in support of the boys. I saw Nasrine and Bland looking at a Facebook page called ‘The Syrian Revolution against Bashar al-Assad 2011’, but they quickly closed it. We were scared even to look at the page.

      Deraa is a very tribal area, and the arrested boys were from all the largest clans. And like many farmers we knew, its people were struggling because of a severe drought which had been going on for the last four years and they couldn’t compete with cheap imports from Turkey and China. Instead of helping them, the government had cut subsidies. They were angry too at the way General Najeeb had been running the area as his personal fiefdom.

      So, on 18 March, after Friday prayers, when the families of the missing marched on the house of the Deraa governor and started a sit-in to demand their release, they were accompanied by local religious and СКАЧАТЬ