Syrian Gulag
I’ve written a long essay for a future issue (the Halal issue) of the Critical Muslim which reviews three necessary books on the politics of the Middle East. Two are Alex Rowell’s “We Are Your Soldiers” and Azmi Bishara’s “Syria 2011 – 2013”. Here I’m showing you a few paragraphs on the third book – Syrian Gulag: Inside Assad’s Prison System – because it’s such an essential addition to the Syrian bookshelf that I feel the need to publicise it. Nobody should pontificate about Syria before making themselves familiar with this material.
To better understand the history of the strong man, or the taghout, in Syria, let’s return to the country’s torture chambers, which became more numerous and more politically salient in the days of the UAR. Some years later, Hafez al-Assad further expanded the detention and torture network, to the point that the entire Syrian society was governed, and smothered, by the fear of detention and torture. The misrule of the supreme strong man was underpinned by hundreds of little strong men abusing people in prisons.
The US incarcerates 629 people per 100,000 of the population. This is generally considered to be the worst rate in the world. Russia incarcerates 445 per 100,000. In Syria, however, 1,200 per 100,000 are incarcerated. That’s a conservative estimate. And many of those who are taken “behind the sun”, as Syrians say, never return.
I’ve taken those figures from Syrian Gulag: Inside Assad’s Prison System by Jaber Baker and Ugur Umit Ungor. This is an immense work, based on over 100 interviews with survivors, some interviews with defected perpetrators, leaks – including the ‘Caesar’ photos of at least 6,786 people murdered in detention – as well as reports by international organizations, a vast archive of torture accounts held by a Dutch immigration lawyer, and published and unpublished prison memoirs. Prison literature (adab as-sijoon) is Syria’s most developed genre, very unfortunately.
Syrian Gulag is encyclopedic, organizing information on the different types of prisons, the various branches and their histories, and the officers who built the system. In so doing, sadly, it gives a history of the last sixty years in Syria. What’s surprising here is the petty sadism of the top-level, household-name officers, their willingness to get their hands dirty. The people in charge are thugs, quite literally. And what is wearily familiar here is the taghout’s tactic of turning meaning on its head. The “Palestine Branch” sounds like it does exciting espionage on Israel, but is in fact a torture camp for the abuse of Palestinians and Syrians.
The torture methods described are numerous and heart-shattering. They include “the German Chair”, “the Dynamo”, tying the penis, sleep deprivation, electrocution, “the Magic Carpet”, “the Ladder”, burning with charcoal, burning with hot water, fingernail extraction, drowning, “the Parachute”, “the Pyramid Pose”, cutting with knives, and rape. Remember, these horrors are not freak occurrences. Almost every Syrian family has encountered them.
Read the rest of this entry »Khaled’s Death is Hard Work
A slightly different version was published at The Markaz Review.
I remember Khaled in a beer garden in Bristol. He was sitting at a table performing the English language: “So so so,” he sang. “And and and, but and but! and so… but! so… but!” Khaled inhabiting his stocky body, his warm, brimming smile, his big head of fluffy white hair.
Of course he knew far more words than those. He somehow managed to communicate very well in English without speaking it very fluently. In Arabic he talked and talked, like the tide. Sometimes he broke into song. His writing was brilliant, the kind that will last for many generations. A poet, screenwriter, novelist — he was endlessly playful with words. And he was gentle with life, and with people. He took them very seriously.
I was with him at the BBC one evening in June 2014. ISIS had captured Mosul, and using the money looted from the city’s banks, and the American weapons captured from the fleeing Iraqi army, the organization had rapidly seized vast swathes of eastern Syria, areas which had been previously liberated from the Assad regime. The radio presenter asked Khaled what he thought of it all. His answer — “It’s important to pay attention to the role of Iran” — may have confused non-experts at the time, but was absolutely apt.
He was politically acute, although he wasn’t primarily a political person. He was a humanist, an artist, and a Syrian who cared deeply about Syrians. Once, as we toured England to introduce the Syria Speaks anthology, Khaled met refugees from villages near his own in the Aleppo countryside. “They asked me about the olive trees and the seasons,” he grinned afterwards. “I love these people.”
He liked the concrete, material detail of life, and was aware of the dense social webs connecting people. This comes through in his writing, in its sensuousness and physicality as well as in its careful intricacies of plot and character. His novels are beautiful and rewarding, but not always easy reading. The stories often proceed in narrative swirls and mosaics rather than in linear fashion. This form manifests a kind of realism, because in real human life everywhere, not only in Syria, characters are woven from stories, and stories link to further stories …
Read the rest of this entry »October the Seventh
A very slightly different version of this piece was published at The Markaz Review.
On October the seventh, Hamas fighters broke through the fence which locks Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip. In doing so they revealed Israel as a paper tiger. This supposed regional superpower, so skilled at containing and killing dispossessed Palestinian civilians, was unable to stop its enemies from attacking military bases and killing and abducting soldiers.
If Hamas had ended the operation there, it would have won an undoubted political as well as military victory. No doubt Israel would have responded with force, and as disproportionately as it always does, but it would have been somewhat restrained by its western allies and sponsors. The Israeli ‘peace camp’ (such as it is) might even have been revived. Even now we see Israeli fury directed at Netanyahu’s government that focused on guarding illegal settlers in the West Bank rather than the Gaza border fence. Just by breaking through the fence, Hamas changed the regional equation, showing that normalization between Israel and Arab dictators wouldn’t bring Israel security, that only a settlement with the Palestinians would do that.
But Hamas did more than break through the fence and strike military targets. It killed hundreds of civilians, including children and the elderly. A group of elderly people waiting at a bus stop were gunned down. Children were tied to their parents and set on fire. Whole families were murdered. Hamas perpetrated an appalling and enormous war crime.
This was immoral, illegal, and stupid. First, it pushed the already hyper-violent Israeli society into a blind rage for revenge. That may have been part of the calculation – to provoke a response so massive that it would upend the power structures in the region, in the hope that the new structure would turn out to be better for Palestinians. This is the kind of gamble that only a blind-faith pyromaniac could make.
Maybe the orders were, go in and cause as much damage and pain as you possibly can. Maybe they expected they would have only a few minutes to spend killing before the IDF killed them. In fact, incredibly, they had forty eight hours. I have no idea how this happened. If Israel were an Arab dictatorship, I’d say it was because key officers had been bribed or threatened to look the other way. But Israel is not an Arab dictatorship. No doubt in the years to come books will be written to attempt to explain.
In the end, Hamas achieved what has been called ‘catastrophic success’. It probably hoped to grab a few dozen hostages with which to bargain for Palestinian prisoners (or hostages) held in Israeli prisons. By taking so many hostages, and by killing so many civilians, it decreased the hostages’ value. Sections of the Israeli establishment seem to have already sacrificed the hostages. Their priority is to destroy the Palestinians, not to negotiate.
What Hamas fighters did was behave like savages. In so doing they gave Israelis and Westerners the perfect reflection of an image that already existed in their minds: the Muslim barbarian, the savage other, the irrational absolute enemy against whom all measures are justified. Because Hamas calls itself an ‘Islamic Resistance Movement’, the stain spreads to cover Muslims everywhere. (It’s worth repeating that Islamic rules of warfare very specifically forbid the harming of non-combatants.)
Irreconcilable Narratives
When I called relatives and friends living in Arab countries I realized that the story they were hearing from Arab media was very different to the story here in the west. There the focus was on Hamas’s assault on the military; here it was on Hamas’s terrorism against women and children. From the very start, the narratives spun in east and west were irreconcilable.
It didn’t help that Joe Biden said he’d personally seen and confirmed evidence of beheaded babies, and then a few hours later that the White House retracted his claim. It didn’t help that unverified claims of rape were spread far and wide. Some or all of these atrocities may actually have happened, but a lack of concern for truth on all sides has made it difficult to convince anybody of anything they don’t already believe.
Personally I don’t see any moral difference between shooting a baby in the head, or beheading a baby, or incinerating a baby with a bomb (and Israel has killed far more Palestinian children in the last few days than the total number of Israelis killed on October the Seventh). What the image of the baby-beheading rapist does, however, is to provide a justification for further genocidal violence.
The Context
Hamas’s attacks against civilians cannot be justified, but they can and must be contextualized. Israel and the West choose to believe that Hamas started the war on October Seventh. They tell us that when Hamas kills civilians it does so simply because it’s evil, and that when Israel kills civilians in greater numbers, and besieges and occupies them, it also does so simply because Hamas is evil.
Read the rest of this entry »Revolutionary Resurgence in Syria
Just a couple of points:
Twelve and a half years on, days after the tenth anniversary of the sarin slaughter in the Ghouta, that is a decade after Syrians lost all reason to hope…
As in the first years of the Syrian Revolution, people of all sects and social backgrounds are coming together to demand freedom and dignity. Over a decade of fierce sectarian counter-revolutionary violence hasn’t changed the basic demands of the Syrian people.
Protests are rising throughout southern Syria, in Daraa and Sweida provinces. As if this were 2011 reborn, there are massive popular demonstrations in regime-controlled territory. They’ve been met by solidarity demonstrations in eastern Syria: in Deir ez-Zor, and in Raqqa in PKK/PYD/SDF territory; as well as in the liberated areas of the north. The chants and lyrics of greeting and solidarity exchanged between the various regions of the country feel like a fresh breeze after the years of engineered sectarian and ethnic breakdown.
Syrians have been disappointed so many times before that it seems foolish to continue hoping. And yet, there are two new elements to the situation today. First, the entire Druze community – centred on Sweida – appears to be rejecting Assad entirely.
Individuals from minority communities have opposed Assad previously, but not a minority community en masse. The Druze of Sweida tolerated Assad so long as his forces kept their distance, and so long as young Druze conscripts served in the province rather than went to fight other Syrians. And the community sheltered defectors and others on the run from Assad’s killers. But it didn’t stage mass protests, nor an armed uprising, even as the Sunnis in neighbouring Deraa province were tortured, shot, and bombed. Assad’s main strategy has been to slaughter, rape, torture and expel Sunnis in particular, and to scare minority groups to sell them the lie that only Assad can protect them from the Sunnis. So mass protests of Druze are particularly difficult for Assad to deal with.
It looks like these protests won’t be stopped without massive violence. But massive violence against a minority sect ruins the pretext of the regime being a ‘protector of minorities’. It emphasises the unity of the Syrian people. Assad can’t survive a meeting with a unified Syrian people. Hence the slogan once again rising: One, One, One, the Syrian People are One.
Second,
Read the rest of this entry »Lesson from Iraq and Syria
Everybody’s asking what lessons can be learned from Iraq twenty years after the invasion and occupation. But more can be learned by looking back further, to 1991.
I’ve just listened to the two episodes on the The Rest is Politics podcast in which Rory Stewart grills Alastair Campbell on the 2003 invasion. It’s a fascinating discussion which I recommend listening to, but there are some glaring omissions. First, there’s lots of talk about British military casualties and the effects on western politics in the years since (and good they mention the Iraq hangover’s role in the west’s criminal inaction in Syria), but not much talk on the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians. Next, and most importantly, there is no mention of the American decision in 1991, after driving Iraqi forces from Kuwait, to not only leave Saddam in office but to give him permission to use helicopter gunships to put down the uprising in the mainly Shia Iraqi south.
That was the time to remove Saddam from power, not as a remotely decided regime change, but in support of a population that was already rising against the tyrant. At that key moment, America (and its allies) decided to NOT protect the Iraqi population. America had soldiers right there in southern Iraq watching as Saddam’s forces massacred civilians and filled mass graves. The reason for this was probably fear that Iran would take advantage – but if this terrified decision makers then into such immoral behaviour, why in 2003 did British and American decision makers not bother even considering how Iran would take advantage of their invasion? Of course the end result of the 2003 invasion was the takeover of Iraqi institutions by Iranian-run militias. This was the key factor in the rise of ISIS and then the consequent war to destroy the so-called ‘caliphate’.
So in 1991, after destroying the Iraqi army and liberating Kuwait, the US chose to allow Saddam to slaughter the southern Shia. Then it imposed ruinous sanctions which destroyed the Iraqi middle class. Sectarianism became much worse as Saddam used loyal Sunni troops to massacre Shia, and as he turned to sectarian rhetoric to shore up his damaged rule. By 2003, when the US and Britain decided to invade for their own reasons, on their own timetable, it wasn’t surprising that the place soon collapsed in civil war.
Read the rest of this entry »Palestinian Assadists
There’s nothing more ridiculous than a Palestinian Assadist. For western Assadists, the Arab world is a blank on which to project ideological fantasies. But the Palestinians are part of this world. So what makes some repeat inhuman and absurd Assadist propaganda?
How has the Assad regime under father and son won such loyalty? Is it because in 1967 Hafez al-Assad, then defence minister, ordered the Syrian army to retreat from the Golan before any Israeli soldiers had turned up? So the Golan was handed to Israel, which then annexed it. Or is it because in 1973 Hafez al-Assad, now in absolute control, lost another war (not surprising given his endless purges and rabid sectarianization of the army) but spun the defeat as a historic victory and proof of his nationalist genius? Perhaps it’s because early in the Lebanese civil war, the Assad regime, which had loudly proclaimed its support for the Palestinian/Muslim/leftist alliance, intervened, but on the side of the pro-Israel Maronite Falangists to defeat the Palestinian/Muslim/Leftist alliance? Or could it be because throughout the 1980s the Assad regime slaughtered tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in camps in Lebanon, most notably at Tel Za’atar? Perhaps it’s because the regime under Bashar utterly destroyed Yarmouk camp, until then Syria’s most important centre of Palestinian culture. Or because the regime tortured and starved so many Palestinians to death during the Syrian Revolution. Or maybe Assadist Palestinians love the regime because its reign has seen all of Syria parceled out to foreign powers – Russia, Iran, the United States, Turkey, the Turkish-Kurdish PKK, as well as the part it had already handed to Israel. Perhaps they believe the destruction of Syria’s cities, the murder of a million Syrians, and the expulsion of millions more, will in the end hasten the liberation of Palestine.
I should say that very many, probably most, Palestinians sympathise with the revolutionary Syrian people and not with the regime (and its allies) killing them. The more working class and more religious the Palestinian, the more this is the case (in my experience). And among liberal middle class activists there are many decent people who have shown solidarity with Syrians. Here’s a great statement by some of them from 2016. But some of the signatories were ostracised by other Palestinians for signing. Amongst the West Bank middle classes, including not a few faux-intellectuals, there’s plenty of Assadism. There’s also, for God’s sake, the statue of Saddam Hussein at Bir Zeit.
Why is it that this kind of Palestinian, the very kind who in previous decades we might have considered as being at the forefront of radical politics in the Arab world, has become enmeshed in such backward and inhumane modes of thought? It might be because the Palestinians haven’t experienced the revolutionary wave of the Arab Spring. This isn’t really their fault. They are stuck with the old nationalist narratives because they are stuck with a foreign occupation. Whereas their neighbours have moved on to postcolonial struggles. The foreign occupations have gone (or had gone, before Assad brought them back), so the struggle now is against those gangsters who seized control of the weakened countries the colonialists left behind.
Read the rest of this entry »‘It can’t get any worse.’ And then the earthquake…
(A lightly edited version of this piece was published by Dawn Mena. At the bottom of this page there is information on who to donate to.)
Syrians wanted to be known for their contributions to civilization, as they were in ancient times. Syria is part of the Fertile Crescent where agriculture began, where the first cities were built, where the first states developed. The first alphabet (Ugaritic) was thought up in Syria. The country produced Roman emperors and, under the Umayyad dynasty, became the first centre of a new ‘Islamic world’. When Syrians achieved independence in the mid 20th Century, they hoped their modern accomplishments would echo the old. As a diverse, cultured, hardworking people who valued education, and who tended to excel in business when abroad, they had good reason to hope this would be the case.
But like so many post-colonial states lacking strong institutions, modern Syria soon fell into a cycle of military coup and counter-coup, ending with the Baathist dictatorship which has tortured and plundered the country and its people since 1963 – and under the Assad family since 1970. In 2011 Syrians rose in revolution against the Assad regime, and would have liked then to be recognized for their revolution’s successes. For years they resisted the most extreme oppression, and even under the bombs managed to build hundreds of democratic local councils. They also managed to avoid falling into sectarian civil war, despite the provocations. Sunni and Alawi villages didn’t attack each other. The sectarian massacres had to be organized from on high, first by the regime, then by ISIS, the regime’s dark protégé.
But the Assad regime was rescued by Russian and Iranian imperialists, and by the West’s appeasement of these imperialists. The democratic Syrian Revolution was defeated by force of arms. Worse, it was ‘orphaned’, to use Ziad Majed’s term. Beyond Syria it was ignored or misrepresented, particularly in the West, by the Kremlin’s leftist and rightist useful idiots and a wider public prepared to believe the worst of a mainly Arab and mainly Muslim people.
So now Syrians have become known internationally not for their history, nor their modern success, but for the extremity of their suffering. Their pains under dictatorship were bad enough, culminating in the 1982 Hama massacre when at least 20,000 were murdered, but multiplied after 2011 when the full force of local, regional and international counter-revolution was deployed against them.
Read the rest of this entry »British Political Breakdown: An Explanation
An explanation for why British politics is in such a mess:
In 2016 Prime Minister David Cameron gave the right wing of the Tory Party what it wanted – a referendum on British membership of the EU. He expected the result to be an overwhelming vote to stay in the EU, because leaving was clearly such a bad idea. Tragically, however, this coincided with Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the opposition Labour Party. Corbyn – a fossilised teenager from the early 70s, a propagandist for Assad and Putin, and a conspiracy theorist – had opposed EU membership for decades. This meant that the Labour leadership failed to oppose Brexit, and that therefore no substantive criticism of this far right idea was made from the left. It also coincided with years of anti-migration rhetoric from all major English parties and from almost all media. Therefore 52% of people voted to leave the EU.
From that point on, Britain became ungovernable. This is because people had been promised things which were impossible – for instance, that immigration would be dramatically reduced while the economy would continue to grow. Or that British trade would increase while barriers were put up to trade with Britain’s neighbours and closest partners.
Read the rest of this entry »A Key to All Conspiracies
I’ve written a long essay for the Critical Muslim’s Ignorance issue on conspiracy theories. (Buy it from Amazon, or direct from the publisher, Hurst.) The essay covers myths about polio vaccines in Pakistan, and anti-semitic conspiracy theories in Arab countries, as well as Great Replacement Theory, ‘psy-ops’ and ‘crisis actors’, the Brexit myth, the reductive simplicities of ‘anti-imperialism’, and conspiracy theories as our age’s latest, most debased substitute for classical religion.
The extract below is perhaps the part which is most immediately relevant to our news cycle:
Ukraine, Syria, Russia and ‘anti-imperialism’
My good friend Mira Krampera interviewed me at length in Czech on Russian imperialism in Syria and Ukraine, and western and global responses to the crisis. Here’s the interview in Czech. And here is an English translation. And now… here it is in Polish. And now in English in Antidote Zine.
Liberty
I’ve contributed a short story to the latest issue of Critical Muslim, whose theme is Liberty. My copy has just arrived, and it looks very good – there’s Mustafa Akyol’s essay ‘Islam and Freedom’; Vinay Lal’s ‘A Very Short History of Liberty’; an essay on E.M. Forster’s politics; and plenty more. I’m glad to see that Ukraine is prominent. Russia’s invasion, and leftist and rightist responses to the invasion, is the subject of Naomi Foyle’s essay ‘Liberty, Hypocrisy, Neutrality,’ and there’s some great Ukrainian poetry, from Ihor Pavlyuk and Olexander Korotko. You can buy the issue from the publishers, Hurst, here, or from Amazon, etc.
You can also read my story in full on the CM website here.
Three Political Principles
Marine Le Pen leads France’s rebranded National Front (now it’s called ‘National Rally’), a far right-populist party rooted in fascist ideology. Here is her line on Ukraine: An embargo on Russian fuel would hurt French consumers. Sending weapons to Ukraine would lead to escalation. We need a rapprochement between Russia and the West.
Jeremy Corbyn is the leftist ex-leader of Britain’s Labour Party. He led Labour to its worst defeat since the 1930s and is no longer a Labour MP, but still leads the Stop the War Coalition and represents the perspective of quite a few British leftists. Here is his line on Ukraine: Sanctions on Russia won’t help. We shouldn’t arm Ukraine because it will lead to a long proxy war. We need a new security arrangement between Russia and the West.
Meanwhile, here is the latest directive from Noam Chomsky, the font of the ideology that calls itself ‘anti-imperialism’: Surrender to imperialism. It’s like a hurricane. It’s stupid to resist.
It’s problematic that political positions presented as opposites are so often identical (the hard left and the hard right meet on many other issues, from Syria to membership of the EU). It’s worse than deceptive that supposed anti-imperialists are actually pro-imperialist. This kind of politics robs language of its meaning as efficiently as Kremlin propaganda. People are deeply confused as a result. Young people with progressive urges end up following deeply reactionary leaders or advocating deeply reactionary programmes.
Archaic terms like ‘left’, ‘right’, ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ usually no longer illuminate. The problem is made much worse by the shallow self-advertisement encouraged by social media and by a postmodernity which favours signs over reality. So much of our politics, from Tariq Ali to Jacob Rees-Mogg, is a form of roleplaying, a recycling of old images.
It’s way past time to ditch the archaic labels and to start again from basic principles. I’ve quickly drawn up three principles which fit my politics. I would advise everyone else to think about their own principles and then, rather than practising loyalty to a leader, party or label, to work out who else you can work with, and in which contexts.
Here are my principles:
Read the rest of this entry »The Left’s Syrian Failure
I’ve found a video of me criticising the left’s failure to understand Syria. The crude binarism, the ignorance, the conspiracy theories, the war-on-terror rhetoric, the racism. The talk is from Oslo in late 2016, but I think it’s still very relevant today. Since 2016 the crisis has intensified and spread. Cities are burning in central Europe, climate change is galloping, and we’re still playacting oppositional politics. Here it is:
This Body, A History
There’s an essay of mine in Critical Muslim’s 41st issue. The issue is called Bodies, and my essay is called This Body: A History. It contains an out of body experience, migraines, semen, the Gulf consumerist lifestyle, and the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. Amongst other things. You can buy the issue from the publisher, Hurst, or from Amazon, etc…
As a taster, here are the first four paragraphs:
This may be my very first memory. I’m standing in a square space between four doors – one in front of me, one behind, and one to either side. One by one I close the doors. The shade increases as I go, until, closing the last door, I am enveloped in utter darkness. It’s comfortable and warm. Then I open the doors, one by one, until I’m so bathed in light, so surrounded by space, that I can’t see where my limits end.
I feel this action was often repeated, so for a long time I was sure the memory was a genuine recollection of a game I used to play, but then I interrogated the details. For a start, I remember the door handles being at the level of my waist, where door handles are today, but given my tiny stature at the age of three or four, the handles should have been much higher up. Next, and crucially, there was no space in the house we lived in then that fitted my remembered position between four doors. I’ve checked with my mother, and anyway, what kind of architect would design a room the size of a stand-up coffin?
Read the rest of this entry »Irrationality
Over the last two weeks very many people have asked, is Putin rational? Worse, many have argued that Putin used to be a pragmatist, a master strategist, but that he’s suddenly gone mad.
In 1999 Putin was a little known prime minister aiming to become president. Then a series of bomb attacks destroyed residential blocks in Russian cities, killing hundreds. Many insiders blamed Putin and the FSB intelligence services for the attacks. One such insider was the defected FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko, who Putin’s men consequently murdered in London (in 2006). The FSB obstructed all attempts to investigate, so its guilt has never been proved. Observers must make up their own minds. There are many good sources of information on the topic. I first came across it in Masha Gessen’s excellent book “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.”
What happened next is not controversial. Putin blamed the blasts on Chechen terrorists, and on that pretext reinvaded Chechnya. The Chechen capital Grozny was leveled and tens of thousands of civilians were killed.
Was this behavior rational? Well, it worked. It made Putin very popular in Russia, easing his succession to the presidency. It established his reputation as a patriotic strong man. It quelled Chechen independence.
Read the rest of this entry »
Qunfuz 