The Morning They Came for Us Read online

  THE MORNING

  THEY CAME FOR US

  THE MORNING

  THEY CAME FOR US

  Dispatches from Syria

  Janine di Giovanni

  In memory of my beloved brother, Joseph, who died suddenly on 11 August 2015

  ‘Only the dead know the end of war.’

  Plato

  ‘In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people . . . not to be on the side of the executioners.’

  Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States

  ‘Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind.’

  Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

  Contents

  Maps

  Introduction

  1Damascus – Thursday 28 June 2012

  2Latakia – Thursday 14 June 2012

  3Ma’loula and Damascus – June–November 2012

  4Homs – Thursday 8 March 2012

  5Darayya – Saturday 25 August 2012

  6Zabadani – Saturday 8 September 2012

  7Homs, Bab al-Sebaa Street – Sunday 14 October 2012

  8Aleppo – Sunday 16 December 2012

  Epilogue – March 2015

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Chronology

  Index

  By the Same Author

  Also by Janine di Giovanni

  Ghosts by Daylight

  Madness Visible

  The Place at the End of the World

  Introduction

  It was the winter of 2011, and I was in Belgrade. The war that had destroyed Yugoslavia had been over for many years, but I was working on a project tracing war criminals. It was an intractable task, but the potent emotion I felt towards the Balkan wars and their aftermath was not rational.

  It was a terrible fever – not unlike malaria, recurring in your bloodstream for ever once you got it – that had gripped me since I had reported from Bosnia in the early 1990s. The men who had caused such evil and such harm, who had burnt villages and bombed schools and hospitals, who had mutilated children and raped women en masse, were still living in villages, going fishing at weekends and having picnics with their grandchildren. It made me feel physically ill thinking about them living unreservedly while their victims were dead; and I would trail the events that led to the downfall of that sorrowful country. In Sarajevo one year, I spent days, which turned into weeks, with the man who ran the morgue during the war. He had not only arranged the bodies and prepared them for burial but he also diligently kept notebooks with every name, every detail of their time and their cause of death (bullets, shrapnel, explosion). He called it The Book of the Dead. One morning, he arrived at the morgue and found his only son, a young front-line soldier, laid out on the slab.

  He survived and grew old, and when I found him two decades after the war ended, we went through the books carefully. But his partner at the morgue, a less robust man, had killed himself years before.

  I wanted my fever to break, but it never did. Throughout the new millennium, criminals from the Balkan wars, rapists and murderers, went unpunished. I talked to women who had been kept in camps and violated sometimes a dozen times a day; women who were forced to carry their rapists’ children. Yet post-war, owing to the division of the country, and the fact that no one really knew who their neighbours were any more, these women had to face their rapists daily, passing them in the local shops or on the street, at the schools where they took their children. It was the victims, not the perpetrators, who dropped their eyes in shame when they passed one another.

  But some of them met their fate. Radovan Karadzic, the psychiatrist, football fanatic, poet and leader of the Bosnian Serbs, who led the puppet regime for Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Serbia, had been caught while riding on a bus in 2008. He had been in disguise, and had been in hiding since the war ended in 1995, living under a false name and posing as a New Age healer. Karadzic is, at this time of writing, being tried for alleged war crimes but no verdict has been reached.

  Slobodan Milosevic, the leader of Serbia throughout these wars, had been carted off to The Hague in his bedroom slippers by helicopter in 2001. The day it happened I was also in Belgrade, but I drove all night to get to Sarajevo, the city he had hated and almost destroyed, to witness the reaction of the people. I expected to find jubilation that Milosevic was getting his just deserts, but instead I found weariness. My friends – former soldiers, lawyers, students, doctors, mothers, teachers – were too tired to celebrate, to think that this meant something in terms of retribution. Everyone just wanted to forget about the war that had devoured them alive.

  I felt the greatest revenge was that the man who had caused such pain to his own people would sit in a jail cell in The Hague for the rest of his life, but Milosevic did not, in fact, face justice. He was found dead in his cell in 2006, under mysterious circumstances. Some said suicide; some said his devoted followers had slipped him a pill which made his heart quicken and burst; some say he died of heartbreak. The fact was, this wicked man had died before justice had been served.

  Still at large on that winter afternoon in January 2011, while I sat in a freezing café in New Belgrade talking to men who had once fought alongside him, was Ratko Mladic, the general who had led his men on a rampage and who had headed the assault on Srebrenica. He was sleeping soundly in some village in Serbia, protected by his followers, while the families of the 8,000 men and boys killed in Srebrenica had to live with their ghosts, their memories of their loved ones fading more and more into the distance every day. At the moment, he stands accused of war crimes – no verdict has been reached as the trial has not yet concluded.

  I was not a criminal investigator, and I knew that I would not be the one to march up to Mladic and put the handcuffs on him before he was arrested, but in some ways, I had much more freedom than police. I could sit in cafés where Mladic’s followers gathered to drink their morning tea, and ask where he had last been seen. I could sit by the grave of his daughter, who had tragically killed herself during the war, and ask the woman who kept the graves when she had last seen him; what his mood was; how he appeared physically. I could try to put myself in his mindset. In building up a portrait of the tormented Mladic, I wanted also to make him immortal: as immortal as those it is claimed he had murdered (though he denies murder).

  In short, I wanted people never to forget.

  While I was in the middle of compiling notes of interviews with his old school friends, his soldiers, his cadres and his loyalists, the Arab Spring began – first the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, then Egypt. I was watching Tahrir Square in full meltdown on television, flicking from station to station, the images of the crowds growing larger and larger, and waiting out the countdown for the end of the reign of Hosni Mubarak. I had started my working life in the Middle East as a young postgraduate student two decades earlier, and it had drawn me in, by the heart and the guts, as much as Bosnia had.

  I finished my work and by the time Mladic was caught, in May 2011, I was in Tunisia, then Egypt, Libya, Iraq, and finally Syria. It seemed I could transfer my obsession from the Balkans to Syria, which was the last in the chain, in the string of pearls of the revolutions. Syria began as a peaceful one, but, as I write this four years in, the revolution has since spiralled into a gruesome, a brutal, a seemingly forever war.

  As I roamed across the country, moving from one side to the other, sometimes legally (with a Syrian regime visa stamped in my passport
) and sometimes illegally (crossing various borders to reach rebel sides of Syria), I tried not to draw comparisons with Bosnia. But it was difficult not to do so. There were the same floods of refugees, the same burnt-out villages, and the same women driven out in terror, because paramilitaries were on the march and they feared being raped. After all the lessons we had learnt from the brutality of the wars in the 1990s – Rwanda, Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Chechnya – we were allowing it to happen again.

  A friend, LR, a diplomat who had shared with me many experiences of post-war Bosnia and the lessons that had not been learnt, who told me once not to take a job in a certain part of the world, ‘because you will be angry all the time and it is an anger that you will never be able to reconcile’, warned me not to start working in Syria. He said it would engulf me as Bosnia had done, and he suggested gently that this was probably not a good thing emotionally.

  Even so, I went.

  1

  Damascus – Thursday 28 June 2012

  On an early morning in May 2012, one year into the Syrian revolution, I made my first trip to Damascus. It was a suffocating, early summer day with a hazy, opaque light. I arrived from Beirut in a local taxi, which I had hired for slightly less than 100 dollars, paid in cash. The driver picked me up on the road to Damascus and made a joke about St Paul’s Damascene conversion, as he loaded my bags into the boot of the car. Then we drove into another country, leaving behind Beirut with its modern beach clubs and crowded Thursday hairdressers and balmy restaurants and noisy clubs, and drove to another land, one that was teetering on the edge of war.

  In the New Testament, it says that St Paul was on this same road sometime in the first century AD, when an event occurred. I am not sure, and neither are historians or religious fanatics, whether he heard a voice or was given a sign from God, or whether he just had a sharp and painful understanding that his life was not on the right track. At any rate, a mystic conversion occurred. Paul ceased persecuting the early Christians and instead became a loyal follower of Jesus. His life changed for ever.

  It does not take long to get to Syria from Lebanon, which gives an idea of how brutally the land was torn up and fashioned into artificial countries after the First World War, once the Ottoman Empire had collapsed. The modern Syrian state was established as a French mandate, after many false promises, lies and deceptions of the Arabs by the French and British. It left the Syrians (particularly the Alawites, who had felt most oppressed by French rule) with a wilful desire for self-determination. Syria finally gained independence in April 1946, as a parliamentary republic. What followed next was a series of coups, until the Arab Republic of Syria was established in 1963 in a Ba’athist coup d’état planned and led by several men, including Hafez Assad, father of the current president, Bashar.

  Looking at that timeline of betrayal and violence, the groundwork had already been laid for the tragedy that would evolve decades after those maps had been redrawn by colonial interlocutors. It seemed forcefully inevitable.

  The first thing I saw once I crossed the border into the Syrian hinterland was an enormous colour portrait of Bashar al-Assad, his already vivid eyes tinted blue to make their colour even more intense. The second thing I noticed was a Dunkin’ Donuts, which seemed odd, even in a sophisticated country like Syria. It was an awkward juxtaposition, so blatant a symbol of Western commercialism – not a small café serving coffee but a sugar-infested paradise – on a highway leading to Damascus.

  As it turned out, the Dunkin’ Donuts was not what I suspected. Although it looked like the solidly American version, down to the branded signs and decoration, it only sold toasted cheese sandwiches. I bought one, and was watched all the while as three mustachioed men smoking cigarettes – obviously Mukhabarat, secret police – stood around the bar, while one of them toasted it. My driver was waiting, twitchy and nervous, and hustled me out once the sandwich had been served.

  The atmosphere in Damascus was equally paranoid, something like the old days in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. There was an unspoken quality, a silence despite the blaring horns of those caught in traffic. People whispered when out in public. When a waiter arrived at a table, the people at that table stopped talking. The Mukhabarat could easily have been the same men who had followed me in Iraq a decade before – those same cheap leather jackets, the same badly trimmed, downward-turned moustaches. Many of the Ba’athists I knew from Saddam’s portfolio had, in fact, run to another country of Ba’athists after he was killed – to Syria.

  I had come to Syria because I wanted to see a country before it tumbled down the rabbit-hole of war. During that first trip, in May 2012, Syria was just on the brink. You could be exacting about definitions and call it an armed conflict between two factions (later three, then four, then more), but I had seen war start like this before, and it was descending on Syria with stunning velocity. The world stood by watching.

  I had a visa, therefore I was there legally, but anyway, I felt uneasy: I was watched, observed and followed. I checked into a hotel, the Dama Rose, where the United Nations monitors were also staying: morose men who were no longer allowed to operate because they had been attacked too often. They sat drinking coffee after coffee and making jokes about the bar downstairs, which was usually frequented by lithe young Russian girls whom they called ‘Natashas’. In a few weeks’ time, even the Natashas would flee, even though Putin being Assad’s ally had made it easy for them to get visas to enter the country.

  One Thursday – the day that is the start of the Muslim weekend – I returned to the hotel after a day of talking to people who were uncertain whether or not their country would exist in a year or two. They were Christians, but liberal. They did not support the government’s crushing of peaceful rebellions, but nor did they support an armed resistance. At that point, I was trying to describe the various supporters and detractors of Assad. There were rebels who were fighting him; there were activists who were launching a digital war, using Facebook, YouTube and Twitter as ammunition; and then there were those who had protested in places like Homs in the beginning but had dropped out altogether when some of their fellow activists took up arms.

  In a café in Paris, on a bitterly cold day earlier that year, I had met with Fadwa Suleiman, a graceful Alawite actress who, in the very beginning of the revolution, led the protests and became something of a celebrity (before that she had starred in Syrian soaps). Because she was an Alawite, the same ethnic group as Assad, and a protester calling for freedom from the regime, she was instantly branded as the face of the revolution. But she said things had changed. She was saddened to see that ‘the revolution is not going in the right direction, that it is becoming armed, that the opposition which wanted to resist peacefully is playing the game of the regime, and that the country is heading for sectarian war.’ ‘I didn’t want to leave Syria,’ she added, ‘but I didn’t have the choice. I was being threatened and I was becoming a threat for the activists who were helping me.’

  Then there were what I called ‘the Believers’, Assad’s followers, some of them as devoted to him as St Paul had been to Jesus, but others who were simply concerned that, as a minority of a minority – Alawites are an offshoot of the Shia branch of Islam – they would disappear if the radical Sunnis came to power.

  There was a sub-faction of the Believers who only wanted to save their own skin: they did not want to get hauled away to jail by Assad. They privately did not approve of the regime’s torture cells and bombing raids on Aleppo, but they found the news hard to believe, and, above all, they did not want the radical Islamists in power.

  Then there was another category: those who believed in nothing other than staying alive, putting a meal on the table, stepping across a street without getting sprayed with shrapnel, or travelling in a car without getting stuck in traffic next to a car bomber.

  Sometimes the categories shifted. The longer I stayed, the wider became the range of activists I would come across. I knew some who became Believers after ISIS – the Islam
ic State of Iraq and Syria, sometimes called ISIL, sometimes called Daesh in Arabic – came to power, simply because they did not want to live under that kind of Islam: one where women doctors were beheaded, where children were taught to hate anyone who was not like them, where only the most literal, most radical form of Islam was accepted. There were also rebels who shifted sides, moving from being supporters of the Free Syrian Army to part of Jabhat al-Nusra (the al-Qaeda faction in Syria), and then making the leap to ISIS.

  Equally, many Believers were also losing faith. The Foreign Ministry spokesman that spring and summer was Jihad Makdissi, a Christian with a Muslim name and a degree from the Sorbonne in Paris. In his office at the Ministry, Jihad explained how his country was a ‘melting pot’ of ethnicity: Greek Orthodox, Christians, Sunni Kurds, Shias, Alawites and Jews. He was rational, intelligent and thoughtful, and it was obvious why he was put in that position – to give a gentler face to the regime.

  But Jihad did not stay much longer. One year after my first visit to Syria, I would open the paper and see that Makdissi had defected with his wife and children to the Gulf, making him for ever persona non grata – at least under the Assad regime. Some time after that, I met him for lunch in a businessmen’s café in Geneva, a few days before the failed Geneva II talks. Makdissi, who was leaning towards a political career, but was not entirely clear about what his platform would be, told me about his final days in Syria: ‘I realized that things I had accepted before, I would no longer be able to accept.’

  Suleiman, the actress, also fled from Homs to Damascus, thence to Jordan, and finally to France. She said it was in Homs that she saw Sunnis who had initially carried weapons only to defend themselves begin to use these arms to attack regime forces. ‘It was then that I understood,’ she said, acknowledging that what she had thought would be a peaceful uprising was turning into war. She blamed, above all, not the Syrians themselves, but the ‘other countries’ (Saudi, Qatar, Kuwait) that were ‘arming the Syrian streets. . . Those people are willing to do anything to take power in the same way that Bashar al-Assad is ready to do anything to stay in power.’