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We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled
Wendy Pearlman
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eBook - ePub
We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled
Wendy Pearlman
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About This Book
LONG-LISTED FOR THE CARNEGIE MEDAL
Reminiscent of the work of Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich, an astonishing collection of intimate wartime testimonies and poetic fragments from a cross-section of Syrians whose lives have been transformed by revolution, war, and flight.
Against the backdrop of the wave of demonstrations known as the Arab Spring, in 2011 hundreds of thousands of Syrians took to the streets demanding freedom, democracy and human rights. The government's ferocious response, and the refusal of the demonstrators to back down, sparked a brutal civil war that over the past five years has escalated into the worst humanitarian catastrophe of our times.
Yet despite all the reporting, the video, and the wrenching photography, the stories of ordinary Syrians remain unheard, while the stories told about them have been distorted by broad brush dread and political expediency. This fierce and poignant collection changes that. Based on interviews with hundreds of displaced Syrians conducted over four years across the Middle East and Europe, We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled is a breathtaking mosaic of first-hand testimonials from the frontlines. Some of the testimonies are several pages long, eloquent narratives that could stand alone as short stories; others are only a few sentences, poetic and aphoristic. Together, they cohere into an unforgettable chronicle that is not only a testament to the power of storytelling but to the strength of those who face darkness with hope, courage, and moral conviction.
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Topic
HistoriaSubtopic
Historia de Oriente MedioPart I
Authoritarianism
Fadi, theater set specialist (Hama)
A Syrian citizen is only a number. Dreaming is not allowed.
Hosam, computer programmer (al-Tel)
When you meet somebody coming out of Syria for the first time, you start to hear the same sentences. That everything is okay inside Syria, Syria is a great country, the economy is doing great . . . Itâll take him like six months, up to one year, to become a normal human being, to say what he thinks, what he feels. Then they might start . . . whispering. They wonât speak loudly. That is too scary. After all that time, even outside Syria you feel that someone is listening, someone is recording.
Mohammed, professor (Jawbar)
There are differences in Syrian society, as in any society. Despite those differences, we recognize each other as Syrians. The key problem has been how to build and how to manage a state.
The Syrian state inherited a Syrian army designed by the French, and the French designed it to divide and rule. They appealed to religious minorities to go into the army. Minorities were in an economic situation where they naturally wanted jobs. The French saw that, and at the same time wanted to put them against the Sunni majority, which opposed the French. The result was an army that drew too heavily on minority communities.
The Baath Party came along with an idea of pan-Arabism. This brought Syrians of different backgrounds together, but did not honestly address the problem that Syria is multicultural and multiethnic.
Hafez al-Assad used the Baath Party. He was a military person and didnât really believe in democracy or pluralist politics or all of those liberal ideas that other national figures believed in at that time. He relied on Alawites more than others, even though he later killed a lot of them because they were his rivals. It was pragmatic to use primordial relationships to consolidate power, but it ultimately created even more divisions in Syria.
Assad was a shrewd politician. He managed various players within the Syrian mosaic and patched together a system loyal to him. He allied himself with the traditional urban merchant class and gave them space to make money. At the same time, he kept the underprivileged communities happy with trickle-down state funds, like subsidies for workers and peasants. He allied with traditional Sunni clerics, because he knew that they had control over the religious narrative in society. In the late 1970s, the Muslim Brotherhood had its own vision and used force to try to bring it into effect. Assad used his alliance with clerics to fight the Brotherhood, and some of those clerics, amazingly, stood by him and then his son. There was opposition to him from the left, and he destroyed that, too.
Issam, accountant (rural Aleppo)
In my opinion, there used to be coexistence, but under security pressure and judicial control. It wasnât real coexistence. You couldnât even say to someone, âYouâre Kurdish, or youâre Sunni or Shiite.â It was forbidden; youâd be fined or punished.
We werenât educated about the different people in the country, so there wasnât real integration. Arabs didnât know about Kurdish culture. Arabs and Kurds knew nothing about Turkmens. Weâd hear that there were people called Syriacs and Assyrians, but who are they and how do they live? We didnât know. The Druze? You know that they live in Syria, but what is their culture and what do they want? We were all just groups of strangers. A country of closed communities, held together by force.
Abdul Rahman, engineer (Hama)
There was an attempted military coup against Hafez al-Assad, but it failed and the Muslim Brotherhood escaped to Hama, which was the capital of its movement in Syria. The army invaded the city from many directions. They started with shelling, and then chose neighborhoods in which to start killing people. In one neighborhood they gathered males over thirteen years old and executed them. They left the corpses so people could see them.
The army came to my grandparentsâ neighborhood and took four of my uncles. A few days later, they invaded my parentsâ neighborhood and started kidnapping men in the same way. My father told my mother that he might never come back. But then my dadâs best friend called the commanding officer and told him to halt the executions because all the people theyâd detained were government workers. He said, âThis is a friendly neighborhood, they all work for us.â And it was true: My father was a member of the Baath Party. Two of my uncles who got killed were members of the Baath Party, too.
And thatâs how my father survived. My alcoholic uncle also survived. When the army came to his house, he was naked and kept shouting, âViva Assad, viva Hafez, viva the military!â
My grandmother went crazy after they took her sons. She never believed that they were killed. My father kept asking people and kept searching. He even went to the cemetery, where he saw mountains of shoes. He dug and dug in the hope of finding his brothersâ shoes, just so he could have some evidence that they were killed. He told me that there was blood all over the place and the smell was so bad that he was fainting. But he kept digging, digging, digging. He dug without success.
Aziza, school principal (Hama)
Iâm from Hama, but wasnât there in 1982. I later returned to work as principal of a school. People used to come and talk with me, and each had a story. You canât imagine how they raped the women, how they stole and looted. A relative told me that she saw bodies tied together and tossed into the Orontes River. A friend was a doctor at the hospital where injured regime soldiers were brought for treatment. One died and when they gathered his things they found piles of gold in his pockets. She told me that she took it to the officer and told him that it should be returned to its rightful owners. He swore at her. âReturn the gold to his body. Those are spoils of war.â
They played with peopleâs lives like it was a game. People said that the troops used to enter a neighborhood, gather all the men, line them against the wall, and shoot them. Once, there was a delay in the firing orders. The soldiers asked what to do and the officer told them to pull the menâs pants down. He said, âIf theyâre wearing short underwear then theyâre with us, so let them live. If theyâre wearing long underwear then theyâre terrorists, so kill them.â
It was winter and most of the men were wearing long underwear, and they killed them. One man was left whose underwear was to the knee. It wasnât too long or too short. The soldiers asked what to do. The officer said, âLeave him. Heâll spread the word about what he witnessed here, and that will serve us.â And so the man survived.
Kareem, doctor (Homs)
I was born in 1981, at a time when many people were being arrested or killed. The regime told people that they had no right to ask about their family members in prison. If they asked, they risked getting arrested themselves. So Iâm from a generation in which dozens of my friends didnât know whether their fathers were dead or alive.
Weâre Muslims and our community is conservative. Just like Christians pray in church, we pray at home. But people had to pray in secret. My family said that if someone called for my dad while he was praying, I should say that he couldnât come to the phone because he was in the bathroom. They told me that if the regime knew that someone was praying, it would think that he had Islamist tendencies, and there would be consequences to pay. I was just a child, but I was trained to lie for the safety of my family.
Iliyas, dentist (rural Hama)
Syria had the appearance of being a stable country. But in my opinion, it wasnât real stability. It was a state of terror. Every citizen in Syria was terrified. The regime and authorities were also terrified. The more responsibility anyone had in the state, the more terrified he was. Nobody trusted anyone else. Brother didnât trust brother. Children didnât trust their fathers. âDonât talk, the walls have ears.â If anyone said anything out of the ordinary, others would suspect that he was a government informant just trying to test peopleâs reactions and gather a sense of what was going on.
It is a regime based on command and obedience. If it gives to a citizen, it gives him more than he deserves. And if it punishes a citizen, it punishes him more than he deserves. The more corrupt a person is, the easier it is for the regime to use him as an instrument however it wants. And for that reason the more likely he is to rise through the ranks and obtain a high position.
Every state institution re-created the same kind of power. The president had absolute power in the country. The principal of a school had absolute power in the school. At the same time, the principal is terrified. Of whom? Of the janitors sweeping the floor, because theyâre all government informants.
Fouad, surgeon (Aleppo)
I graduated from medical school in 1982. I had very good grades and wanted to pursue PhD-level studies. The only way to do that was to go abroad. But to go, you needed approval from the security forces.
One day I was in the cafeteria with a group of friends. Someone from the intelligence services approached us and said that he wanted to speak with me. The Baath Party had its own office in every department in the university, and he took me there.
He said, âWeâll try to be nice. We wonât ask you many questions. Just be good with us. If anything happens when youâre abroad, let us know.â I told him that I didnât want to be an informant. Later I got the news: they rejected my application. One of my dreams was broken.
I spent the next four years doing my residency at a hospital in Aleppo. Then, to do general surgery, I was required to pass three exams. I took the written exam. When I came home I saw terror in my fatherâs face. He said that the Political Security Service had come by and asked for me.
I ...