This is just a sickening saga
Syria hails global hero executed as Assad fled
Crowds in Damascus have celebrated the legacy of Mazen al-Hamada, the face of the country’s uprising, whose tortured body was found this week.
Adrian Blomfield
Dec 13, 2024 – 10.40am
Few could bear to look long at his face, with its sunken, sorrowful eyes so full of pain – but when Mazen al-Hamada spoke, you could not help but listen.
He spoke to audiences across the West, in lecture theatres and parliaments, bearing witness to the darkness of the Assad regime in low, urgent tones.
Sometimes, he showed them his wrists, scarred by the chains from which he hung until he lost consciousness. He would speak of the beatings and the rapes he and others suffered, his haunted eyes reddening at the memory.
On Thursday (Friday AEDT), they laid Hamada to rest in central Damascus, the capital coming to a halt as its residents gathered to honour the man who became the embodiment of a nation’s suffering and who now had become as powerful a symbol in death as he was in life.
Hamada was one of the last casualties of the 13-year uprising against Bashar al-Assad, tortured to death by a vindictive regime in its death throes just hours before the advancing rebels flung open the doors of the infamous Sednaya prison where he was held.
Having escaped for Europe in 2014 after his first incarceration, Hamada returned home six years later, fearing his crusade was having little impact, worried about his family’s wellbeing and relieved to have received assurances he would not be detained again.
Instead, he was arrested at Damascus airport immediately after his plane landed and never seen again until, on Tuesday, just two days after Assad’s fall, the city’s new masters discovered his body among 35 corpses wrapped in bloodied sheets at a military hospital in the Harasta district.
Tens of thousands were tortured to death by the Assad regime over the course of the rebellion. Hamada was quite possibly the last of them, killed, so activists hypothesise, to prevent him testifying against Sednaya’s torturers.
Muhammad Jafran’s forensic medical team at Damascus hospital examined all 35 bodies and concluded that only two, Hamada’s and another, had external injuries. The others, all believed to have been inmates at Sednaya, died either of starvation or asphyxia, most likely after suffocating in its overcrowded cells.
But what shocked Jafran was the scale of the injuries to Hamada’s body and that they had clearly been inflicted over several days. It is probable, the doctors concluded, that he died on Friday, less than 48 hours before Assad fled the country.
“He had so many fractures,” Jafran said. “There were injuries to his entire body, with heavy bruising on the femurs and abdomen. We don’t know which was the injury that killed him. We do know he suffered.”
From the morgue at the hospital, through the streets of Damascus to the Hejaz railway station, the crowd carried his coffin, chanting his name, lauding his courage and regretting how poignantly close he had come to rescue.
Yet it was not just Hamada’s picture the crowds held aloft. There were dozens of others, too, each showing the image of another of Assad’s victims who disappeared over his 24-year rule never to be seen again, buried, most likely, in unknown, unmarked graves across Syria.
Fittingly, the man who in life championed the cause of all Syria’s 100,000 or more political prisoners had become the symbol of far more deaths than just his own.
Nor was it just those with missing relatives who joined the procession. So, too, did political prisoners of all generations who had also survived torture, not just under the regime of Bashar al-Assad, but under that of his equally dictatorial father Hafez, who seized power in a coup in 1971 and ruled until his death in 2000.
They came not just to pay tribute to the man who gave voice to Syria’s suffering but to celebrate the fact that, for the first time in so long, there is a genuine atmosphere of freedom in the country.
“One of the biggest changes is that we don’t need to be frightened of each other any more,” said Abdullah Fadel, who was held at Sednaya for nine years in the 1990s and for a further three months in 2016.
“I can put my arm around someone I don’t know on the street and tell them what I really think, knowing that no one is going to do anything to me. I never imagined I would live to see such a thing happening in Syria.”
Arrested for belonging to the Communist Party, Fadel endured repeated torture during the early period of his first spell in custody.
He survived prison, he says, by teaching himself English then translating George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air into Arabic, setting him up for a lifelong career as a translator of novels.
It is experiences such as these, inflicted on so many, that helped stir up such hatred in the Assad regime, and reasons people flocked to join Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Islamist movement that toppled it.
Among those at Hamada’s funeral, there was optimism that HTS would be better than the Assad regime – “it could hardly be worse”, said Fadel’s wife, although that was tempered by others by the fear that it might be.
“We have only walked half way,” said Mahmoud Isa, a 61-year-old former political prisoner. “The other half is to come and it will not be easy because we now need to move beyond the men with guns. Syria wants democracy. If we get dictatorship again, we will rise up again.”
Isa is not the only person expressing reservations.
Across the capital, in the city’s ancient Christian quarter, three 19-year-old women – Jessica, Miriam and Giselle – were in a reflective mood as they sipped coffee in a cafe off Straight Street.
As a minority, they hesitantly admitted, they regarded Assad, a member of another minority, the Alawites, as a protector from extremist Sunni Arab groups, HTS among them.
Yet it was only now that state television, which long parroted the government line, had fallen that they had become aware of the atrocities the Assad regime had perpetrated, they said.
“We lived in the dark,” said Miriam, who did not want to give her surname.
Just as they had underestimated the abuses of the Assad regime, so far, they said, they had exaggerated the dangers of HTS, which once pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda but now insists it is pursuing moderation and tolerance.
Although bars in the Christian quarter remain closed, just in case, she knew of no retribution against Christians, Jessica said, despite their reputation as Assad supporters. That said, she added, these are early days and things could change.
“We are waiting,” she said. “It will take time to build confidence. We are hoping that we will live in a Syria where everyone is genuinely free and everyone can follow their own religion.”
The Telegraph London
Here is the link:
https://www.afr.com/world/middle-east/syria-hails-global-hero-executed-as-assad-fled-20241213-p5ky5o
The more you read about the Assad regime the more one wonders just why he was allowed to rape Syria and Syrians for so long! The US, US, Europe and indeed OZ knew how evil he was but just stood by and watched for 13 long years!
Surely the CIA or MI6 could have found an assassin to sort this horror out. You have to wonder why not?
The West seems rather too prone to high ideals and the toleration of evil I fear.
What do you think? Should our beliefs be followed up by action? There have been all sorts from Idi Amin down who should have been dealt with more swiftly IMVHO but who am I to judge?
Worse still he was a doctor!!!!!
David.
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