The morning before the return flight from Paris, al-Haj Saleh received a positive corona test result. He was left alone in a friend's apartment. And got very sick. It was difficult for him to breathe, he was in unimaginable pain, but he didn't call for help, just lay there. Three days long. Until the friend worried that al-Haj Saleh wouldn't answer the phone. In the intensive care unit, the oxygen level in the blood was only 86 percent. It was very close, so says al-Haj Saleh. The doctor asked: How did you endure it? Why are you only coming now?
A few weeks later, in June, he says softly, but firmly, in English: "I endured the pain in Paris because I longed deeply to punish myself."
In the face of death he realized again that he was unable to convince himself that it was only a mistake from today's perspective to leave Samira behind in Douma near Damascus, eight years ago. About the fact that they had no choice and couldn't know. At that time, Al-Haj Saleh wanted to go north, to his family in Raqqa, the city he came from, just captured by the rebels, and help build something there. Artists gathered, a new newspaper was published. But the only way out of Douma, controlled by the radical Salafist militia Jaish al-Islam and besieged by government troops, a good 400 kilometres in total, many on foot, would - everyone said - too dangerous for his wife, the human rights activist Samira Khalil. In addition, she did important work for the Violations Documentation Center in Syria (VDC) in Douma, with which she later documented the attack on the Eastern Ghouta, with the nerve gas sarin by the Syrian Air Force in August 2013, in which, according to US data, 1,400 people are said to have died. But Khalil also documented the attacks by opposition members. She would follow al-Haj as soon as it was safer.
Yassin al-Haj Saleh arrived in Raqqa after 19 days, but in the meantime his two brothers who lived there had been abducted by ISIS. Al-Haj Saleh went into hiding with his sister-in-law and her young son. After two months he managed to flee to Turkey, to Istanbul. He and Samira discussed on Skype how their departure would also be possible, the situation changed every hour. The conversations grew shakier. There was hardly any electricity left in the Duma. His great love only appeared blurred on the screen, as if they were getting further and further apart.
On December 9, 2013, Samira Khalil, who despite threats still did not cover her hair when she took to the streets, was found together with prominent activist Razan Zaitouneh and her colleagues Nazem Hamadi and Wa'el Hamada by armed men from Jaish al -Islam kidnapped from the office of their NGO. Since then she has disappeared without a trace. And the author Yassin al-Haj Saleh, whom some call "Syria's voice of conscience" and others the "doctor of the revolution", feels, besides the grief, this extreme guilt for which he believes he has to atone - which is another injustice in its history, rich in injustices.
Yassin al-Haj Saleh was born in 1961 in a village near Raqqa, not far from the border with Turkey, the fourth of nine children, the mother being everything. In the village, he says, everyone was related to one another. They had sheep, chickens, dogs, a donkey - and one day even a school, thanks to the now ruling Arab socialist Ba'ath party. Al-Haj Saleh was an even better student than his eldest brother. When he was eleven years old, he moved with him, just 16, and the second oldest, 14, to the city, Raqqa had hundreds of thousands of residents, in a small room that his father rented so that they could all go to secondary school.
Al-Haj Saleh describes this event as trauma, he was still a child and for the first time and forever without his mother. He started reading a lot of books. The Metamorphosis of Kafka became the most important thing for him. Not only did he himself wake up every morning feeling different from the boy he had just been, the country was also changing: in 1970 Hafiz al-Assad, the general secretary of the Ba'ath party, from the minority Alawite community, became Prime Minister and, with the support of the military and the secret service, began to shape Syria into a left-wing nationalist dictatorship that was oriented towards the Soviet Union. In 1971 al-Assad became president, which he remained until his death in 2000, followed by his second eldest son: Bashar al-Assad.
Yassin al-Haj Saleh no longer knows when he became political. He wonders today if he was political at all before becoming a political prisoner. In any case, when he went to Aleppo to study medicine, like the eldest brother, he joined one of the then two communist parties in Syria. Those who were critical of Moscow. The goals: democracy, real socialism, unity of the Arab states. Above all, he says, Marxism made him feel that he was one of the good guys and that there was a future for his country beyond the ubiquitous propaganda of the al-Assad family. At the meetings of his party group, Muslims came together with secularists, Sunnis with Shiites. On one of these evenings, on the 7th December 1980 at one o'clock in the morning, what Yassin al-Haj Saleh calls "the arrest" happened, the police took him and some comrades away. But it was more of a kidnapping: Al-Haj Saleh was imprisoned for 16 years and 14 days from then on. He was 19 when he got to jail and 35 when he left in 1996. The charge: membership in a prohibited association. Yassin al-Haj Saleh was only on trial after twelve years, and he never saw a lawyer. After him, his brothers were also imprisoned for five and six years. Their mother, sick with grief, died while the sons were locked away.
The worst, says al-Haj Saleh, was not the humiliation, the beatings, the insults. It's time. She was the enemy. The torture. You just stopped your life. After a year and a half, at least books were allowed. He learned English. Noam Chomsky. Hannah Arendt. Anna Seghers. After eight years, the prisoners went on hunger strike to get pens. He wrote letters and small notes, but when you are inside, he says, you can't look at it yet. In time, says al-Haj Saleh, time became his friend. He felt that he was developing, even though he was not moving. An inner journey as he only knew it from the Koran, which had always remained alien to him. "It was an emancipation from all the circumstances that surrounded me," he says. "I became free from the challenges of freedom out there." In 1992, in court, he was offered a deal: If he cooperated with the régime, he would be set free. "Freedom only existed at the expense of dignity," says al-Haj Saleh. So he stayed trapped and yet free, as he found out. He was transferred to Tadmur prison in the desert near Palmyra, notorious for torture and murder. All others who were arrested with him in 1980 accepted the régime's offer, he learned. Al-Haj Saleh was among 300 prisoners who were crammed into 90-square-meter cells in Tadmur.
Yassin al-Haj Saleh completed his medical degree in Aleppo, although he knew that he never wanted to be a doctor. He dissected other people's bodies in the university, but had realized that it was inside himself that he wanted to research. This place, to which he had been able to retreat behind bars, remained his protection even in the overwhelming and abundance of the open world. And writing down his thoughts gave him the security he missed, absurd as it sounds, now that the prison walls were no longer around him. "The prison made me a writer," says al-Haj Saleh. At first he hired himself as a translator, his first assignment: a book by Noam Chomsky. From the year 2000, at almost 40, he published his first texts, in various newspapers and magazines, political analyzes on Syrian society and the Arab states. And yet, says Yassin al-Haj Saleh, he would never have found his place without Samira. They met in 1999 over a meal from former political prisoners. Samira Khalil, an Alevi from Homs, was also imprisoned for membership in a Communist Party from 1987 to 1991. They both knew what they were talking about. Samira, says al-Haj Saleh, also had eight siblings like him. And yet, above all, she was different. So direct. Their laughter filled the streets. Your courage every room. After her release from custody, she ran a publishing house in Damascus. She didn't care that people whispered because she lived alone. Yassin al-Haj Saleh had hoped that he would get to know love, even though he was a man without youth. But he hadn't expected that.
They married on September 5th, 2002, in their favorite restaurant. They found a 35-square-meter apartment in the suburbs of Damascus. The second and short life of Yassin al-Haj Saleh began. A very good one, he says. Of course: he still lived in a prison, now in one called Syria. He never received a passport. But his desk was enough for him to go exploring. Every week he wrote his column for the London newspaper al-Hayat. He knew that he couldn't write everything, and yet he wrote everything, called for reforms, justice and the end of corruption, yes: the free Republic of Syria - but he did that by talking about himself and his everyday life, from the little things the great, out of the cell into the world. There is writing about politics, says al-Haj Saleh, and there is politics about writing. A friend joked that Assad's censors just didn't understand his literary style. And yet they called him in regularly. Al-Haj Saleh sometimes got the feeling that they were only doing this to justify their snooping positions, they had to prove something to their superiors. They always let him go. He was immune, says al-Haj Saleh. How else could they break him?
Soon he was one of the most famous commentators in Syria. He made good money. And more importantly: Samira and he made many friends, especially young ones, from the university, who gathered in their living room to debate. They no longer felt childless. Did you feel free? Maybe. Together they had come further than expected, every new morning with Samira was a revolution.
So it was almost a shock for Yassin al-Haj Saleh when the Arab Spring erupted in late 2010. The mass demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt. The deposition of those in power, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and Husni Mubarak, after a few weeks. Then the first protests in Syrian cities. Al-Haj Saleh wanted to protest, but his friends advised against it. Nobody is that immune. If there was one thing Bashar al-Assad had no use, it was a symbol against him. So al-Haj Saleh stayed at home. At first he believed that the change of power would take as long as pregnancy. The country would be ripe in nine months. But he saw how the army acted against the demonstrators. Heard of the dead. From the Free Syrian Army that formed. And decided he had to get out. He had waited for this all his life. That's what he'd sat for all his life.
For Yassin al-Haj Saleh, going underground meant that he moved into the apartment of a friend who only he and Samira knew about. This is how his third life began. Al-Haj Saleh says that the solidarity during this time was unique. He even wrote about it for the New York Times. There was nothing left to lose. When her niece's husband was arrested and questioned about her, Samira Khalil was also forced to go into hiding. They fled to Duma, where many tried to bring order in the midst of the chaos. These people had been liberated by Islamists. Everyone recognizes the mistake in this sentence, says Yassin al-Haj Saleh.
The frightening normality in which Yassin al-Haj Saleh and Samira Khalil lived in Douma can be traced in the documentary Our Terrible Country, which was released in 2014. The young filmmakers Ziad Homsi and Mohammad Ali Atassi accompanied al-Haj Saleh in 2013 on his excruciatingly long journey to Raqqa, into a supposed future, with a group of intellectuals and deserters. Al-Haj Saleh is worn down from the heat and the pain of separation, and yet he seems fearless and euphoric. What makes Our Terrible Country so depressing is that Ziad Homsi captures the moment of disillusionment with his camera. On the way, Yassin al-Haj Saleh learns of his brother's disappearance. And in Raqqa he comes across a bizarre scene in which street art activists design walls while next to them warriors of God reprimand passers-by with machine guns. Evil slowly seeped through the city, says Yassin al-Haj Saleh. But it didn't take him long to understand that it wasn't just the struggle of the people for the liberation of their country being waged here. But that the country became the scene of completely different fights and the people remained hostages.
Al-Haj Saleh's father died shortly before the war began, which to date has killed more than half a million Syrians and from which around 13 million people have fled. His friends and relatives are scattered over Europe, France, Spain, England. The brothers who escaped ISIS live with their families in the Netherlands and Norway. He's not lonely, he hasn't been lonely since prison. He writes every day. But Yassin al-Haj Saleh is angrier than ever, even if you rarely notice it.
It is not just Germany, but "the so-called West". that ticked off the conflict in Syria as "complicated". And ignore the fact that there are many "complicators" who support the various hostile groups - Russia and the USA, Turkey and Iran, plus Israel. "If something is complicated, you should really take a look," says al-Haj Saleh. “Then you would see two wars: that of a people against its dictator. And then the geopolitical, the occupying powers on the back of this people."
The western world, however, had decided that the greatest danger in Syria came from terrorists and that Bashar al-Assad was, so to speak, the lesser evil, "probably because, viewed from here, a studied mass murderer in a tie appears more bearable than a praying mass murderer with a lint beard." Yassin al-Haj Saleh is not someone who would downplay Islamists; they took his wife away from him. And yet, on a walk, he points out that only about five percent of the dead in the Syrian war can be blamed on ISIS, while the vast majority of deaths can be attributed to the ruler Bashar al-Assad. "We are dealing with a genocidal régime," says al-Haj Saleh. "In Germany I often hear that Syria is a kind of GDR, but no: Syria is more of a brutal Stalinist state."
He would like to ask Noam Chomsky, says al-Haj Saleh, why he is defending Bashar al-Assad. To see an attempt to overthrow Assad instigated by the USA out of dated anti-imperialism in the fight against Assad insults him, says al-Haj Saleh, and all his fellow campaigners who have sacrificed so much.
“But we Syrians are not just victims,” says Yassin al-Haj Saleh, “that's why I don't want us to get used to this status. We have a long history in the struggle for freedom, and it is not over yet. In Germany, it is only becoming increasingly clear to him that many Western societies have not had to fight for their freedom for so long that they are busy fighting over their own identities. That is why there is a lack of empathy for the Syrian cause in this country. "It's not about compassion," says al-Haj Saleh, "but about understanding that Syria is the country that currently best symbolizes human suffering in this world." And maybe Yassin al-Haj Saleh is the human being, who best symbolizes this country.
"Your husband is still the same writer who only has the word as a weapon," says one of the letters to Samira that Yassin al-Haj Saleh has been writing regularly since 2017. In it he tells his wife what has happened in Syria since she disappeared. From big politics. And the dead friends. They are love letters and editorials at the same time.
Does he have Samira in mind when he writes to her? “I always have Samira in front of my eyes. When I think of Syria, I think of Samira. And when I think of Samira, I think of Syria.” She lives, he says, until he knows she is dead. He hardly has any hope left, but he clings to it. He doesn't want to accept that this is his fourth life without her. A friend from Damascus claims to have heard that the militia handed her over to the régime at the time. How cruel is it that a Syrian prison would be the best thing that could have happened to her? The 16 years in prison, says Yassin al-Haj Saleh, are the reason why he is not desperate. The prison vaccinated him against desperation.
Is he happy that he survived the Covid infection, even though he wanted to punish himself for three days, in April, in Paris? Yassin al-Haj Saleh nods. But he smiles his mocking smile at it. He doesn't have to say it. It wouldn't be a punishment if it passed.
His punishment is that he keep going.'
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