In a xenophobic Arab country, I was ostracized from journalism. Kurds are not allowed to write about any aspects of their Kurdish identity, even those they have not already given up in order to be a citizen in the service of the Baath Party and its leader, the President. I did not give up my Kurdish identity or my opinions in order to become a mouthpiece for an oppressive governmental system. However, the most significant reason for my exclusion from journalism was “my tall tales,” as the investigator from the Department of Investigation intelligence services explained to me.
According to the intelligence service, this expression means “criticism of symbols of power,” for the president, his government, and his party don’t make mistakes, and no one has the right to record observations against them. There are many red lines, and whoever crosses them is subjected to prosecution, arrest, torture, and death, as well as deprived of their rights as citizens. Critics of the government bear the pressure of neglect and deprivation, and of intelligence forces raiding their homes. Some break down and put their minds in the service of the ruling power in order to gain privileges. To these, the doors of the newspapers are opened, as they are owned by the governing regime and run by staff loyal to the regime.
As for free press, it is prohibited. I prefer to tell “tall tales” than to be a slave to an ignorant copy editor who deletes half of my article and orders me to amend the other half so that my position is no longer contained within it. I prefer my perception of my right to freedom of expression – or rather an instinctive tendency towards freedom, because the majority of Syrian society does not know what freedom of expression is. Under the pretext of raising citizens, cultivating revolutionary socialistic nationalism, and protecting the people from hostile liberal trends, the regime subjects us to a process of brainwashing in which citizens are injected with false slogans of the ruling party and are forced to worship the dictator and consider him the savior of the nation.
The situation changed with the emergence of the “net.” It was an electric shock that revived the heart that had stopped beating, resurrecting people to discover new content. For the first time, citizens could communicate with different cultures. The government had taught us that freedom was the refusal to submit to a foreign authority. However, “human freedom” has no definition in the dictatorial dictionary. The regime translated “popular democracy” to mean weak institutions and trade unions affiliated with the ruling party that permit a parasitic, corrupt segment of society to monopolize power. Those who spoke of distributing power, increasing the number of political parties, accepting opposition parties, as well as a constitution approved by the people and a parliament that monitors the performance of the government, represented the remnants of feudalism and bourgeoisie capitalists in the eyes of the government. The regime taught the Syrian people that the socialist system would provide the inevitable solution to the problems of Arab society and a paradise for the poor. We later found that, in the name of socialism, they robbed us of our lands, companies, and banks, listing them as property of the ruling junta. With socialism, the life of the poor was made a hell.
When we realized that capitalism does not represent unadulterated evil, we began to ask about our rights, thus, the Kurdish Spring began early, with sit-ins occurring during the late 1980s. Despite the emergency laws and operations of oppression, the regime failed to prevent the work of the free bloggers who delivered new thought patterns to Syrian society, freeing it from the culture of the Baath Party and putting an end to the age of a centralized monopoly of power and information. We expected that the Internet would facilitate an intellectual coup, and we rebelled against the fierce thought system to correct distorted concepts by submitting studies critical of the authoritarian state and exposing its false ideology. We held the regime responsible for the deteriorating situation and the lack of rights, in order to convince the people that their desperate condition was not a byproduct of facing the imperialist Zionist monster, as the government claims! Rather, the state of affairs is a result of the monopoly of the monsters in control of the national wealth, the same leaders who first stole this wealth from the state and the people, with senior officials complicit in the corruption.
Public opinion responded positively to us because we talked about the concerns of the people in the language of the “citizen journalist” and offered innovative solutions to their problems. We exposed the harmful effects of dictatorship in order to free the minds of the people from the Baath indoctrination, which tied the idea of nationalism to that of loyalty to the ruling authority. In Baath terminology, rebelling against the ruling authority is equivalent to rebelling against the country and the state; the ruling authority and the country were melded into one concept, thus opposing the regime is to oppose sacred institutions. The duties of the citizen toward the government are made explicit, while the rights of the citizen are not mentioned. Our role was to help the people distinguish between the state, the country, and those in power, and to show that it is permissible to rebel against an oppressive state or a corrupt authority. We encouraged our oppressed people to compare our bad situation to those of democratic societies.
Citizens began to ask: Why does one president govern me for thirty years, while in France five different presidents governed during this same period of time? Is there a relationship between the welfare of the French citizen and the changing of presidents? Is there a relationship between my misery and an eternal president? Why do my children drop out of school? Why didn’t the Women’s Union achieve anything for my wife? Why did I graduate from college and remain unemployed? They found that the malady is in dictatorship, which imposes upon us the worst form of society building.
This was the outcome of the efforts of hundreds of bloggers, who introduced young people to the true meaning of human rights, and led to the schism between the youth and the regime. They began to organize protests against the regime. The regime, however, refused to reform, despite the fact that it knew that its fascist policies would only lead to escalation. Building upon the previous experience of committing the genocide in Hama, the government decided to face any emergency with oppression. So it struck the Kurds in the “Slaughter of the Field of Qamishli,” violently breaking up the uprising of March 12, 2004. The regime besieged the Kurdish people, killing dozens of martyrs and employing Stalinist methods, including the assassination of political leaders, the execution of Kurdish soldiers serving in the Syrian army, firing Kurdish workers from their jobs, striking out against the thriving businesses in Kurdish areas such as agriculture and real estate, and depriving Kurds of the right to live. The government sought to encourage Kurds to emigrate, to leave their homeland. They continued to pursue bloggers, throw them into prisons, and obstruct their activities on the Internet.
The ferocity of the crackdown indicated how afraid the government was of the citizen journalists who expose the regime’s acts of tyranny so that the people recognize the lies of the government about the leader of the masses! Working towards a united Arab socialist society, saving Palestine, throwing the Jews into the sea, recovering Andalusia – these are pretenses that the government employs in order to monopolize authority, authority that it originally captured in a military coup! The regime forced the people to acquiesce so that it could govern in the name of revolutionary legitimacy, and after stripping the ruling party of its power, the united Arab socialist society was never achieved, an empire was not established, and globalization was not snatched from the hand of America. Rather, a military and intelligence apparatus was created, and the party’s dictatorship turned the country into a plantation occupied by masters, the president and his family, and slaves. The dignity of humanity was violated, and the ruling gang thought that the people would submit to them forever, flagrantly provoking the citizens by attacking their rights. This gang became an occupying government, hostile to its people, exercising systematic state terrorism against its citizens and committing heinous crimes of genocide. Despite the spread of democratic language and changes in the structure of Syrian society, in which voices demanding change emerged, they did not try to reconcile with the people or give up the philosophy of their power. Instead, they bet on power, knowing that if the people moved against them, the army would be the only way of silencing them.
Returning to the investigator who described me as “one who tells tall tales,” he asked me: “how do you criticize the sovereignty of the country” – intelligence officers, of course, know more than most about how this country is run – “when these high issues are not your specialty?” I answered him: “There are major mistakes [in how this country is run] that will lead to an explosion that will be difficult for the government to control. I fear for my people, [I’m afraid of the possibility] of civil war--” The investigator interrupted me: “You demand freedom and democracy and liberalism and Kurdish rights, you present claims to the western nations and you attack popular democracy, you criticize socialism and you correspond with hostile global institutions; these are crimes punishable by law. You are [involved with] an internet group stirring up confusion and inciting people against the state.” I answered him: “We write about the problems of the people and we demand renewal. If we talked about the plight of the Swiss citizen, we wouldn’t be committing a crime. Our articles address the authority in order to initiate work towards a solution.” He answered: “I advise you to stop these things, the country is in safe hands, and the shortcomings that do exist are the result of a greater conspiracy we are exposed to.” I asked him: “Is it not better to give the people some rights so that they don’t engage in the conspiracy?” He answered: “Whoever lives in this country has a responsibility to be loyal to the leader of the country.”
Indeed, the country is for Mr. President and his family. The hell of my interrogation continued for three months, and that was before the Arab Spring. I was the first one to expect that it would come to Syria; I also expected that the regime would handle it with a holocaust, as it is doing now. We live in an age of horror, as if our country and our Syrian people live in another era, or outside of human society, where the world has abandoned it, under the bombardment of tanks and artillery.
Zagros Osman is a Kurdish Syrian activist writing from within Syria.
According to the intelligence service, this expression means “criticism of symbols of power,” for the president, his government, and his party don’t make mistakes, and no one has the right to record observations against them. There are many red lines, and whoever crosses them is subjected to prosecution, arrest, torture, and death, as well as deprived of their rights as citizens. Critics of the government bear the pressure of neglect and deprivation, and of intelligence forces raiding their homes. Some break down and put their minds in the service of the ruling power in order to gain privileges. To these, the doors of the newspapers are opened, as they are owned by the governing regime and run by staff loyal to the regime.
As for free press, it is prohibited. I prefer to tell “tall tales” than to be a slave to an ignorant copy editor who deletes half of my article and orders me to amend the other half so that my position is no longer contained within it. I prefer my perception of my right to freedom of expression – or rather an instinctive tendency towards freedom, because the majority of Syrian society does not know what freedom of expression is. Under the pretext of raising citizens, cultivating revolutionary socialistic nationalism, and protecting the people from hostile liberal trends, the regime subjects us to a process of brainwashing in which citizens are injected with false slogans of the ruling party and are forced to worship the dictator and consider him the savior of the nation.
The situation changed with the emergence of the “net.” It was an electric shock that revived the heart that had stopped beating, resurrecting people to discover new content. For the first time, citizens could communicate with different cultures. The government had taught us that freedom was the refusal to submit to a foreign authority. However, “human freedom” has no definition in the dictatorial dictionary. The regime translated “popular democracy” to mean weak institutions and trade unions affiliated with the ruling party that permit a parasitic, corrupt segment of society to monopolize power. Those who spoke of distributing power, increasing the number of political parties, accepting opposition parties, as well as a constitution approved by the people and a parliament that monitors the performance of the government, represented the remnants of feudalism and bourgeoisie capitalists in the eyes of the government. The regime taught the Syrian people that the socialist system would provide the inevitable solution to the problems of Arab society and a paradise for the poor. We later found that, in the name of socialism, they robbed us of our lands, companies, and banks, listing them as property of the ruling junta. With socialism, the life of the poor was made a hell.
When we realized that capitalism does not represent unadulterated evil, we began to ask about our rights, thus, the Kurdish Spring began early, with sit-ins occurring during the late 1980s. Despite the emergency laws and operations of oppression, the regime failed to prevent the work of the free bloggers who delivered new thought patterns to Syrian society, freeing it from the culture of the Baath Party and putting an end to the age of a centralized monopoly of power and information. We expected that the Internet would facilitate an intellectual coup, and we rebelled against the fierce thought system to correct distorted concepts by submitting studies critical of the authoritarian state and exposing its false ideology. We held the regime responsible for the deteriorating situation and the lack of rights, in order to convince the people that their desperate condition was not a byproduct of facing the imperialist Zionist monster, as the government claims! Rather, the state of affairs is a result of the monopoly of the monsters in control of the national wealth, the same leaders who first stole this wealth from the state and the people, with senior officials complicit in the corruption.
Public opinion responded positively to us because we talked about the concerns of the people in the language of the “citizen journalist” and offered innovative solutions to their problems. We exposed the harmful effects of dictatorship in order to free the minds of the people from the Baath indoctrination, which tied the idea of nationalism to that of loyalty to the ruling authority. In Baath terminology, rebelling against the ruling authority is equivalent to rebelling against the country and the state; the ruling authority and the country were melded into one concept, thus opposing the regime is to oppose sacred institutions. The duties of the citizen toward the government are made explicit, while the rights of the citizen are not mentioned. Our role was to help the people distinguish between the state, the country, and those in power, and to show that it is permissible to rebel against an oppressive state or a corrupt authority. We encouraged our oppressed people to compare our bad situation to those of democratic societies.
Citizens began to ask: Why does one president govern me for thirty years, while in France five different presidents governed during this same period of time? Is there a relationship between the welfare of the French citizen and the changing of presidents? Is there a relationship between my misery and an eternal president? Why do my children drop out of school? Why didn’t the Women’s Union achieve anything for my wife? Why did I graduate from college and remain unemployed? They found that the malady is in dictatorship, which imposes upon us the worst form of society building.
This was the outcome of the efforts of hundreds of bloggers, who introduced young people to the true meaning of human rights, and led to the schism between the youth and the regime. They began to organize protests against the regime. The regime, however, refused to reform, despite the fact that it knew that its fascist policies would only lead to escalation. Building upon the previous experience of committing the genocide in Hama, the government decided to face any emergency with oppression. So it struck the Kurds in the “Slaughter of the Field of Qamishli,” violently breaking up the uprising of March 12, 2004. The regime besieged the Kurdish people, killing dozens of martyrs and employing Stalinist methods, including the assassination of political leaders, the execution of Kurdish soldiers serving in the Syrian army, firing Kurdish workers from their jobs, striking out against the thriving businesses in Kurdish areas such as agriculture and real estate, and depriving Kurds of the right to live. The government sought to encourage Kurds to emigrate, to leave their homeland. They continued to pursue bloggers, throw them into prisons, and obstruct their activities on the Internet.
The ferocity of the crackdown indicated how afraid the government was of the citizen journalists who expose the regime’s acts of tyranny so that the people recognize the lies of the government about the leader of the masses! Working towards a united Arab socialist society, saving Palestine, throwing the Jews into the sea, recovering Andalusia – these are pretenses that the government employs in order to monopolize authority, authority that it originally captured in a military coup! The regime forced the people to acquiesce so that it could govern in the name of revolutionary legitimacy, and after stripping the ruling party of its power, the united Arab socialist society was never achieved, an empire was not established, and globalization was not snatched from the hand of America. Rather, a military and intelligence apparatus was created, and the party’s dictatorship turned the country into a plantation occupied by masters, the president and his family, and slaves. The dignity of humanity was violated, and the ruling gang thought that the people would submit to them forever, flagrantly provoking the citizens by attacking their rights. This gang became an occupying government, hostile to its people, exercising systematic state terrorism against its citizens and committing heinous crimes of genocide. Despite the spread of democratic language and changes in the structure of Syrian society, in which voices demanding change emerged, they did not try to reconcile with the people or give up the philosophy of their power. Instead, they bet on power, knowing that if the people moved against them, the army would be the only way of silencing them.
Returning to the investigator who described me as “one who tells tall tales,” he asked me: “how do you criticize the sovereignty of the country” – intelligence officers, of course, know more than most about how this country is run – “when these high issues are not your specialty?” I answered him: “There are major mistakes [in how this country is run] that will lead to an explosion that will be difficult for the government to control. I fear for my people, [I’m afraid of the possibility] of civil war--” The investigator interrupted me: “You demand freedom and democracy and liberalism and Kurdish rights, you present claims to the western nations and you attack popular democracy, you criticize socialism and you correspond with hostile global institutions; these are crimes punishable by law. You are [involved with] an internet group stirring up confusion and inciting people against the state.” I answered him: “We write about the problems of the people and we demand renewal. If we talked about the plight of the Swiss citizen, we wouldn’t be committing a crime. Our articles address the authority in order to initiate work towards a solution.” He answered: “I advise you to stop these things, the country is in safe hands, and the shortcomings that do exist are the result of a greater conspiracy we are exposed to.” I asked him: “Is it not better to give the people some rights so that they don’t engage in the conspiracy?” He answered: “Whoever lives in this country has a responsibility to be loyal to the leader of the country.”
Indeed, the country is for Mr. President and his family. The hell of my interrogation continued for three months, and that was before the Arab Spring. I was the first one to expect that it would come to Syria; I also expected that the regime would handle it with a holocaust, as it is doing now. We live in an age of horror, as if our country and our Syrian people live in another era, or outside of human society, where the world has abandoned it, under the bombardment of tanks and artillery.
Zagros Osman is a Kurdish Syrian activist writing from within Syria.
Zagros Osman gives us a very powerful narrative about the police state that exists in Syria under the Ba’ath party dictatorship. It is a tale taken from the playbook of George Orwell’s 1984 and reads as if it could apply to any other dictatorship in the world.
Regrettably, there are few specific references to the particular conditions in Syria and certain observations could use further explanation, for example, the reference to “ruling junta.” Is the “ruling junta” comprised of the Assad clan, the military high command, or the senior echelons of the Ba’ath party? Perhaps this term refers to the Alawite minority, which comprises only 15% of the population, yet is overrepresented in the current regime.
Zagros is similar to many other opposition bloggers and activists who tend to underestimate the sectarian nature of the regime, for example, the obvious feature of the opposition in Syria being predominantly Sunni. Emphasizing it would take nothing away from the courage displayed by the masses of people who go to the streets daily and risk their lives in their struggle against a murderous regime. It is important for outside observers, whether ordinary consumers of the media, academics, or policymakers, to be exposed to such an important dimension of the Syrian uprising. This is essential primarily because it is the truth, but also because it can prepare us for what may (though hopefully will not) unfold when the regime finally crumbles and sectarian hatred rears its head with ferocity in what can be a long, dark night of settling scores.
Zagros belongs to the important Kurdish minority, whose oppression by the
Ba’ath regime was documented through the years by historians like Ismet Cherif Vanly and others, who told horror stories that have not received their due attention until recently. Zagros just scratches the surface, and will hopefully tell us the entire story when he is able to do so.
In the meantime, he joins the ranks of brave bloggers and the likes of Wael Ghonim, who prepared the groundwork for the eruption of cataclysmic events known as the ‘’Arab Spring,’’ and now do their best to document it. The Kurdish minority’s suffering in Syria is a compelling story that we need to hear, read, and learn much more about.
Dr. Josef Olmert is an adjunct professor at the University of South Carolina and former director of Israel’s Government Press Office and advisor to former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.