Behind Bars - Part 1: Executions Witnessed from the Dormitory Window at Mezzeh Prison

Mezzeh prison, in front of which I was set down, carries a hideous reputation.

The French built it when they occupied our country, to imprison colonialism's own enemies, the free nationalists who resisted it, while serving, at the same time, as a military disciplinary prison.

Every politician who ever left it swore the most solemn of oaths that, should he ever take the seat of power himself, he would tear it down.

Some went so far as to say they would turn it into a national museum instead.

Perhaps the prison's single greatest virtue is its own location, west of the town of Mezzeh, atop one of its own nearby hills, overlooking both the town and Damascus itself, a genuinely healthy spot, then.

Yet its own appearance from outside grips the heart and fills the soul with dread. The very first thing anyone under arrest feels, walking through its gates, is a revulsion mixed with astonishment. Since I was the one who had surrendered myself, by my own choice and after real reflection, I walked in with steady nerves, my own feelings already braced for whatever fate had in store for me.

The officer handed me over to the prison's own director, the way a porter hands over goods he has been tasked with delivering to their own rightful owner, and left, a smile on his own lips, the smile of a man who has faithfully discharged his own duty in full.

I remained in a small, bleak room with two officers, one seated behind an old desk, one that may well have entered the prison in the very days of its own first construction, the other standing bolt upright, his own eyes shooting dark arrows of rancor and hatred.

The seated one asked me my name, my age, and my profession, recording this information in the prison's own register. The other stepped toward me, demanding I remove my necktie and my shoelaces, and hand over whatever money I had on me, then searched my bag, pulling out every book I had brought with me to read in my own idle hours, setting them on the table, and taking my own razor and blades as well, perhaps so that I would not use them to take my own life, or commit some crime within the prison itself.

He did not, however, take the small radio I had hidden among my own clothes. It seems he never noticed it at all.

Once these "routine" procedures were finished, he summoned a non-commissioned officer, and handed me over to him, to be taken to the "wing" where I would be held, an honored guest of Salah al-Bitar's own government.

My escort led me along, using the password to open the iron barriers, each one locked again behind me the moment I passed through, only for the next barrier's own guard to unlock his own in turn, until we finally reached, along one of the corridors, dormitory number three. Its own guard opened it for me, watching me with a pair of hard eyes, and I walked in, and the door closed behind me. He did not, however, shove me forward with his own strong hands.

Then came the surprise. I found myself facing a great number of fellow human beings, sitting on two raised platforms facing one another, separated by a long corridor. The very first familiar faces I saw were Nihad al-Qasim, Thabet al-Mahayni, Munir al-Rayyes, Adnan al-Majarkash, and Shukri Faisal. Everyone in the dormitory gathered around me, welcoming me and asking after the very latest news from outside.

They found me a few centimeters of space on the right-hand platform, to serve as my own "sitting and sleeping room," since the overcrowding this dormitory suffered from far exceeded its own real capacity.

There were, as far as I could tell at first glance, somewhere around seventy men, sitting on worn-out straw mats. For all its own size, the dormitory had but a single toilet, which the "residents" would take turns using. I should note here the "young men's own chivalry," for they knew the older men needed it more urgently than they themselves did, and so honored them by giving it up whenever "pressing necessity" arose, for necessity has its own rules. Small things such as these reveal the very difference between civilization and backwardness.

I once had occasion to visit a central prison in Switzerland, and saw how every prisoner there enjoyed a reasonably spacious, clean cell of his own, sitting at a table on a proper chair, his own eyes free to wander over a beautiful garden and snow-capped mountains, through a window the sun itself would court whenever it shone, spreading health and hope within. There, a human being is treated as a human being. Here, I learned firsthand exactly how a human being is treated among us instead. From this point on, my own writing will be drawn purely "from the inspiration of memory."

For I no longer had pen or paper to record whatever I wished to set down.

Nor would it have been "permissible" in any case to record anything at all, so long as the dormitory and its own occupants remained under the guards' own watchful eyes, and so long as whatever was written, should it fall into the hands of these "impartial judges," would become evidence against its own author. In such fearful times, there was no room left for pleading, "Mother, have mercy on me."

I would like to affirm that the events I record here remain, in every one of my own senses, as vivid before my own eyes as ever, so that even as I write them now, I feel as though I am watching them unfold before me all over again.

But I will write them exactly as I recall them, without attaching them to any particular date, for in prison, we count only the days we have already spent there, forty-five, seventy, and so on. It is likely, then, that I will record certain events out of their own true order, some ahead of others that actually came first. I will number them as I go, and where I can find a fitting title for one, I will give it one.

1. Executions Witnessed from the Window

We learned that the judicial council was made up of Lieutenant Colonel Salah al-Dalati (from Deir ez-Zor) as its own president, and four officer members, Captain Salim Hatoum, Captain Muhammad Rabah al-Tawil, Captain Badr Jumaa, and Captain Khaled Arslan.[1]

Its own president would order Sergeant Suleiman, the deputy prison director, to bring before him whatever men he had written down on a plain sheet of paper. The sergeant would stand at the dormitory's own iron door, paper in hand, and the mere sight of him would make hearts sink. A dreadful hush would fall over the dormitory, and the sergeant's own voice would rise: so-and-so... and so-and-so... and so-and-so... wanted before the court. Those named would rise heavily, preparing to leave.

They would bid their own comrades farewell with kisses, trying to force onto their own lips some artificial smile, like the pale yellow smile of a sun setting on a cold day over the gravestones of a cemetery.

Only a few minutes would pass before the death sentence, "by firing squad," was handed down against them. The guards would lead them to the yard behind the prison's own northern wall, where a number of posts stood upright, and there they would be tied to one of them, their own chests receiving the bullets of a squad well trained in carrying out these ghastly sentences, their own rifles never missing chest or heart.

We were told that, to ease the conscience of these "killer" soldiers, the officers in charge would leave one rifle in the firing squad loaded with no bullet at all, so that each man might convince himself his own rifle was the very one, easing his own conscience and his own feeling that he had not, in fact, killed anyone.

It is a matter of record that the American soldier who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, killing more than a hundred thousand people with it, ended his own life in madness, crushed beneath the weight of his own guilty conscience.

Our own dormitory had a high window overlooking the execution yard. Some of the detainees lifted both myself and Mr. Nihad al-Qasim onto their own shoulders, and we watched, with our own eyes, a number of these organized killings, carried out under the guise of "executing the traitorous criminals."

These were heartbreaking sights, ones I will never forget.

But I will not set down my own feelings about them here, out of respect for basic human decency, morality, and honor, and will instead record, for the record and for history, the names of those the official communiques informed us had been executed that particular day, seven in number:

Captain Mamdouh Badr al-Din Arshid.

Cadet Abdel Rahman Abdo Dahkoul.

Chief Petty Officer Zakaria Ahmad al-Rifai.

Sergeant Anwar Hasan al-Kilo.

Abdullah al-Akhdar.

Ahmad Muhammad Mansour.

Sergeant Abdel Hadi Khalil Sayf.

The food served to the prisoners consisted of a large loaf of dark bread and a plate of white beans, cooked in a tomato broth.

No one could ever eat anything of the bread but its own crust, for its own inner mass was nothing but a lump of dough impossible to swallow.

Prisoners already "seasoned" to prison life would use this very dough to fashion knives and forks for eating, and cups for drinking water, since these "sharp instruments" were themselves forbidden.

As for the white beans, they were nothing but unripe grains, swimming in their own spilled blood. Which is why the pot two soldiers would carry into the dormitory, to distribute among the prisoners, would leave exactly as full as it had arrived, with no one willing to touch a bite of it. Even so, every rule has its own exception.

This same tragedy dragged on for a long time, until things grew even worse still, once the prison administration began mixing diesel fuel into the broth, though there was hardly any need for it, since the food was already inedible as it was.

We found ourselves left with nothing to eat but the crust of the dark bread, which we managed to swallow only with the help of water, or tea, whenever they gave us any.

We would sit on the floor in circles, some of us moving from one circle to another, purely "for entertainment."

The rumor mill, meanwhile, was in constant motion, most of it revolving around who had been arrested, who had managed to escape, who had been placed in which other dormitory, and who stood on tomorrow's own execution list.

In circumstances as harrowing as these, the soul bows before God's own greatness, and the true splendor of faith in whatever God has decreed and ordained reveals itself, and a man finds within himself a calm and a surrender to God's own decree and destiny beyond all description. I bear witness that many of the detainees surrendered to God's own decree with true and sincere faith, some of them knowing full well they would stand tied to the post the very next morning, to receive in their own chests the bullets that would tear them apart, and yet still find, somehow, the "mood" for a little humor.

On this very first day of my own detention, I saw a young officer carrying his own mattress on his head (I do not know where he had gotten hold of it), wandering the dormitory with it, weeping one moment, laughing the next, rambling about shameful matters concerning his own personal life with his wife and his own family.

It became clear to us that he had been subjected to savage torture, one that had robbed him of both his own mind and his own human dignity. He remained nothing more than a ghost, wandering back and forth, devoid of feeling or dignity, his own mattress still on his shoulder. When the lights were switched off, signaling that it was time to sleep, I stretched out on the straw mat, my own elbow beneath my head, a blanket the guards had distributed among us thrown over me. I had no room at all to turn over in my sleep. Beside me lay Mr. Thabet al-Mahayni, a heavyset man, who had thrown himself into the arms of Morpheus, the Greeks' own god of sleep, like some love-struck suitor, without a shred of guilty conscience troubling him at all. What truly tormented me, though, was that his own mouth ended up pressed right against my own ear, and his own unbroken snoring stood between me and any sleep at all, until I was finally "rescued" from this "blessing" by rising for the dawn prayer. But the very same problem would return again come evening.

Even so, from morning to evening, God changes one state into another.

As the French proverb says, how great the distance is between the lip and the cup. And who knows what might happen between morning and evening.

Before we took our own tea and bread, our morning meal, the younger detainees would rush to sweep the dormitory. I wanted to take part in shouldering this same duty myself, but the young men firmly refused to let me touch the broom, the most gracious of them being Mr. Zairi Tayyara, who volunteered to take my own place permanently, for as long as we remained there.

Mr. Zairi was one of the men I came to know during this whole ordeal. I learned from him that he belonged to the Arab Nationalist Movement, the very group led by Hani al-Hindi and Jihad Dahi. He told me a funny story that had once happened to him, over his own name.

He said he had once gone to the airport to receive a foreign delegation, arriving at his own invitation for some commercial deal. When he reached the airport's own entrance, an armed soldier stopped him and asked his own name. He said: Zairi Tayyara [My Plane-Visit]. The soldier snapped at him, saying: visiting planes is forbidden. No matter how hard he tried to convince him that this was simply his own name, and that he had no wish at all to "visit a plane" or "a car," the soldier would not budge.

He remained standing there until the guests and foreigners finally came out, whom he only just managed to recognize as they passed through the airport's own gate.

2. An Awakened Conscience

In this suffocating, grim atmosphere, a small, young officer, dark-skinned, sat down beside me.

He asked me: is it true you're a professor of law?

I answered that I was.

He said: I want to consult you on a matter concerning both myself and others.

I told him: ask, and I pray God guides me to the right answer.

He bowed his own head low, drawing close to me, as though trying to whisper something in my own ear he did not want anyone else to hear.

I leaned my own head toward his, to put his own mind at ease, but happened to glance at the men standing behind him, and saw three officers gesturing to me, fingers pressed to their own lips, signals I understood to mean: be careful, this man cannot be trusted. Even so, I preferred to keep listening to what he had to say, while making sure not to give him whatever he was after, in case he was some planted "informer."

What he told me was that he belonged to a battalion stationed at al-Qutayfah, and that Lieutenant Colonel Abdel Karim al-Jundi had "accused" him of taking part in an operation to seize the battalion on behalf of Jasim Alwan's own group.

He had been arrested along with a number of his own "Nasserist" comrades.

He was subjected to torture he could not bear, so that whenever Abdel Karim al-Jundi asked him whether a certain officer had been with them, if he told the truth and denied that man's involvement, al-Jundi would only intensify his own torture, until he finally said: yes, he was with us. Then he would ask him about another officer's name, and he would say: yes, he took part in the seizure operation too, until the number of officers he had falsely accused reached twenty, and he swore to me, before God, that they were innocent, and that he did not even know many of them personally.

He said: I place both myself and these innocent men as a trust upon your own conscience, and I will do whatever you advise me to do, for I feel a torment of conscience I can no longer bear.

Some of those he had accused under torture were still standing there, gesturing to me with their own fingers on their own lips, warning me not to trust him, and to be careful in what I said.

I judged that the man was doomed regardless, and so decided to advise him to do something that might atone for his own false accusations against innocent men, so that he might meet his own Lord's face pure and clean.

I asked him to repeat what he had told me, fearing the torture might have already taken his own mental faculties from him, and he repeated it, composed and fully aware of what he was saying.

At that, I advised him to write down a confession of what had happened, sign it, and send it to the court before it was too late.

He accepted my own advice, and rose to approach the guard standing behind the iron bars of the door, asking him for paper and a pen, since he intended to make a grave confession.

The guard hurried off to his own superior, and soon returned with the paper and pen. I dictated to him the wording of the confession, and he wrote it down, naming every man he had accused, saying: I, in full possession of my own mental faculties and fully aware of my own responsibility, confess that I accused so-and-so, and so-and-so, and so-and-so (naming them all), while under torture inflicted upon me by Lieutenant Colonel Abdel Karim al-Jundi, and that these accusations were false, since I do not know many of these men at all, nor am I tied to them by any personal relationship whatsoever. I therefore submit this confession to declare the truth, and to clear men I accused unjustly and wrongfully.

He signed the confession and handed it to the guard, who carried it off to his own superiors. My own instinct proved correct, for this officer went on to meet his own Lord, and secured, in doing so, the salvation of the others, or at least some of them.

I recall that among these men were two brothers, both handsome and good-natured. I believe one of them went on to hold a prominent position in the Palestine Liberation Army, one he still holds to this day. I have chosen not to name him here, for fear of becoming the victim of some "historical" error of my own.

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Endnotes:

[1] Lieutenant General Zahreddine does not mention Khaled Arslan's name at all. See p. 471 of his own memoirs. These names were given to me by an officer who had himself stood trial before this very court and was acquitted, since it was proven that he had been taking his own sick child to the hospital at the moment of his own arrest, his own acquittal helped along by his own friendship with two members of the court. Had it not been for this fortunate coincidence, he might well have "met with disaster" himself.