Behind Bars - Part 5: Imprisoned Alongside Ousted President Nazim al-Qudsi, and a Spy Tortured by a Trained Dog

In the Military Hospital

The sergeant who "ran" the wing walked me to a room at the far end of the corridor, and in this room I met Colonel Adib Qadi Reha, an officer from Hama whose reason for being detained I was never able to learn. From him I learned that Dr. Nazim al-Qudsi and Lieutenant General Abdel Karim Zahreddine were also in this wing, sharing the first room on the right as one entered.

We would go out for our "walk," an hour of pacing on foot each morning and another hour in the afternoon, confined to a corridor no more than sixty meters long. Dr. al-Qudsi and General Zahreddine, though, passed by the window of our room whenever they wanted to go to the bathroom. They would raise their right hands in greeting, and we would answer by raising ours in return.

Each of us would smile at the other.

I wonder what each of us was thinking, as we greeted one another and smiled.

As for the two of them, they must surely have felt some satisfaction at our expense, since our former partners on the same path had betrayed the unwritten pact of "honor" we had once made together, and had thrown their own former allies into the darkness of prison and onto the gallows, choosing the principle of party advantage over the principle of the public good.

As for us, we remained confident that the secession would come to an end, just as the secessionists themselves expected the collapse of their own rule with every dawn. So there was nothing strange, from our side, in seeing them behind bars. And yet, watching Dr. al-Qudsi walk the corridor with heavy, weary steps, the old feelings of warmth I had once carried for him returned to my heart, despite whatever disagreements had sometimes arisen between us over matters of public policy. I felt as though sweet breezes from a distant past had blown over my heart, reviving it, washing away everything the dark days of the secession had piled upon it.

For here before me now was my old friend Nazim al-Qudsi, Abu Saad, not the president of the republic who had lent his own name as a cloak to conceal the ugliness and corruption of the secession.

The secession had failed, had been exposed and stripped bare, and it had stripped him bare along with it. Nor was my last dealing with him a distant memory, for I had met with him twice on the very morning of the ninth of March.

I was startled by the announcer's voice, blaring from a loudspeaker mounted in the corridor, speaking of the victory achieved by the Baath Party, which had "ignited" the revolution of the eighth of March, and of the "disappointment" that had struck "the lackeys of Abdel Nasser," sprawled as they were in pursuit of "personal gain."

And yet, I found myself taking a strange delight in hearing the song "Diab Mashhour," which they played for us some twenty times a day:

"They attacked us at midmorning,
They opened fire upon us,
The millstone turned against them,
They wore the garment of shame..."

And along with the delight, laughter would seize me.

As for the singer performing it, Loudy Shamiya, she filled our ears between the song "Diab Mashhour" and the military marches, as though the officer who had taken charge of the broadcasts, Lieutenant Colonel Salim Hatoum, had once sworn an oath to his own mother that he would take revenge on the entire Syrian people, making them lose their nerves and ruining their lives, in retaliation for some old grievance he had suffered as a child.

And he made good on his oath once he had seized his own prominent position, having marched in with the ranks of Ziad al-Hariri's men. One evening an order came down that the doors of the rooms in our wing be left open, and so we began to get to know one another. Nazim al-Qudsi and I embraced.

We took to sitting for long hours, exchanging conversation on every subject, none of it free of the occasional barbed remark of reproach over what had been let slip through careless hands. Our second rival present was Abdel Karim Zahreddine.

The officer in charge of the prison, a "committed Nasserist" as he told me himself, would sometimes sit with us, though he preferred generally to stay away from our gatherings, so that we would not feel constrained in speaking freely.

The circle widened further when Nihad al-Qasim and Abdel Samad al-Fatih were brought in. We were then three Nasserists facing two secessionists.

The wing's own ward held more than twenty beds, filled with patients and wounded men who had taken part in the fighting and been spared.

I myself spent some days in this ward.

While we lay there on the iron beds, counted as patients, Colonel Muhammad Umran once passed through, as though inspecting an honor guard. He spoke to no one, and singled no one out with any warm glance. Some days later, Salah al-Dalati, president of the martial-law tribunal, did the same.

It was an occasion for me to see "the men of the new order" from a distance. I later crossed paths with Muhammad Umran again, after I had been released more than once.

Chance placed me face to face with Salah al-Dalati as I was washing my car at a car wash. He came toward me all smiles and extended his hand for me to shake, as though granting me a favor by reminding me that he had "saved my life." My reaction, spontaneous and unplanned, was to turn away and refuse to shake a hand stained with blood.

In this same ward I met Dr. Shukri Faisal, one of the leaders of our movement's secret command, who had been a university professor of Arabic literature. He later became a member of the Arabic Language Academy, and when God took him and I was elected to the Academy in his place, I chose his own seat, and delivered my induction address on his literary legacy.

I also met Mr. Akram al-Safadi, the extreme leftist thinker, and we debated the concept of socialism, coming out of the discussion without finding any common ground between us.

I likewise met the "dissident Baathist" Adham Mustafa. What impressed me in him was his moderation and his steadfast performance of the five daily prayers at their proper times. He told me he had never once missed a prayer or a fast in his entire life, except when ill, and that the same was true of every member of his family, a habit his old party did not exactly welcome.

One night, as I lay sleeping, I felt a hand shaking me. I woke and looked around to find my neighbor, Captain Yahya al-A'sar, rousing me to ask what punishment awaited him if the tribunal discovered that he had sheltered Jasim Alwan in his own home for several days. I said to him: do you not realize that the guards' eyes never sleep on us? If they were to drag me off and put me under torture and ask me about this conversation at dawn, would you truly be confident I would keep your secret?

An incident occurred in my presence that left me stunned. One of the detainees drew several razor blades from a hiding place in his clothes, broke them into small pieces, and then, once they had become small enough to fit in his palm, put them in his mouth and swallowed them, without our understanding why he had done such a thing.

We were seized with alarm and feared for his life, so we sent word to the officer in charge, who rushed to carry him away, and we never saw him again.

I was returned to the room, and our own gathering came together once more. My companions there were Nihad al-Qasim, Abdel Samad al-Fatih, and Colonel Adib.

We had with us a small radio, through which we followed world events.

During our stay in this wing, a number of incidents occurred that have stayed with me. The following are among them:

1. A Spy the Dog Ate

The guard on duty would open the door of my room and let me walk alone in the corridor, before the order came down from above forbidding the doors to be closed. But this order remained in force only for as long as the prison director, Lieutenant Wanous, was in a "calm" mood.

If anything came along to upset his mood, our conditions would worsen at once: the doors would be shut, the daily walk canceled, or its time cut short.

My attention was drawn to an iron bed set up in the corridor, on which a sick man lay. No one was allowed to speak to him, nor he to anyone, by strict order of the prison director.

At the time I was smoking American Pall Mall cigarettes, which some of the guards would buy for us with the official approval of the prison administration.

Once, as I passed by his bed, he gestured to me, touching his finger to his lips, a sign I understood to mean he wanted to smoke.

I took the risk and slipped a cigarette into his mouth, and lit it for him.

He was in a state of exhaustion plain to anyone with eyes to see.

He told me he was on a hunger strike unto death, and so would put nothing, neither food nor drink, into his mouth. It became my fixed habit with this prisoner: I would place a cigarette in his mouth during the morning walk, and another during the evening walk. I could certainly never have kept up this violation, one that might well have been called "a threat to national security," had it not been for the willful blindness of the "Nasserist" sergeant, Muhammad Kalta, who would pretend to be asleep at his post at the end of the corridor.

The man grew to feel at ease with me, brightening whenever I passed near his bed.

During the morning walk and the evening walk I would pass by him more than fifty times, and then, for the rest of the day, every sign of life would drain from that pale, wrinkled face.

One day an official from the prison came to me and spoke to me in a whisper, saying he had come to ask me for a humanitarian service. My "prisoner friend," he said, was insisting on his hunger strike and determined either to die or to be released. Since they did not want him to die on their hands, and could not release him without an order from the military tribunal, they had fabricated a paper for him, brought from the office of the military investigating judge, bearing his name and stating his release.

The paper, however, carried neither a signature nor the administration's seal.

When they presented it to the prisoner and asked him to eat and remain with them a few more days until he could go home to his family, he feared the whole thing was a ruse, meant to restore his health only so they could resume torturing him, and so he asked that I personally vouch for the release paper's authenticity.

I feared I might bring tragedy upon him if I misled him.

And it weighed on me to practice deception, even a "white" one.

So I refused to give this false testimony. I told them that yes, I was their prisoner, and that this was true, but that my confinement gave them no right to force me into lying and forgery.

As a compromise, I agreed to stand beside them in silence while they pointed out to the prisoner, in my presence, that the paper was genuine.

And so I stood there in silence, and the prisoner understood it was nothing but a trick played on his chin, and he refused to swallow it.

One evening I sat on the edge of his bed and asked him about the charge brought against him. He said they accused him of being an Israeli spy, a suspicion that had arisen simply from the location of his home, which overlooked territory occupied by Israel.

They had fabricated a charge against him of selling livestock to Israel and passing along information to it about Syrian forces. But in all honesty, I was never convinced of the espionage charge, for the man was illiterate, his simplemindedness was plain to see, and I could not imagine what "secret" information he could possibly have passed to the enemy.

In any case, this was a matter for the proper judge to decide, if he found conclusive evidence, rather than mere suspicion, proving his guilt.

He then, with great difficulty, reached out his hand and pulled back the blanket covering his body, drawing up his "dara'a," his Bedouin robe, from the lower part of his body, and I saw what no eye had ever seen and no ear had ever heard.

I saw two legs with no flesh left on them at all, nothing but two bones covered by wrinkled skin that had lost every sign of life. His male member was gone entirely. As I pressed my hand over my eyes to keep myself from fainting, he told me that Lieutenant Abdel Wahab al-Bakri used to smear his legs and thighs with fat and set upon him a dog trained for exactly this kind of savagery, which would then tear into his flesh and skin.

This prisoner was later transferred elsewhere, and I never heard anything of him again. Some weeks afterward, though, another prisoner was brought to the military hospital wing for treatment, a young man with a flattened nose, thin, tall, who greeted me warmly, the way a student greets a teacher he meets again in difficult circumstances.

I gathered from him that he was a legal officer, one of the military investigation staff during the days of the secession, and that he had now been arrested himself on a charge of "Nasserism."

When he told me his name, I felt a wave of shame, for this was the very man who had tortured the prisoner by feeding his flesh to dogs. I reproached him for what he had done.

And I bear witness that he did not deny the charge. Instead, he began offering justifications uglier than the crime itself, imagining they might somehow excuse his treatment of this spy.

He seemed to have forgotten that the very first principle of our own criminal law, one enshrined in the constitution itself, holds that every accused person is innocent until a final judgment is rendered against him.

2. The President's Blood Pressure

One night we were sitting in the room of President al-Qudsi and General Zahreddine when the telephone rang. President al-Qudsi picked up the receiver, and the operator told him it was a call from Aleppo. He spoke in a low voice, but his emotion was plain in the tone of his voice.

When the call ended, Nazim Bey began to weep. He had been deeply moved upon hearing his youngest son, not yet two years old, call him "baba, baba."

He then stretched out on the bed, utterly overcome, and we called for a doctor to examine him. A young doctor came, and the first thing he did was fasten a blood pressure cuff to his arm. He announced: the pressure is 32.

This was medically impossible, and we realized this doctor was a trainee prattling on about things he did not understand. The president's face had gone pale and sallow, his muscles had tensed, and we genuinely feared for his life, so we dismissed this doctor politely and I telephoned the hospital director, who was a friend of the president's and a well-known secessionist himself, and told him what had happened and asked him to send a doctor who respected his own profession.

An experienced doctor came and reassured us of the president's health, telling us that what the other doctor had said was nothing but foolishness born of sheer ignorance, of a kind that would bring shame on the very medical school that had graduated him.

This brought to mind the words of a French doctor named Le Cercle, who had once been a professor at the Damascus School of Medicine during the days of the Mandate. He once assessed the school's own standards in a statement he gave to a newspaper, saying that it graduated doctors who did not even know how to give an injection, and the whole country rose up against him for it. I still ask myself, to this day, what scientific contribution we Arabs have made to human civilization in the field of medicine and pharmacology.

Among Dr. al-Qudsi's own traits was his love of jokes, and his skill in telling them, even when their language grew a little coarse at times, once he had warmed up to his company. In one of our sittings we were speaking of torture in the prisons, and of the screams of those caught in the jaws of the electric belt, and I recounted to them what I had endured myself during my time in the cell, the sounds of those being tortured in the darkness of the night.

One of those present remarked that the prison administration might well keep a recording of artificial screams, of people crying out for help, simply to break the spirit of the detainees and strike terror into their hearts.

At that I told them the story of the detainee I had seen through the opening in my cell door, and how he had been carried to the edge of the pool in the prison courtyard, where they had poured an entire bottle of iodine tincture over him, because his whole body had been torn apart, so that simply wiping the wounds would do no good.

The president said: they painted him white, so that others would take it as a lesson.

And he told the following joke:

The people of the Ghab, before it was drained, used to suffer terribly to bring in their harvest after months of toil, working land that was little more than a swamp, teeming with mosquitoes and swimming in fevers.

But once the corn cobs ripened and were ready for picking, herds of wild boar would descend upon them, tearing them apart and destroying them. The farmers would fire on them and kill a number of them, but the boars were never deterred and never afraid, since within a few days they would return to their destruction fiercer than before.

One time, a great boar fell into a pit, and they caught him and argued over how to kill him, until an old and experienced man among them suggested they paint his black body white, beat him with sticks until he bled, and then set him loose to return to his own kind, broken and limping.

They painted him white, beat him, and let him go, and when he reached his own herd in that state, they abandoned the whole area and were never seen there again.

And so, ever after, whenever we heard the voice of a man being tortured, we would say: they're painting him white.