Behind Bars - Part 7: A Staged Escape Trap, and Amin al-Hafiz's Broken Promise of Release

6. Umm Ghassan's Visit

Umm Ghassan is my wife, Mrs. Amal Kourani, mother of my daughter Maysa and my son Ghassan.

One day, in the midst of these wretched days, after nearly three months, I was taken completely by surprise by her visit to the detention center. I was overjoyed to see her, especially once she reassured me about our daughter and son, and about our family and friends, of whom I had heard nothing at all, as though they were living on some planet other than this earth. At the same time, I found myself puzzled by this visit, since I had no idea who might have "arranged" it for her. My cousin, a colonel in the police and the director of the Damascus police, later told me he had managed to persuade the senior officer, a classmate of his from the military academy and a man of real weight and authority in the new order, to allow him and my wife to visit me.

An officer of the military police sat with us throughout, to make sure she did not tell me anything that might harm state security, or hand me some document that might threaten the collapse of the regime's own foundations.

I took this visit as a good omen, since it suggested the noose around our necks was starting to loosen, and my instinct proved right. The prison administration soon began allowing us to telephone our own homes once a week, a blessing beyond price.

Of course, my wife's visit was an unusual occurrence in the detention center, whereas General Zahreddine's wife and children enjoyed a weekly visit as a matter of course, bringing food with them to share with their own man in the room he shared with President al-Qudsi.

We used to explain this "generous gesture" toward Zahreddine as simple "respect for officers toward their commander," regardless of political leanings. But the truer explanation was that His Excellency the commander still had "two riders in the saddle," Lieutenant Colonel Fahd al-Shaer and Captain Salim Hatoum, and whoever holds the pen does not write himself down among the wretches.

It is also worth noting that General Zahreddine wrote frequently to the leadership of the new Revolutionary Council, reminding them of his own unionist stances during the days of the secession and offering various pieces of advice to spare their own course any mistakes, to the point that he "rejoiced beyond measure on hearing the communiqué of the unity talks, forgetting entirely that I was a detainee, forgetting everything else, for the sake of the news of unity."[1]

We often debated with him, and with President al-Qudsi, in our own sittings, over the disgrace of the secession and the damage it had inflicted on the country, damage no one could say for certain the passing days would ever undo.

The general himself refers to some of these very discussions with me in his own memoirs, in the passage he titled "A Dialogue with the Nasserists, Our Fellow Detainees."

There, he quotes AbdulWahab Homad telling Dr. Nazim al-Qudsi: "I hold you and General Zahreddine responsible for failing to restore the union once the two of you had taken the reins of affairs in Syria. Had you acted, you would have spared the country the calamities we are suffering now at the hands of its new rulers."

General Zahreddine replied to me with what he wrote on page 492 of his own memoirs.

It seems to me that what he wrote there is really a defense of himself, laying the blame for the secession's continuation on the state of the army and its own divisions.

In all honesty, we had maintained secret contacts with Zahreddine during the days of the secession, though they were never of a kind one could truly rely on, or take at face value, given the real nature of his own leanings.

7. An Enemy in a Friend's Cloak

One day, while I was in the room with Colonel Adib Qadi Reha, an assistant officer of the military police came in to see us. He greeted the colonel with courtesy and respect, and sat beside him on the bed. The two of them fell into a long, whispered conversation.

To give them the chance to speak freely, I stretched out on my own bed and busied myself fiddling with the dials of the small radio.

The assistant rose, greeted me, and left, telling the colonel he would come by again tomorrow. He shut the door behind him. The colonel then said to me: I will tell you exactly and faithfully what he said, and the judgment of it is yours to make in the end, since the matter concerns you personally. And the one who repeats blasphemy is not himself a blasphemer.

The assistant told me, he said, and he is from the villages around Harim and leans toward your own unionist convictions, that he had come by disturbing information concerning the safety of the "Nasserist leaders" held here. He fears some harm may befall us some night, and had discussed the matter with a group of his own friends, who agreed that he should be the one sent to deliver their message to me.

The gist of the message was that unless I escaped the detention center, my life was in serious danger, and that they knew how to smuggle me out to Lebanon. The method was this: I would be tied to a rope at night and lowered by one of the wing's own guards, to be caught below by three soldiers from their group waiting to receive me, who would secure my passage out through the walls of the military hospital, then lead me on foot through the western hills for an hour, until we reached a spot where a military jeep would be waiting for me, carrying a pass authorizing travel on the road to Lebanon. Before reaching the checkpoint at al-Jdeideh, they would set me down from the jeep, and I would continue on foot, concealed by the darkness, until I reached Deir al-Asha'ir, and from there to Chtaura and Beirut, where the Egyptian embassy, and Abdel Hamid Ghaleb himself, would be waiting to receive me.

He added that the group would carry out this "duty" as a purely voluntary national service, but that the operation itself would cost me ten thousand liras, for the driver and a few guides, and that I would need to write a letter to my wife instructing her to pay the sum to whoever brought it.

I was astonished that the colonel had had the patience to sit through this crude assistant's entire proposal. I told him: either the man is a con artist, or he is an intelligence informant's own eye and ear.

I assured him that this "plan," foolish as it was, could only be one of two things: either a trap to seize me as a fugitive criminal, handing them a cheap and easy pretext for my own crime, or else a soft method of killing me outright while I was wrapped in the cloak of darkness, as a fugitive from justice caught in the very act of his own flight.

The anxious assistant, so worried for our safety, came back the following day and received his answer, which was exactly what he and whoever had sent him ought to have expected all along. He left the room dragging the tail of his own disappointment behind him, whispering into the colonel's ear as he rose to see him out: "I hope he won't come to regret this."

I never did regret it. What truly wounded me, as a citizen, was the sheer level of this so-called "intelligence work," on which vast sums are spent, drained from this very people's own blood, with no oversight or accountability whatsoever over how it is spent.

8. General Amin al-Hafiz's Visit

The wing was yawning with boredom that morning, given how little activity ever stirred in it. But suddenly life stirred through it all at once. The guards began moving, taking up positions at close intervals along the corridor and in front of the ward and the rooms. Our doors were shut on us.

We wondered: what was in the air?

A few days earlier the guards had gone rushing about without warning, shouldering their automatic rifles, strapping on ammunition belts, and crouching behind the wing's outer windows in the highest state of alert, as though expecting an assault on the wing itself over some matter concerning its prisoners. The mountain had gone into labor, only to bring forth a mouse, for it turned out to be nothing but a storm in a teacup: no one ever showed up, and the guards never even had to use their rifles. Calm returned to what it had been before.

We assumed this "alarm" was simply repeating itself today, and we went to look through the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of something.

We heard the tramp of soldiers' boots on the corridor's tiles, an unusual bustle, and then a large group of soldiers stopped in front of our own room. The sergeant opened the door, and the newcomers filed in, with General Amin al-Hafiz, president of the National Council of the Revolutionary Command, the first to enter. We were genuinely stunned.

Nearly three months had passed since we had been brought to the detention center without our ever "dreaming" of a visit from "Lieutenant" Wanous himself, let alone this, and so we were caught entirely off guard by the general's visit, accompanied as he was by the head of the military police, Ahmad Suwaydani, the "senior" prison director Wanous, and a number of officers we did not recognize.

Amin al-Hafiz was courteous and friendly as he entered, asking our leave to join us over a cup of coffee, which we of course welcomed him to share with us.

Amin was no stranger to me, nor I to him. We were, in fact, distantly related, and I had taught Arabic literature at al-Ma'mun Secondary School in Aleppo when he was a student there.

We spoke of our own circumstances, and among what I said to him was: why, Your Excellency the General, are we still being held here, when we have our own work, our families, our dignity, and our own need for freedom?

He answered with the candor he was known for: we hold our own positions today by the logic of tanks, and we will not vacate them unless tanks themselves force us out. We are willing to hand you a few tanks yourselves, so you can try your own luck against us.

I found nothing in this worth arguing over, and so I returned to the subject of our release, or else our referral to a military tribunal to decide our fate, release if we had no connection to what had happened, or punishment if evidence were found against us. He assured me that conditions had stabilized, and that our detention had been carried out for security reasons that had now come to an end, since the domestic situation had settled fully into place.

Among us was Abdel Samad al-Fatih, one of his own old friends, and he grew warm and familiar with him, assuring us all that he would have us released within days, that is, after his own return from Baghdad, where he was traveling the next day and would remain for four days, a period he called a chance for us to "bid farewell" to our fellow detainees who would still remain guests of the state's own hospitality.

I said to him: might I ask you a favor? He said: what is it? I said: that the prison director be permitted to leave our own room doors open again, so we can return to the "internal freedom" we once had, visiting back and forth with President al-Qudsi, Zahreddine, and the detainees of the other rooms, a privilege we had since been deprived of for some whim we could not explain. The general turned to the lieutenant, the prison director, and told him: leave their room doors open.

Our tongues were tied with astonishment when the lieutenant, right there in our presence, answered the general that the prison's own regulations, sir, did not permit that. We felt the general had put himself in an awkward position, since we could hardly believe that so strict a military system would allow a junior officer to refuse a direct order from the president of the National Council of the Revolutionary Command and commander-in-chief of the army and armed forces.

The general "treated" this strange situation by adopting a fatherly gentleness with the lieutenant, telling him simply: well then, do whatever you can.

He bid us farewell with a promise of freedom within four days at the most, and departed in his own "imposing" procession, his soldiers' boots ringing against the tiles of the wing's own corridor.

The lieutenant did not forget our own boldness in making requests through our relative. He shut our room doors on us, depriving us of the morning and evening walk for nearly a week, until our chests grew tight, especially in the evening, when the gases food produces pressed on our lungs, tightening our breath and leaving us in a state of real depression.

Not even a hand of fortune-telling cards helped our brother Abdel Samad, who had by then become like a matchstick, flaring up spontaneously as he struggled to rein in his own volcanic anger at his old friend.

We sent a "verbal message" to the lieutenant, asking him to come to us, and he did not disappoint our expectations, showing up the following morning.

He was harsh in what he told us, warning us that "not even Amin al-Hafiz himself" could get us out of the detention center, and that we had better resign ourselves to staying here for twenty years, for our own physical and mental comfort, and that we should be certain that if anyone in authority ever thought of releasing us, they would send the tanks against him themselves to force us to stay put.

We realized then just how dangerous we truly were to security and to the state. He went on, his words dripping with venom and spite: "And you should know full well that you will never leave here, whenever that day comes, without every one of you carrying some disability for the rest of your life, to remind you of what awaits you should you ever think of returning to politics. We will not let you become heroes." We expressed our astonishment at this threat, since we had only been discussing the matter of our daily walks with him, not the question of our release, which lay in the hands of men far above his own station.

Despite his raging fury, he agreed to restore the morning and evening walks, and this was enough to satisfy us from him. The four days Amin al-Hafiz had promised us stretched into two further months before our release came.

Colonel Ahmad Suwaydani, director of the military police, visited us one day, and went on at length, threatening and blustering, declaring himself ready to sacrifice his own seven children for the sake of the party and the state.

I asked him: did he remember that I was a prisoner, and he the commander of the military police, and that it hardly suited his own lofty position to provoke a man who had no means whatsoever of defending himself?

Our brother Nihad, though, plunged into his own quarrel with him, denouncing the ugly manner in which their own unionist brothers had been pushed out of any share in governing and in achieving unity. Suwaydani's own chest found no room for al-Qasim's words.

And when our release was finally decided, Colonel Suwaydani delayed al-Qasim's own release by a full extra month, in retaliation for his boldness toward the man who held, as they used to call him, "command and prohibition."

He held no more of that "command and prohibition," in truth, than a trumpet holds eloquence, for merely carrying forward the words of the mouth that moves behind it.

---

Endnotes:

[1] Memoirs, p. 453; see also his other telegrams in the following pages. None of which, however, spared him his own removal from civilian life.