Читать книгу Erdogan Rising - Hannah Lucinda Smith - Страница 14

I wandered into my first personality cult off the back of a bad break-up and harbouring a long-term curiousity to see the Middle East. The region fascinated me – especially the Lebanese capital, Beirut, with its evocative connotations of glamour and war. At the time I was a television producer in London, working mostly in the current affairs departments of Channel 4 and the BBC on big investigations, including stories about rampant heroin use in prisons and fire safety flaws in refurbished tower blocks, a full seven years before Grenfell. But I yearned to be a foreign correspondent, writing dispatches from turbulent places for a daily newspaper. Soon I discovered that British journalism is a series of closed shops; the editors hiring for any foreign jobs I applied for weren’t interested in my experience. So, in lieu, I travelled to off-beat places for holidays, and sold an occasional article where I could.

But in between booking my plane tickets and setting off for Amman, the biggest popular protests in decades were flowing back and forth across the Middle East. In Tunisia and Egypt, the old dictators Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak had already been bundled from their palaces by popular grassroots movements. In Libya, the armed rebellion against Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi was soon to win the backing of NATO airstrikes.

In Syria, small demonstrations in the southern provincial city of Deraa, close to the Jordanian border, had been swelling for a fortnight by the time I entered the country. Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, initially seemed immune to the unrest spreading elsewhere in his region, partly because he kept his own country so closed. To get a fourteen-day Syrian tourist visa I had enlisted a friend at a small company to fake a letter of employment for me, claiming that I was his secretary. Had I written on my visa application that I was a journalist, there was no way I would have been allowed in by the time I arrived at the border – an American traveller I met in my hostel in Amman had just been turned back at the frontier. By now, a fragmented opposition movement was rising against Assad, and there was a growing security crackdown in response. It was happening mostly in places like Deraa, and the poor outer suburbs of the cities where scores of rural migrants had arrived over recent years, forced from their farms by drought. But young educated activists in Syria’s urban centres – Damascus, Aleppo and Homs – were picking up on the chance to finally challenge the dictator they hated. Via Facebook, they organised ‘Days of Rage’ after each week’s Friday prayers.

All I could see of this from my shared taxi – a Chevrolet so old it was retro that boomeranged along the 125-mile road between Amman and Damascus – was Syrian army tanks blocking the exit to Deraa. The driver looked ahead and said nothing, while the two old couples travelling with me fell into silent contemplation. The TV in my room at the once-glamorous Orient Hotel, a faded grandma located in what had become a red light district in central Damascus, broadcast the official version of events on Syrian state television. From the huge and sagging bed I watched protests in front of the presidential palace a kilometre away, as the area filled with supporters shouting how much they loved Bashar. Sensing my chance to hit on a story, I set about trying to contact opposition activists.

In the meantime, I wandered the old heart of Damascus, a maze of narrow alleyways between thick stone walls, laced with sweet whiffs of jasmine and shisha smoke. Here I found trinket shops dedicated to souvenirs decorated with Bashar al-Assad’s image – lighters, coffee mugs, car bumper stickers. Bunting bearing his face, identical on each little fluttering flag, criss-crossed the rafters of the souk. One morning I walked through the main drag with a new friend, a sweet Syrian girl in a tight white headscarf who had approached me minutes earlier as I stared awestruck at the nearby Umayyad Mosque. She grasped my arm and pointed to him.

‘Beheb Bashar – I love Bashar,’ she said, with the earnest gaze of a recent cult convert. ‘Do you love Bashar, too?’

What could I say? The president is weak-chinned, long-necked and speaks with a lisp. And, already, he was a murderer. As she and I walked through that souk on a fresh April day, Assad’s thugs were opening fire on demonstrators in Deraa, eighty miles down the road, picking them off from the rooftops with the indifference of schoolboys playing video games. I hummed a non-committal murmur, which seemed enough to satisfy her.

After a series of protracted emails, phone calls that came from a different number each time, missed meetings and finally some good luck, I eventually found an opposition activist called Roua. She was one of the young Damascenes – there were so few of them at the time it’s incredible they managed to find each other – who was trying to organise the Day of Rage that Friday. So far, the activists hadn’t scored much success – mere handfuls of people were showing up to their protests, and most were immediately arrested. Their ranks, such as they were, had been fully infiltrated by Syrian intelligence.

When Roua came to meet me, on a sultry Tuesday night in a bustling restaurant in the Christian quarter of the old city, she was wearing a paper dental mask over her nose and mouth, and didn’t take it off in the whole time we spent together. She claimed she was hiding some work done recently on her teeth.

‘We are speaking to each other using Skype,’ she told me in perfect English. With her hennaed hair and hippyish clothes she wouldn’t have looked out of place at Glastonbury. ‘We use false names, and actually we wouldn’t even know each other if we passed on the street.’

Her parting sentence confirmed my suspicions: she was terrified that if she showed her face, someone might notice that she had been meeting with a foreigner and start putting two and two together.

‘The walls have ears,’ she said, tapping her knuckles on the age-worn stone of the restaurant’s wall as she rose. I never managed to meet her or speak to her again; her phone numbers rang out, my emails to her went unanswered.

All that fear and paranoia had birthed a society of sycophants. Everywhere I went in Damascus in that month when the uprising was just sprouting I found pictures of Bashar al-Assad. Bashar in military uniform, pasted onto a kebab shop’s heated glass cabinet. Bashar administering eye drops to a baby, pinned up on the door of a stationery shop. Bashar in dark glasses, superimposed onto the rear window of a sleek black Mercedes.

Syrians who wished to go one step further put up posters of the Shia troika – Bashar with Hassan Nasrallah, the pugnacious leader of the Lebanese Shia militia Hizbollah, and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, the president of Iran at that time. For real favour-winning bonus points, they would also stick up a picture of Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father and first president of the dynasty – over a decade dead, but never too far away. Some young Syrians I met, befriended and went drinking with warned me to be careful on Fridays.

‘Stay in your hotel,’ said Faris, a plump and cheerful guy from an upper-class Sunni family. ‘Don’t go to the mosques or the old city. Wait until Friday prayers are fully over.’

One of the others, a gay man called Ahmed, said he was sick of Bashar, but deeply apprehensive about the opposition. ‘We don’t know who they are,’ he warned me. ‘They might be Islamists, anybody.’

I left Damascus and its small sparks of revolution in the spring of 2011 and returned to London to pitch the story. I got a couple of commissions from marginal magazines, but nothing more: the uprising in Libya was revving up and would dominate the news from the region until Gaddafi’s bloody end at the hands of a mob in October of that year.

Meanwhile, the protests were growing in the Syrian cities. Homs, a multicultural university town close to the Lebanese border, was one of the epicentres, with thousands of people turning out around the old clocktower in the centre of the city chanting: ‘The people want the fall of the regime!’ With no international media able to operate freely in Syria the news of the demonstrations leaked out through shaky mobile phone footage. And as the protests spiralled out of the government’s control, the security forces started posting snipers on the rooftops to fire into the crowds. The increasingly emboldened activists were rounded up by the score and thrown into the regime’s feared prisons.

Then, in the autumn of 2011, videos started appearing on YouTube showing groups of armed men in mismatched camouflage waving a three-starred flag – similar to but distinct from Syria’s official two-starred flag. The three stars quickly became the symbol of the opposition and the rebels announced themselves as the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Soon after, scores of Syrian military officers started defecting to join the FSA and the protests turned into full-blown conflict. Assad’s army placed the centre of Homs under siege, and the death toll began to soar. Suddenly Syria was the story.

I had witnessed the opening acts and was desperate to go back and report there again. So over the next two years I saved up, made some more contacts in the newspaper industry and bought a flak jacket, and in February 2013 travelled to the Turkish borderlands with a few phone numbers and a plan to cross the frontier and go into rebel-held Aleppo. Thousands of Syrians were flooding into Turkey every day to escape the fighting between the FSA and Assad’s forces in the northern provinces of Idlib and Aleppo. Going the other way and entering the war zone was as easy as showing your passport to a Turkish border guard.