01-10-2013 - Traces, n. 9

Current Events
After the Kidnapping


MY SYRIA
In 152 days of fear and suffering, Italian journalist Domenico Quirico came to understand many things–about the revolution and the Syrian people, but also about himself, his job, and his relationship with his family and with God. Here are some excerpts from the speech that the war correspondent for the Italian newspaper La Stampa gave at the Milan Cultural Center on September 25th.

My revolutionary friends
“What was the Syria that I loved? I fell in love with the Syrian revolution because I fell in love–not with its ideology, its project, or the ideas that moved it, but with the men, the boys, who were carrying it out. I went through the Arab Spring, Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya to some extent. And in the Syrian revolution–the first one, that of Aleppo, two years ago–I found the same vital energy, the same extraordinary sincerity, and the same young people that I had met in the street of Tunis and the square in Cairo.
A revolution is energy; it is a different tempo of life, it is living in a more accelerated way, believing that everything is possible and that the world can be transformed with an individual and collective act, from one day to the next, into something different and better. The kids in Aleppo, from the streets of Aleppo, the neighborhoods of Aleppo, freed from Assad’s regime, were all this: the fifth season of the world, the extraordinary emanation of a life force, of a will to be protagonists and to catalyze change. Their political project was still very uncertain and confused: a nation different from the one in which they had lived for half a century, ever since Assad’s family had taken the country hostage and ruled it with an iron fist. So, I loved those kids. I loved the fact that they had left their books at the university and the middle school and had taken up old Kalashnikovs and fought, even though they were not soldiers, they were not guerillas, they were not rebels. They were practically empty-handed, in the streets, in the ruins, under bombardments from the MiGs, the helicopters, Bashar’s army. That, and only that, was the Syrian revolution.
Then I saw the other faces of this revolution. How it changed! Some of those kids, who were its creators and protagonists, were already dead by my second or third trip there. Today, my Syrian friends, the young people that I met two years ago, are gone. Not because they gave up on the revolution, but because they are dead. They were killed.”   

Young jailers
“I had many jailers in the two months that I spent in al-Qusayr, because then the rebellion burst through this siege in an epic march of two days and two nights, leaving behind its dead and bringing along the elderly, children, women, and the disabled, and marched under the artillery fire of the government and Hezbollah, until they were out. There were apocalyptic scenes, reminiscent of Dante. But in the two months in al-Qusayr, my jailers were peasants, locals. There was one named Samir, the head of this small brigade that kept me in custody in a beautiful country house, rich, surrounded by large orchards. In the room where we were kept, there was an old armoire. I opened it to see what was inside, and I found the four Gospels in Arabic and some notebooks, belonging to an adolescent, full of the stories that adolescents all over the world write in their diaries: first loves, broken hearts. The family was Christian. Samir told me, ‘Yes, there were Christians here, people who supported Bashar; I killed them myself.’ And he showed me from the window the place in the orchard where he had buried them in order to take their ‘stuff.’ Samir was a man who had nothing; he told me that he was very poor, and that when the revolution broke out, he joined up because–like many others–he had seen a shortcut to getting out of his poverty.
Then there was an extraordinary boy, a bit big–one of those who are always teased at school–who frightened me a great deal at first, because he used to appear at the window and yell, ordering me to repeat very complicated words in Arabic that I couldn’t pronounce properly, and every now and then he would beat me with a stick that he carried with him. I came across him again weeks later, in another hiding place, and he was a completely different person: he took me outside–one of the few times that they let me out of the room–to show me the landscape, the birds flying in the countryside. He was the same age as my oldest daughter. And then I thought that perhaps I would have liked to be friends with that boy who was holding me there. But I couldn’t be his friend, because he was free, and I was imprisoned. I couldn’t hate him, though, because he came into my room and looked at me, and I asked him, ‘When can I leave here?’ And he, unlike the others, who said it in order to deride me, to see my desperation afterward, said, ‘Maybe in a week the siege will open, and then you can be free again.’”   

The novena
“I had the lives of four of my jailers in my hands. I could have killed them, because I had two hand grenades that I had stolen when they were distracted. They were four kids–the oldest, Ahmar, must have been 27 or 28. He was the head of this new group, and he had a family and children. Another was named Rahmad; he ate continually, with the desperate hunger of one who is poor and never knows if he will have something on his plate again. I had the lives of these young men in my hands. I could have thrown those grenades whenever I wanted, blown them to pieces, and I could have fled. So, with my co-captive (who was also Christian), we had to decide to carry out this gesture, and then open the door and flee into the countryside in an attempt to reach the Turkish border. We didn’t have the courage to say, ‘We’ll do it tomorrow.’ At a certain point, we said to each other, ‘We’ll pray for nine days, nine more days, and if nothing happens, then we’ll do it.’ On the ninth day–I’m not making this up, this is what happened–these kids forgot to close our room, they left their four Kalashnikovs in the hallway, and the door of the house was there in front of us, open. We escaped without having to use a grenade.
Someone asked me if I hate my jailers. You know... 152 days of emptiness, of absence, of nothing, immobile, waiting for the sun to set and then rise the next day, without being able to do anything, except wait for that door to open and for someone to throw you a few pieces of old bread–that’s a long time. They stole a piece of my life, and many things that I will never be able to do again are lost, behind me; they are absence. These people took much from me, but I can’t hate them–and not in order to be a saint, no, I am a common person, normal. I simply realized that, if I hated these people, then I would still be their prisoner; I wouldn’t have left those rooms, I would still be there, ruminating. I wouldn’t be free.”

There’s freedom
and there’s freedom

“The last day, Ahmar, the head of this group, announced that this time I would truly be free. With a voice that was finally not mocking, he said, ‘You will leave for Italy and Belgium, you will go back home, put back on your nice clothes, take back your nice cars and your normal life. And we–indicating himself and the other three–we will stay here. So it’s not true that you were the prisoners and we were the jailers. All of us, you and we, were prisoners of something bigger. But you can leave and find another life again, and we remain here, prisoners.’
Those five months of mine are a small, irrelevant human story in an immense tragedy, which is the tragedy of 20 million people whom we, the West, have completely forgotten in our cowardice. I can understand a political strategy, I can discuss it, but I cannot accept cowardice. The West, in Syrian history, was cowardly. It is cowardly. It didn’t want to understand. My jailers, today, now, tomorrow, maybe for years, are in their prison. Rebels, loyalists, bandits, jihadists–they are all in an immense prison where the rule is hate, where the normality is pain, suffering, death.”

Like Job
“The simplest and greatest temptation is to ask God to be freed. My fellow captive, who is Belgian [Pierre Piccinin], thinks that one makes pacts with God. It’s Abraham, the faith of the Old Testament, the covenant between God and man. I, on the other hand, believe that one does not make pacts with God, one cannot make pacts, it’s not a give and take. The only thing that works and that can work with God is devoting oneself, entrusting oneself, awaiting. If I have to find a figure with whom I identify, it’s not Abraham, who broke the covenant with God, and then God punishes him and stops the hand that is about to kill his son, saying something tremendous: ‘I grant you this grace, because I know that you fear Me.’ Not, ‘You love Me,’ but, ‘You fear Me.’ It’s the God of the Old Testament. My character, instead, is Job. I had a great exercise in patience in those days, but Job’s is on a much larger scale. Job awaits. God takes everything–everything–away from him, more so than with Abraham, but Job does not rebel; he devotes himself, he waits, he surrenders himself to what God decides. And, in the end, he has ten times more than what he had before, and then some. So I believe that the relationship with God, in a situation that extreme and terrible, but also in a daily situation–in the pain and suffering of every day, which is often much greater than the suffering of my 152 days–is this devoting oneself and waiting. I confess that, at a certain point, after the two months in al-Qusayr, when nothing happened, I had the impression that this patience was not enough, and that God was silent and far from me. But in reality, I understood that in that absence–in that absence–was the strongest, most extreme presence of God. This is because of the message of this absence: ‘Accept with humility. Be like Job; do not rise up against Me. Don’t ask Me for something immediately.’”

My sin
“For the first time, I realized that when you decide to go to these places, there is one thing to remember: you are not alone. I am not alone. I cross the border, travel through this country, write my articles, but there is someone at home who carries a burden of suffering, fear, anguish, and pain that is much larger than mine. I was not the true hostage. The true hostages were my wife, my daughters, my friends, my colleagues–all those who struggled, thought, and suffered with me and for me. I was there, and I knew what was happening to me and what could happen to me. They didn’t. Theirs was an empty anguish, with no news. For two months, my family thought that I was dead. And when I called, I heard my wife’s cry on the other end of the line: ‘You’re alive!’ For the first time, I realized that I had a responsibility which is tied to a horrible sin: vanity. I had forgotten it. I had never thought, in years and years of this job, that when I crossed a border and entered a revolution, I had other people next to me, mute and terrorized by anguish. The true hostages were my family, who paid a tremendous price, much greater than what I paid, and toward whom I have an immense guilt. The second and last time that I called, my youngest daughter asked me a terrible question: ‘Dad, when are you coming home?’ I told her, ‘I don’t know, because it’s not up to me, but I will come back because I have to ask for your forgiveness.’”

I tell what I see
“I am afraid that Syria is one of those countries that are about to leave History. When a country’s story is not told, and you don’t know what happens there, it leaves History. It’s the same thing that happened to Somalia. I have a feeling that it’s about to happen in Syria; that it has already happened.
In order to make sense, the journalism that I do requires that I be in the place where the events I recount and the men that I describe are developing their story, for good or for bad. If I am not there, and I don’t completely share, for a certain period of time, their suffering, their pain, their fear, their rage, their dreams, and their wrongdoing–looking at them, seeing them, and hearing them–if I am not there, then I don’t have the right to recount details about those men and those events, because they are not mine, and it would not be honest to do so. And not only for those who read my writing–and can ask me, ‘And where were you?’–but above all for those whose story I am telling. I have a moral duty to them, so that they cannot say to me, ‘Who gave you the right to say who I am and what I do, if you weren’t there?’ And so, if I can no longer go to Syria, then I will no longer write about Syria, because it’s not honest to tell what you don’t see.”

The depth of hate
“In 152 days, I found only one person who showed charity and mercy toward me: the wounded soldier who gave me his cell phone, so that I could call my wife. But I can give an explanation for this, because the depth, the breadth, and the alien character of war and violence, which all–all–of the Syrians have been living for two years, has scraped away any compassion, mercy, and remorse. Today, in Syria, it is no longer possible to feel pity for the other human being who suffers, to hold out a hand to him and say, ‘Friend, brother, comrade, stranger, I give you my hand and I say to you: courage, you’re going to make it.’ I didn’t ask for someone to liberate me, but simply for someone to say to me, ‘We know that you are our friend. The situation forces me to do this, but I’m with you.’ One human being with another human being...
Today, in Syria, the depth of hate is the only thing that keeps them going. And the complex and terrible character of this story is in the totality of this permanent condition of pain, which forces the Syrians to behave as they are behaving. In these terms, I say that Syria is the country of evil.” 

Back at home
“Recovering my life is nothing extraordinary; it is carrying out simple gestures. My captivity was the opposite of this–not being able to do anything that is ordinary. I discovered the immense, indescribable value of banal things, like drinking a glass of water, opening a door and going out, the taste of a cookie... not hearing the sound of artillery. What an extraordinary sense of freedom and of life.”