A Woman to Admire

Recently I have been learning a lot about Benazir Bhutto. Let me tell you why I admire her.

• She was the first WOMAN Prime Minister of an Islamic country (she served as Prime Minister of Pakistan twice from 1988 to 1990, and from 1993 to 1996).
• She is the mother of three children (two of whom she gave birth to during her first term as Prime Minister).
• Her father who was also Prime Minister in the early 1970s, was hung after a military coup. She was then incarcerated for a total of seven years because of her family name. The worst part of her incarceration was when she was put in solitary confinement (for almost five years) in a desert cell during the summer of 1981. (I saw pictures of her desert prison that horrified me.) She described the conditions in her wall-less cage as follows:
  
  "The summer heat turned my cell into an oven. My skin split and peeled, coming off my hands in sheets. Boils erupted on my face. My hair, which had always been thick, began to come out by the handful. Insects crept into the cell like invading armies. Grasshoppers, mosquitoes, stinging flies, bees and bugs came up through the cracks in the floor and through the open bars from the courtyard. Big black ants, cockroaches, seething clumps of little red ants and spiders. I tried pulling the sheet over my head at night to hide from their bites, pushing it back when it got too hot to breathe."
  
  She remained hospitalized for months as a result.
  
  
• After her imprisonment, she was more determined than ever to fight for democracy in Pakistan.
• At the height of her popularity - shortly after her first election - she was one of the most high-profile women leaders in the world.
  
• After all she went through, she never completely loses faith in, or gives up on the hope and the dream that Pakistan can turn itself around and become the kind of open democracy she envisioned it to be.
• On 27 December 2007, Bhutto was killed while leaving a campaign rally. She had given a spirited address to party supporters in the run-up to the January 2008 parliamentary elections. After entering her bulletproof vehicle, Bhutto stood up through its sunroof to wave to the crowds. At this point, a gunman fired shots at her and subsequently explosives were detonated near the vehicle killing approximately 20 people.
  
• I hope that in the future, a definitive and balanced account of her leadership and life as well as her family's reign will be written.

A Syrian-Style Mother's Day

Bashar al-Assad, ruler of Syria is killing more and more of his own people everyday. In their hearts, I think the Syrian people knew that they would pay a heavy price for freedom. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons it took so long for protests to take off there, even though Syria is high on the list of the most repressive governments in the world. Emergency laws, in place for the past fifty years, allow the government to censor, arrest, torture, intimidate, and suspend most constitutional rights. If that isn't enough to intimidate and suppress the people there is always the lingering nightmare of 1982 in their minds. Hafez al-Assad, father of the current dictator, presided over a massacre in the city of Hama that left tens of thousands of people dead. Just how many nobody knows for certain. Word didn’t leak out to the international community for weeks, and by then the dead had been interred in mass graves, and a blanket of enforced secrecy had fallen over the incident. In Syria, even mentioning the events in Hama is strictly forbidden. However, a full description of the massacre (not for the faint of heart) has been compiled by the Syrian Human Rights Committee.

It is against this backdrop that the Syrians are exhibiting extraordinary courage as they defy a government that until now has so effectively controlled them by fear and force. I have a special feeling for Syria, and have been waiting anxiously for this moment. In January of 2001, when I arrived in Damascus for a second time, Bashar al-Assad was the new president. (I was also there in the summer of 1999 when Bashar’s father Hafez al Assad was still in power) The new president filled me with optimism, mainly because Bashar was not originally chosen to succeed his father. He also had a very decidedly unpolitical original career choice. The newly “elected” Bashar seemed less formidable than his father. It was possible, just faintly possible for the optimistic, that under his leadership Syria might peacefully transition to a more free and open society.

But all the trappings of dictatorship remained, and I was to become intimately acquainted with many of them during my stay in Damascus. First, there were the pictures of the president. Everywhere. And often they weren’t just pictures, they were adoring collages of the president and his father and his deceased elder brother, all framed by such a profusion of sentimental flowers that it would be amusing if you could forget the circumstances. The regime also actively promotes hatred of Israel as a tool for domestic political support and stability, so Bashar could be found dressed in fatigues with a machine gun, or with his arm extended, Hitler-style, over cheering crowds and rows of troops. I still have posters and pamphlets and my Bashar keychain, I guess I could burn them in solidarity. (In the future, I will have to write about the Hizbollah rally I went to.)

While in Syria, we were told to assume that our living quarters were bugged by the mukhabarat, the infamous secret police of Syria. So my fellow American students and I would often joke about the mukhabarat in our ceiling fan. Maybe they were there, and maybe they weren’t. But on one memorable day, a friend of mine broke down and spent an hour or so ranting to the ceiling fan mukhabarat about just what she thought of them. Living under a repressive dictatorship, even if it’s not your own, really does strange things to a person.

However, the incident I really need to get off my chest happened on Mother’s Day of 2001. As part of our cultural outreach activities, members of my study group were spread throughout the city of Damascus participating in ongoing service projects. The project I picked was teaching songs to the children at a special ed school in preparation for a Mother’s Day performance. I went every week with a couple of other American students to teach twenty or so sweet, adorable down syndrome children how to sing a few songs, both in English and in Arabic. The songs we chose were simple ones expressing love for their mothers. It took a long time to teach them, but it didn’t matter. I loved visiting those children. They were so kind to each other and loving to us. And they didn’t care at all that my Arabic was rudimentary. They would always greet us with smiles and hugs, and we usually stayed after music time to play with them at recess.

However, an odd thing began to happen after a few weeks. The teachers at the school apologetically informed us that the songs we were to teach the children had changed. In fact, they changed several times over the next few weeks. We had one cold and formal interview with a school administrator, in which we feebly suggested that our songs had been more appropriate for Mother’s Day than the increasingly politically-toned songs they were insisting that we replace them with. In the end though, rather than our sentimental mother-I-love-you songs, we had to settle for teaching the children songs about the glory of the Syrian Republic, and standing for Bashar al-Assad “with heart, with blood,” etc. (I still remember that ridiculous chant we would recite.)

I still held out the hope, though, that even though the songs were decidedly not to do with mothers at all, at least the program would be a nice tribute to the mothers, who would think their children adorable no matter what songs they sang. When we arrived at the room where the Mother’s Day performance was to be held, I was impressed with the grandeur of the setting. A stage festooned with flowers was crowned by a gigantic projection screen. The audience was full of parents and grandparents, and children from a dozen or more schools were dressed in various costumes (including a group of very blonde Russian girls dressed up with their hair braided in ribbons to do a traditional Russian dance, reminding me that Russia’s cold war ties with Syria remain warm).

But as we settled back to enjoy the program, my warm and fuzzy Mother’s Day thoughts about my own mother in faraway America were intruded upon by my dawning realization that Mother’s Day in autocratic Syria is more about glorifying Bashar and the Regime than it is about honoring mothers. Most of the performances had overtly political themes. To me, there was just something obscene about twisting a celebration of children honoring the maternal bond into a blatant glorification of political repression and violence. The worst was a large group of identically-dressed children who couldn’t have been older than five or six, singing their hearts out with lyrics about being ready to fight to the death and bleed for the fatherland. As they sang, the screen behind them played video of graphic scenes of fire and bloodshed from various wars with Israel. By the time I got up on stage with my sweet, innocent charges to lead them through a political rallying cry for President Bashar (yes, complete with the Hitler-salute), I was feeling sick with anger and betrayal.
How was it that the tender family moment I had planned to share with these children had been perverted by a self-serving government into just another showy display of the “grassroots support” enjoyed by the regime? I felt used. I felt violated. I felt guilty for having been caught up in something I would never have done had I understood what it was from the beginning. My efforts to bridge cultural gaps and forge friendships between my country and Syria had, in this case, backfired on me in a way I never expected. It had all happened so gradually, and with such smooth and understated but iron-clad control that before I knew it, I was on Syrian national television (yes, the whole thing was filmed and broadcast) leading the most innocent of the innocent in saluting President Bashar like a dyed-in-the-wool Ba’ath partisan.
And now, as I watch Syrians being gunned down by that very same government as they demonstrate for basic human rights, I cringe again. Of course I wouldn’t obey Bashar if he told me to go out and shoot protesters. But I joined the faceless masses, however unwillingly, in singing his praises. All I can say is, I’m sorry. With all my heart, I support the Syrians in their cause, and wish them success and Godspeed as they begin their perilous journey toward freedom.

(Thank you to Thuriyah, one of my Arabic study buddies for reminding me of these events.)