On the fourth day of my trip to the Medical Educational Centre in Reyhanli, Turkey, I met Hiam. By this point, I was facing an internal struggle. I was so inspired by the bravery of these women who were willing to speak out, to share their story and to break down the barriers of silence that they had been enclosed in by the Syrian regime and the international community. Yet, another part of me was scared. I was scared to hear another story that I would not be able to handle. Another story that would reveal the gross injustices that these women had to go through without any one to turn to as they begged for help.
However, overpowering this internal struggle was a tangible sense of shame at the fear of merely being told these stories, or even at being able to refer to them as such, while for the women themselves they were reality. So, with this thought in mind I walked into the centre determined to let Hiam speak to me, determined to be able to give her a platform to expose those who carried out gross injustices against her. When I walked in, Hiam was waiting for me. There she was, sat on her wheelchair smiling at me.
Hiam is sixty years old, and she is from Zabadane, the suburbs of Damascus. Like many of the Syrians who fled during the war, Hiam was at first unwilling to leave her home in even the most intensive periods of shelling. “It was suffocating,” she told me, “But it was Syria. It was home. It was where I wanted to be”. In 2015, Hiam’s choice of staying or leaving was ripped away from her when a barrel bomb was dropped on her house, forcing her into a coma. When she opened her eyes, she found herself in the hospital, relieved to discover that her two daughters had safely made it out and were by her side.
Hiam’s injuries required extensive medical attention, which could not be provided to her by the hospital she was in. For a short period of time, Hiam and the medical team were considering the logistics of her transfer to a different hospital. Their contemplation was cut short, however, when Hiam and her two daughters were forced out of the hospital by government forces and thrown into detention centres. Not even the bounds of a hospital warranted the mercy or respect of the Syrian regime for basic human rights.
Hiam asked them to let them go, to have mercy on her. To consider her age and medical condition. She pleaded, telling them that they had not done anything wrong. Their response was shocking. They called her a “traitor to the nation”. As Hiam said this, I clenched my hand to her. I soon learned that Hiam was told that she and her two daughters would be imprisoned until they found her son, who allegedly had a “dissenting opinion” towards the Syrian regime. The threshold for justice in her case was so low that a mere opinion was enough, even if such opinion was not her own.
Hiam and her daughters were imprisoned for two and a half years. As she described the conditions to me, she shook her head. Between every stage of the story, she closed her eyes, almost as if she was trying to remember what happened and then instantaneously tried to wipe the image from her memory. Hiam recounted how the prison room they were in held more than fifty women, all cramped up in a tight space, barely able to breathe. They were occasionally given bread and water. On some occasions, however, the respect for human dignity was so low that when they complained of thirst they were forced to drink from the toilet.
Hiam lived for two and a half years on the prison grounds. Two and half years without sunlight, without movement, without mercy. Allowing her to sit down was the special treatment she received in light of her age and medical condition. The rest of the women imprisoned with her were so cramped that they would take shifts standing and sitting.
At one point, Hiam stopped talking. I asked her what was wrong, if her story had finished. She shook her head and told me that even if she spoke for days, the stories of injustices she experienced during her years of imprisonment would never end. “There are some things that cannot be repeated,” she would say, “some things which cannot be expressed.”
So, we will never know the real extent of the horror that Hiam and her daughters experienced. Just as we will never know the extent of inhumanity experienced by those who are arbitrarily detained by the Syrian regime for crimes they did not commit. All we have are brief snippets given through accounts of brave individuals such as Hiam, and information such as the Caesar report which reveals the deaths and stories of thousands of detainees in government custody.
But the reality is that the dead cannot speak. If they could, I am certain they would echo Hiam:
“Leave it to your imagination,” she said, “and then some”.
Sarah is a third year undergraduate student studying BSc Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University College London. She has a keen interest in human rights - with a particular interest in Middle Eastern Affairs due to her Syrian origins.