May 26, 2006

How do you imagine a normal person would live between the ages of 19 and 35? Getting a higher education, working, travelling a bit perhaps, marrying, maybe having children? That's a pretty average destiny that most people would follow.

Yassin Al Haj Saleh was robbed of the right to be an ordinary human being. As he was studying medicine at 19, he was arrested with a number of other "dissidents" in his university in Aleppo. His sin (apparently being a communist) was not revealed to him for 11 years, when he was finally charged en masse with 600 other prisoners "before the State Supreme Security Court with no lawyers and no witnesses. Their crime: Challenging the aims of the ruling Baath Party and joining a group that wanted to overthrow the political system."

A "crime" worthy of 16 years in jail, according to the Syrian regime, and worthy of the torture he only partly describes: "Islamists were flogged up to 500 times. People like us, Communists, whoever, only got 100. Me, it was less, I think," he said with a tiny smile. "I lost consciousness after 72."

Yassin Al Haj Saleh, who recently signed the Beirut-Damascus declaration, is a brave man, and one of our most respected and eloquent civil society activists. These are the Syrians we should be talking about, and whose values are much more representative than regime apologists would have you believe.

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