Hama massacre survivors break 40-year silence

Iman wanted to give her father his slippers. As the plain-clothes security forces dragged him away, along with one of her male cousins, the 14-year-old girl followed. She begged the men to at least allow her relatives to cover their feet.

“We cried and ran after them, and asked them, ‘please, give them slippers – their shahata,'” Iman Al Alwani, now 57, recalled.

The armed men refused, and instead pulled out their guns.

“They shot a bullet at the door. There was a mark from it on the door, it came between me and the brick,” she told The National. “I wanted to give him [my father] his slippers. They didn’t let me.”

It was midday on a Friday, at the end of February 1982, in the Syrian city of Hama, around 200km north of the capital Damascus.

Hama had been besieged by men loyal to then-President Hafez Al Assad and his younger brother, Rifaat. He later gained the nickname the “Butcher of Hama” for overseeing the forces who carried out mass killings, torture and destruction in the city.

Pro-government troops had entered the city on the pretext of eliminating gunmen affiliated with Islamists that the Assad family saw as a threat to its rule. But the death and destruction they wrought on civilians and the city – much of it was destroyed – became one of the most striking examples of the Syrian state’s violence against its own people.

There are no exact death tolls from the massacre, which the former Assad regimes never investigated. The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), a non-profit organisation, puts the death toll at between 30,000 and 40,000 people and describes the events of February 1982 as, “the most horrific single massacre in the country’s modern history.”

For years, the survivors stayed quiet, unable to speak about what they had witnessed. They feared reprisals from the Assad family’s notorious intelligence services, both under Hafez and his son Bashar, who took power when his father died in 2000.

“They would throw you in prison if you spoke,” Iman said, sitting in her family home in Hama. “Maybe they would kill you so you couldn’t speak. We couldn’t talk.”

It is only now, after the end of more than 50 years of Assad dynasty rule in December, that survivors from the Hama massacre are able to speak out about what happened.

“This is the first time we feel able to speak,” Iman said. “Before, we couldn’t speak. We used to feel that the walls could hear us, and could write reports on us.”

Iman searched for her father, Maan Abdul Latif Al Alwani, who was in his late 30s when he was taken, to no avail. A smartly dressed man with a finely-waxed moustache, Maan hailed from a family rich in capital, but poor in favour with the Assad regime. Family members said their property had been gradually confiscated since the 1970s, and handed out to regime loyalists.

In the following days, Iman passed near a school being used as a makeshift prison, holding scores of men, but could not get close enough to see if her father and cousin were among the detainees. Two days later, the men disappeared.

“We never saw them again,” Iman said.

One of her eight siblings, Hamzi Al Alwani, said the family later heard from eyewitnesses that Maan Al Alwani had been shot dead by pro-Assad forces, alongside other men. “They were taken to a mass grave,” said Hamzi, now 52.

Hamzi and Iman’s cousin, Abulkader Al Alwani, can still recall the sounds from weapons used against the people of Hama. Fifteen years old in 1982, Mr Al Alwani remembers a narrow escape, fleeing while troops were distracted. His father and a brother were seized by the regime men.

“They made them say, ‘There is no god but Hafez al-Assad and Rifaat al-Assad,’ said Abdulkader, now a 58-year-old computer mathematics teacher. “These words are still ringing in my ears, and I hear the bullets whizzing as they scattered the people.”

The Al Alwani family was targeted because they were from an educated, landowning class that the Assad regime wished to erase, Abdulkader said. The Al Alwani cousins have documented at least 80 victims from 1982 from the extended family.

The regime, “wanted to give the impression that we were terrorists, extremists, and fanatics, but this is not true,” Abdulkader added.

The experiences of those who survived Hama also highlight the generations of trauma in Syria.

One of Iman’s four brothers, Muhaid, joined the anti-government protests that broke out in 2011 against Bashar Al Assad, partly in protest at the relatives he lost nearly three decades earlier. The consequences were equal in their brutality.

Muhaid, just two years old when his father was killed, had no memory of the violence of 1982, and refused to heed his siblings’ warnings about the risks of joining the demonstrations.

“We screamed at him, ‘Don't go out, we know what they did in the 1980s, don't go out,’” Iman said. “He replied, ‘I want to go out, I want to speak.’”

Most of those who were protesting in 2011 from Hama had lost their fathers in the 1982 massacre, she added.

Muhaid was arrested aged 32 in June 2012 when informants told regime security forces about his whereabouts, Iman said. The family gave money and gold to regime intermediaries to determine where he had been taken – a common practice among relatives of the tens of thousands of people missing in Syria’s network of detention centres. Less than a year later, he was confirmed dead, having been incarcerated in the notorious Sednaya prison north of Damascus. The family never received his body.

Following the Assad family’s fall, human rights organisations are urging Syria’s new transitional authorities to set up mechanisms to investigate massacres committed by the former regime, including the mass killings at Hama.

In a report released last month, the Syrian Network for Human Rights urged the country’s new authorities to set up a national investigative commission dedicated to accountability for Hama victims. The commission should present findings to the judicial authorities, along with clear recommendations about criminal prosecutions, compensation, and reparations to “ensure justice and redress for the victims,” the SNHR report said.

Hama survivors are aware that hundreds of thousands more people have gone missing or been killed since 1982. The scale of identifying all the victims from so many decades of loss is overwhelming, they believe.

“Today in Syria, there are 200,000 or 300,000 people buried in mass graves,” Hamzi said. “Who feels able to identify who is who? If they were 5, 6, 10, you could find out this is so-and-so, that so-and-so. But for 200,000 or 300,000, a state is powerless over them.”

All the same, they are determined to seek accountability for their lost loved ones, and see the fall of the Assad regime as an opportunity to overcome the brutality of the past.

“The Syrian people are peaceful people who love life,” Abdulkader said. “We don’t like violence. But we were brought monsters.”