“Even in your own house, if you speak against the regime, you do so in a whisper,” she said.
Even the four walls of one’s home did not guarantee protection, Lujein remarked. Nowhere was it safe to criticize Assad and his government. “They can do anything they want to anyone who goes against them.” “They teach us always to be afraid of the government,” said Alaa. “That was the most peaceful weapon they used.”īut sheer terror was also a deterrent the government unleashed on its people. At any moment, government forces could appear to violently disperse the protesters. It was a wise strategy, her husband said. Out of fear for her life, she did her best to hide her sympathy for the pro-democracy cause when people gathered on the streets chanting. “Sorry to say that, but that’s the way it was.”Īt the time, Lujein was studying English literature at Damascus University. “They were dealing with the country as their farm, and we were their animals,” Alaa said. The primary goals, he said, were to express discontent with the Syrian government and to oust a president who had become a despot. Alaa calls it a young people’s revolution, but said there were “old people” involved as well. Syria’s bitter revolution began March 15, 2011, with what were known as pro-democracy protests, primarily in the capital of Damascus and in the ancient city Aleppo - then the country’s most populous city.
“People felt that if they went out and protested, he would leave,” Alaa said. They are talking about revolution that rocked its way through the Middle East: Tunisia in 2011 the Arab Spring in Egypt in 2011 the Yemeni Civil War in 2015 a 2018 state of emergency in Libya, less than a week after a United Nations ceasefire went into effect.įor close to a decade, civil uprisings and armed insurgencies have raged throughout Syria, sparked by the tyranny of the dictatorial leader of that country, Bashar Hafez al-Assad. It is such an all-American, child-centric scene - except that what Lujein and Alaa Alkaridi, the parents of this small child, are discussing centers around the painfully adult topic of the civil war that has killed so many men and women in their native Syria and has reduced much of their home country to rubble. Sometimes the stranger is enlisted in the game of musical headbands as well. From time to time while her mommy and daddy are talking to the stranger, she trades decorated headbands with her mother: a unicorn, tiny mouse ears, colorful ribbons. A sheet of paper posted at a child’s eye level shows the first, impressive attempts of a two-and-a-half year-old learning to print her name. Toys are everywhere in the small apartment in Vancouver, Washington.
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