A Brief Taste of Prison

In 1986, fresh out of my medical internship, I headed to the Beirut airport to catch my flight to the United States to start my residency training. I was looking forward for a change. The civil war was bogged down in recurring cycles of violence with no end in sight. Besides, as a Syrian citizen, I had little long term prospects for a medical career in Lebanon. I checked in at the ticket counter and proceeded through the Lebanese immigration counter. As I turned the corner to descend to the departure lounge, I saw two men at the bottom of the stairway and my heart skipped a beat.

The men were short, scrawny, in ill-fitting suites and looking out of place. I knew immediately what they were. They might as well have had neon lights on their forehead flashing mukhabarat. After a momentary hesitation, I proceeded down the stairs with an air of confidence hoping that I would pass without harassment. I was wrong. I handed over my passport to one of the men. He opened my passport then looked up at me with disdain and asked where I was going. After I told him, the dreaded question came up: “Wein daftar al askarieh?”-where is you military service booklet. I told him that I did not do my military service but that my family had left Syria when I was five years old. He frowned and fell silent. His friend whispered to him: “He’s a doctor just going to specialize, why don’t you let him go?” But he had other ideas. They both walked off to their officer who was sitting in the middle of the departure lounge looking like he owned the place.

I suddenly spotted a familiar face among the crowd of passengers. He was a family friend of my fiancé (and now wife of 18 years), a businessman who appeared to be well connected. I inched over to him and told him that I needed his help. He looked back at me sheepishly and told me that you can’t mess with these people. With a casual wave of his hand, the officer summoned me. Looking bored, he proceeded to lecture me for the next five minutes about how it was my patriotic duty to liberate the Golan Heights. When he was done, he waved to his men to take me away.

I was driven to the mukhabarat headquarters in Ramlet el-Baida. On the sixth floor office, I was relieved of the contents of my pockets including my wallet and was asked to surrender my belt. I was told that when the senior officers returned later in the afternoon, they will interrogate me. I then followed one of the officers to the basement of the building. He opened the metal door, let me in and locked the door behind me.

When my eyes accommodated to the darkness, I made out the outlines of my prison. It was a long narrow space, dank from the water covering almost half of the floor on the right. Lining the left side of the cell, some sitting on blankets others standing, were about fifteen other prisoners. Some walked up to me to console me as I stood shocked and dazed. They were a mix of Lebanese, Palestinians and Syrians, in this predicament for various reasons. Some had been in for almost three months. I spent the next hours feeling like my life was being sucked out of me. Just hours ago, I was hopeful and happy looking forward to a new and promising start. Now, I was in prison, not knowing what will happen to me or even whether anyone knew where I was.

Late that afternoon, the officer who booked me showed up at the cell door looking annoyed and called me over. He let me out and as I stood there soaked in sweat and disheveled, he told me to tuck in my shirt. We took the elevator back to the sixth floor offices. I feared the worst. As I exited the elevator, two neatly dressed young men introduced themselves as bodyguards of Assem Kanso, the head of the Lebanese Baath party. They told me to look out the window across a couple of empty blocks to a building. They told that my fiancé and her mother were waiting for me there.

Unbeknown to me, the businessman had managed to give a Lebanese immigration officer the phone number of my fiance’s family home and told him to call to tell them what happened. When the call was made, my future mother in law sprung to action. A friend of a friend knew someone who knew the wife of Assem Kanso. Calls were made. The bodyguards collected my suitcases, and had the officer return my wallet. I was driven to Mr. Kanso’s home for a tearful reunion.

When I returned several days later to the airport, it was in Mr. Kanso’s Range Rover with two armed men sitting in the back. I felt like the prototypical Lebanese warlord that I loathed so much. At the airport, the hypocritical bastard who lectured me about patriotism was now apologizing profusely. He called his minions to carry my suitcases. One of Kanso’s men walked me down to the departure lounge and bid me farewell. I asked him not to leave until I am on the plane but he told me not to worry, that everything was “taken care of”. I felt relieved only when my plane was in the air. I did not return to Lebanon for another ten years and then only with a different passport.

I hesitated for several months before writing this piece. On the one hand I did not want to over-inflate the magnitude of what happened to me. After all, I was lucky enough to come out of it unscathed. On the other hand, it is more than just a good story, it is emblematic of what goes on in routinely in Syria and to a variable extent in other Middle Eastern Mukhabaratocracies.

What angers me most about what happened is its complete randomness. Your life, as a citizen, is completely dependent on the whims of single, all powerful individual. If the mukhabarat officer woke up that morning with an annoying itchy rash on his backside, then consider yourself screwed. If, on the other hand, his wife was good to him the night before, he may feel generous on that particular day. You as a citizen have no rights and the law is what THEY tell you it is.

I cannot claim, because of this event, that I know what Michel Kilo and other political prisoners feel during their long incarcerations. I do know, however, how it feels in the first few hours: the sudden and unpredictable loss of your freedom, the shock, the desperation and the fear of what is to come. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemies… I take that back, I DO wish it on that mukhabarat officer in the departure lounge and I want to be the one sealing his fate with a flick of my hand.