I sit blindfolded and handcuffed inside the security service branch. Someone is pacing in circles around me, constantly questioning me.
His voice is hoarse as he hurls accusations at me and hits my head and face every now and then.
I think he is tall and very thin and wears black pants and a white shirt with yellow stripes. I believe he puts olive oil in his thin – black hair, I can smell it distinctly.
The investigator talks and I listen intently as I try to define my answers while my imagination attempts to reconstitute his facial features.
The investigator places one hand on my hand and the other on my shoulder. I feel a thick ring digging into my skull as he presses long and hard. His voice is very close to my ear as my eyes keep trying to make out his features.
I lose track of time in this position. My vision stills and blackens. I can see myself from some disembodied distance: a blindfolded girl with her hands cuffed backwards. A tall, thin man with oily, light hair and coarse hands exerts pressure on her head and shoulder. I can see his fingers and the worn golden ring on his left hand. He has brown eyes, light-brown skin, a thin moustache, and a protruding nose. There’s a black aura around him.
When you are forced not to see, you feel extremely distressed. It is pitch dark and you are in the most terrifying of places. Your eyes move rapidly, trying to see through this piece of leather and picture what is going on around you; the shape of the room, the security personnel, the jailer, the investigator.
Your ears are on the alert, trying to absorb all the sounds around you and use them to form a virtual image in your brain, which – under the circumstances – turns into a string of brutal, ugly images.
Your hands are folded backwards and tightly tied together. At this moment, you feel like they are going to separate from your body. You are totally paralyzed, even though it is only your hands and eyes.
The Investigator
I shall assume the role of the investigator in this case. The first stage is to make my prisoner feel afraid and insecure; cause them to collapse; destroy them psychologically and break them down to a childlike vision of reward and punishment. In short, I have to strip them from their environment, blind them.
People depend greatly on their eyesight to assimilate what is going on around them and to build reactions and feelings. Therefore, I maximize the factors that are unknown to the prisoner and use, aside from blindfolding them, an appropriate mix of yelling, torture, and threats. I also force then to sit on the floor in a fetal position at all times.
“They put a nylon bag [around my head], tied my hands and took me to a security station in Maarat al-Naaman, in Idlib. They put me in a half-filled gasoil barrel and later took me before the investigator,” said Mohammad. “I was trying to picture what he looked like; a short, bald and fat man sporting a beard who looked like a thug. Then I got used to him, as he hit me a lot. We also talked a lot and we had a clear relationship. I was afraid of being taken to another branch. He was the first person with whom I felt afraid, worried and tense.”
In March 2012, Mohammad was working as a photographer for several news agencies to convey the popular unrest in various regions across northern Syria. He was arrested by security forces and detained at the military intelligence station in Maarat al-Naaman. Then he was transferred to the Idlib military intelligence branch, the military police in Aleppo, a four-member intelligence council in Homs, the military police in the Qaboun district of Damascus, and the Homs Central Prison – an overall detention period of a year and a half.
The security force member grabs the candy from his hand and throws it away. Security personnel immediately attack him, tie him up, and blindfold him. Raed arrives at the Air Force Intelligence branch on the verge of passing out due to the severity of the beating to which he has been subjected on the way there.
“Beat him up.” This was the first time Raed heard the investigator’s voice, his first meeting with the man who will accompany him for six months. After a few minutes of beating, Raed passes out completely and later meets the investigator’s voice again after three months in solitary confinement.
“When he started yelling and interrogating me, I was able to picture what he looked like – a thin man, who, I sensed, was trying to get angry and yell. He was doing what he was told as an Air Force Intelligence branch investigator. He was ordering his men to beat and torture me all the time, and sometimes he would hit me himself. During the investigation, I would be on my knees or in the fetal position, as I was in my cell,” said Raed.
Raed was arrested twice at a roadblock because of his identity. The first time he was detained at the Khatib branch for nine months, and the second time he was held at the Air Force Intelligence branch, for six months.
A Caged Animal
Let us assume that the investigator in the previous scenes led the detainees to feel that someone had stripped them of their normal lives. They might feel like animals being hunted down in the wild, put in a cage, fed when necessary, and beaten into submission. Detainees become creatures that have been hunted and imprisoned, and live now at the mercy of their hunters.
These conditions can be likened to family dynamics; a father who is cruel to his a child, for instance. The father screams and rages – psychologically and physically – at his three-year-old child. Then one day he smiles and offers his son a small gift for no reason. How will the child feel towards his father at that moment and how will he react? Typically, the child smiles back, relieved with his father and pleased with itself.
During the latest interrogation, having gone through the aforementioned states, the investigator asks one of the troops present in the room to wipe my blood-stained face with a clean handkerchief and says, “take the blindfold off of her eyes” with a voice that sounds like it belongs to another man. He lifts the blindfold and opens my eyes towards the sound.
Three men are sitting behind the desk. The investigator sits in the middle. He is fat, and has a sweet face. He smiles and, without thinking, I involuntarily smile back at him. This does not change my feelings towards him, but my smile confuses me a little and makes me feel relaxed afterwards.
“You are like my daughter, he says. “You have a future and a life ahead of you. Don’t squander it on such matters. We are all like family here.”
“After several rounds of violent interrogations, he lifted the blindfold. Before I could realize what was going on, he brought me water and an egg sandwich. He asked me nicely if I was ok and in that moment I felt I was somewhat safe. He started telling me about his wife and children, about his neighbor who was getting divorced, about how he was unable to go to his hometown because he was serving his compulsory military service. He taught me how to roll a cigarette because commercial ones are expensive, and he offered me a smoke. When he first lifted the blindfold off, he smiled and I smiled back. I don’t know why.”
“Following several rounds of interrogation, he took my Facebook password and started going through my pictures. He told me to come closer and take my blindfold off. He started asking me about the girls in the pictures and whether I was romantically involved with any of them.
I told him about a girl I was in love with and he asked me whether I had asked her out for dinner and dancing. He offered me cigarettes and I told him about my love stories and how I used to live. He offered me oranges and cigarettes. The whole interrogation changed. It was really strange and I felt a bit relieved.”
Phase Two Of Interrogation
I go back to putting myself in the investigator’s shoes. I now have to enter phase two, which is to simply restore the prisoner to a bare minimum of normalcy. I take off the blindfold and I withdraw the two security personnel who do all the blindfolding, screaming, and torturing. I transform into someone who can communicate like a person with my prisoner; as a friend, a son and a brother. I do this all of a sudden, as if I was giving them some water before they die of thirst, or like a little child punished by being locked in his room and beaten for a month before being given a little present and a pat on the back.
Yet after an initial stage and despite what I have done so far, they understand perfectly that I am able to take them back to where they were before. Their feeling of relief with me is still a means by which I control them. Their relation to me will be different, as I am now much more than just an investigator to them.
On the investigator’s order and because the place is overcrowded, the detainee sits in the fetal position, which they grow accustomed to after a while. This was the case with Raed, but recently I have begun to notice he has been trying to get out of this position.
Raed sits with his back and head bowed. A moment later, I see him bracing himself and lifting his head. He relaxes a little before bending his head again, only to brace himself up again, straighten his back and lift his head. And this goes on and on.
This article has been translated from the original Arabic.
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