Enab Baladi Issue # 73 – Sunday, July 14, 2013

Baylasn Omar

Translated by Ruba Al Jarf

“After being arrested, I knew the meaning of Injustice, and I am willing more to ask for freedom”. 

This phrase has been summarized by Huda after she tasted the injustice of warden…

Huda adds describing the moments of her arrest “I did not expect that I will be arrested with two of my friends on the forty checkpoint, and I said to myself that we will be investigated and then released; however, after an hour of stopping us at the checkpoint, they arrested us”.

Transferring her in a car to the fourth platoon in the mountains of Moadamyeh with beatings and verbal abuse has become an unforgettable memory… “I was scared when I boarded the car with the security agents; we were taken to the mountains of the fourth platoon, with a tremendous amount of insults and beatings. They did not tolerate us because we are women, but on the contrary, being from Daraya has increased the amount of insults”.

Huda and the other detainee were not afraid that they were arrested but Huda’s first concern was her daughter and her husband… “What has become a concern to me were my little girl and my fear about my husband to be arrested by them”.

They were difficult minutes that passed from her life’s moments until she was taken to the prison but she did not realize that the hardest was to come… “When I entered the prison, my senses have disappeared and I felt I was in a dreamlike. The room was underground, dark and putrid, and a large number of detainees exceeded 30, we were in a room that is two meters in its length and width”.

Huda described the poor health status of the detainees and lack of care that they received, where in most of the time they were not provided with any kind of treatment or the possibility to go to the hospital… “I got sick and they did not treat me or send me to the hospital, I stayed in the prison regardless my health condition that started to deteriorate when I entered the detention centre… this is apart from getting lice”.

Huda had been tortured for seven days continuously, it was “a physical torture where I was beaten with a stick, and they stretched me more than once during the investigation which made me collapse from the frequent interrogation”.

She paused for a little bit and then continued saying “there is worse than the physical torture which is the psychological torture, and this is what I do not like to remember or talk about. I mean by this the intended harassment that they used to do for us through searching us, touching our bodies in a shameful way, threatening us with rape, and hearing the screams of the men while torturing them and exposing them to electric shocks that make their voices reverberating in the whole place”.

Huda adds that despite everything she always had “hope and optimism” that she will be released at any moment, and she did not feel despair for one moment. The walls of the prison that “restricted my body are not going to limit my spirit and mental power”.

Huda’s detention lasted for two months and the in advance fabricated accusation, despite her random arrest, was “cooking for armed men”. She says “we used to spend our days in prison reading the Qur’an with other detainees. When I was transferred to Adra, I learned knitting wool where one of the girls has taught me to do so”.

Huda concludes her conversation “I got to know people from different regions, they differ in their characters and their way of thinking and this has contributed to increase my experience of life as I learned patience, but I wished that I experienced it elsewhere”.