“I was raped by Assad’s thugs

It belonged to his grandmother. Something solid. Something to hold in your hands, run with your fingers and trace the path of memory. A small thing of beauty, inlaid with a delicate mosaic.

René opens the music box and tinkling music begins to play, the same song that was heard a long time ago in his living room in Damascus.

“This is all I have left of my house,” he says.

Everything about this young man suggests sweetness. René Shevan is short, slender and speaks in a low voice.

All week his emotions have come and gone. joy in the fall of Bashar al-Assad. Heartbreak over the memories it has triggered from his months in Syrian prisons.

“There was a woman. I still have her image here in my head. She was standing in the corner, and she was begging… it’s clear that she was raped.

“There was a boy. He was 15 or 16 years old. They were raping him and he was calling his mother. He was saying, ‘Mom… my mother… mom.'”

There was her own rape and sexual abuse.

When I met René, I had just escaped from Syria. That was 12 years ago. He sat in front of me, shaking and crying, terrified to show his face on camera.

The secret police had detained him because he had gone to a pro-democracy demonstration. They also knew he was gay.

Three of them gang-raped René. He begged for mercy, but they laughed.

“No one listened to me. I was alone,” he recalled in 2012.

They told him that this was what happened to him for demanding freedom. Another officer abused him every day. For six months he suffered this abuse.

When images of prisoners walking free in Damascus appeared on television this week, René returned to his own images.

“I’m not in prison now, I’m here. But I saw myself in the photos and in the images of the people in Syria. I was very happy for them, but I saw myself there… I saw the old version of me there. I saw when “They raped me and when they tortured me. I saw everything in flashback.”

He is crying and we stop the interview. A few minutes, he says.

I look at the wall of his living room.

There is a photo of his ruined house in Syria, one of René running in a marathon in Utrecht. Then an image of the Jesuit priest, Father Frans Van Der Lugt, 75, psychotherapist and ecumenical activist in Syria, until his murder in 2014.

It was Father Van Der Lugt who told René, who was struggling in a deeply conservative environment, that he was a normal human being, that Jesus loved him regardless of his sexual orientation.

René drinks a glass of water and then asks to continue our conversation.

Why did he agree to show his face in front of a camera now, I wondered.

“Because the republic of fear disappeared. Because I am no longer afraid of them. Because Assad is a refugee in Moscow. Because all the criminals in Syria fled. Because Syria became all the Syrian people again,” he answers. .

“I hope we can live as a people in freedom and equality. I am very proud of myself as a Syrian, Dutch and LGBT.”

That doesn’t mean he still feels safe living in Syria as a gay person.

Under the Assad regime, homosexual acts were criminalized.

The country’s new rulers have fundamentalist religious roots and have been involved in violence and persecution against homosexuals.

“There are many LGBT Syrians who fought,” says René.

“They were part of the revolution and they lost their lives. (The Syrian regime) killed them only because they were LGBT and because they were part of the revolution.”

René tells me he is “realistic” about the prospects for change. It is also concerned that all religious and ethnic groups, including the Kurds, receive protection.

René is among the around six million Syrians who fled the country and found safety in neighboring countries such as Lebanon, Jordan and Türkiye – the majority – or in places further afield in Europe.

Several European countries have already suspended asylum applications from Syrians, following the overthrow of the Assad regime. International human rights groups have criticized the move as premature.

It is estimated that there are one million Syrians in Germany. Among them, a notable disabled Kurdish girl whom I first met in August 2015, when she joined a vast column of people who had landed on the Greek island of Lesbos.

On his way north he passed through Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Austria.

To reach Europe from northern Syria, Nujeen had crossed mountains, rivers and the sea; his sister, Nisreen, pushed the wheelchair.

“I want to be an astronaut and maybe meet an alien. And I want to meet the Queen,” he said.

I crouched next to her on a dusty road, where thousands of asylum seekers lay exhausted in the midday heat. His good humor and hope were contagious.

This was a girl who became fluent in English by watching American television shows. Nujeen grew up in Aleppo and then, as the war escalated, he went to his family’s hometown of Kobane, a Kurdish stronghold that was subsequently attacked by the Islamic State (IS) group.

I meet her now in Cologne’s bustling Neumarkt square, surrounded by Christmas market stalls where locals eat sausages and drink mulled wine, and the dramas of Syria seem far away.

But not for Nujeen.

She’s been up all week watching TV, long after the rest of the family has gone to bed. It doesn’t matter that you have an exam for your business administration degree. She’ll figure it out.

Nujeen understands that there will never again be a moment like the fall of Assad, a moment of hope so singular.

“Nothing lasts forever. Darkness is followed by dawn,” he says.

“I knew I would never return to a Syria that had Assad as president, and that we would never have the chance to be a better nation with that man in charge. We knew we would never find peace unless he was gone. And now that chapter is over, I think the real challenge begins.”

Like René, he wants a country that is tolerant of diversity and cares about people with disabilities.

“I don’t want to go back to a place where there is no elevator and only stairs to an apartment on the fourth floor.”

As a Kurdish woman, she is well aware of her people’s experience of suffering in the region.

Now, as Kurdish forces are forced to withdraw from cities in the oil-producing north, Nujeen sees the danger posed by a new Turkish-backed regime.

“We know these people who came to power now. We know the countries and the powers that support them, and they’re not exactly fans of the Kurds. They don’t exactly love us. That’s our biggest concern right now.”

There are also fears of a possible regrouping of IS if Syria’s new leaders are unable to achieve stability in the country.

There are constant calls to relatives who still live in the Kurdish areas.

“They are anxious and worried about the future like all of us,” says Nujeen.

“We never stop calling, and we’re always worried if they don’t answer after the first ring. There’s a lot of uncertainty about what’s going to happen next.”

The uncertainty is amplified by the change in asylum policy in Europe.

Still, this is a young woman whose life experience—the experience of being severely disabled from birth, witnessing the terrors of war, traveling through the Middle East and Europe in search of safety—has created a capacity for hope. .

In the almost decade I’ve known her, she hasn’t dimmed. The fall of Assad has only deepened his faith in Syria and its people.

“There are many people who hope to see Syria fall into some kind of abyss,” he says.

“We are not people who hate, envy, or want to eliminate each other. We are people who were raised to be afraid of each other. But our default setting is that we love and accept who we are.”

“We can and will be a better nation: a nation of love, acceptance and peace, not chaos, fear and destruction.”

There are many hearts in Syria and beyond that will hope she is right.