Over the course of the continuing decade-long Syrian battle, documentation of the struggle and its results has at all times been desired by the surface world. From footage unfold on social media to whole masterpieces produced by those that lived via it, such because the film ‘For Sama’ in 2019, those that have been lucky sufficient to solely witness the battle have been in a position to catch glimpses of the atrocities dedicated by the Syrian regime, its allies and the quite a few opposition teams on the bottom.
The interval resulted within the emergence of a technology of unlikely filmmakers and administrators, who picked up their cameras and determined to document precisely what they noticed round them, with none certainty of whether or not the world would, someday, see it or if they’d even survive the ordeal. Abdallah Al-Khatib was one such particular person.
What made his scenario much more distinctive, although, was that he was not simply in Syria however in one of many areas the place the regime of Bashar al-Assad and his loyalist forces laid siege to. The Yarmouk camp—that web site which was house to a whole bunch of hundreds of Palestinian refugees because the Nakba and their exile from Palestine in 1948—had all of the roads resulting in and from it blocked off by Assad’s forces whereas they held checkpoints on the camp’s outskirts.
Because the siege was enforced in 2012, the regime starved the camp’s inhabitants and forbade worldwide help from getting in. Anybody who dared to flee via a checkpoint was arrested, disappeared and sometimes tortured to death.
Chatting with me about his expertise, Khatib revealed that he initially had no plans on releasing his personal movie. Utilizing the digicam of a pal—Hassan Hassan, who tried to go away however was detained and tortured to loss of life—Khatib filmed footage of the scenario throughout the camp for others who would use it exterior to supply their very own movies. “I assumed I’d die” within the siege, he informed me, and had no concept if he would ever escape.
Previous to the outbreak of the Syrian Revolution, he had labored with the United Nations Reduction and Works Company (UNRWA) whereas learning sociology on the College of Damascus, planning to proceed his life in Yarmouk and to contribute in direction of the Palestinian inhabitants’s well-being. The Assad regime’s brutal crackdown on protestors all through the nation and the following siege on Yarmouk modified that.
Yarmouk is moving from being a refugee camp to a Damascus neighbourhood
Like a lot of the nation, Yarmouk and its Palestinian residents confronted the total drive of the regime’s repression, and Khatib’s movie has an intense means of exhibiting that. With hunger ravaging the camp and help sources working dangerously dry, the camp’s inhabitants—together with quite a few kids—might be seen choosing weeds out of the bottom to eat them, each uncooked and to be cooked as a soup. Undernourished infants and skeletal figures might be seen all through the camp as testimony to Assad’s long-perfected technique of ‘siege and starve’ warfare.
Apart from the apparent human rights violations that this technique resulted in, the truth that it focused Palestinian refugees en-masse was additionally seen as a contradiction of the Assad household’s long-perpetuated fable that it helps Palestinians and their historic plight. When requested whether or not he—as a Palestinian from Syria—noticed the siege and other atrocities by the regime towards his individuals as a betrayal, Khatib disagreed.
Relatively than a betrayal, the siege “was fairly a continuation of the collection of crimes dedicated towards Palestinians, and the Syrian regime by no means leaned in direction of the Palestinian trigger in any respect.” He confused that, via acts reminiscent of historic massacres and the concentrating on of a whole bunch of Palestinian fighters, “the Syrian regime used the Palestinians as a card of strain for its personal good in an effort to attain its personal objectives.”
All through the movie, the viewer usually notices that, opposite to widespread Western notions of what would happen in an apocalyptic state of affairs, the inhabitants of the camp acted with an air of dignity and upheld a lot of their pleasure and laughter regardless of their situation. Khatib insisted, nevertheless, that it “was truly nothing distinctive to us as Palestinians, however you may also see it in different elements of Syria and you can additionally see it in Afghanistan.”
The necessary query is, he defined, “who’s making the movie and the way do they wish to painting them? Western media is used to picturing us as damaged individuals, as victims and in that sense solely as numbers.”
The siege on Yarmouk could have ended just a few years in the past, however the ordeal left long-term results on him and others who survived it. When he eats, makes use of electrical energy, showers with working water, and different primary every day duties, he says he remembers the siege. Whereas there was no bodily impact on his physique, he admitted that it left a mark on his soul and psyche.
‘Today I am a doctor, but first I am a fighter’
That influence was most evident when he was about to title his movie ‘The Siege inside Me’ fairly than the present and last title of ‘Little Palestine: Diary of a Siege.’
“There are additionally optimistic points,” he mentioned, recalling when all the things was locked down in the course of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. “It did not make such a giant distinction for me as a result of I had lived this expertise earlier than.” When social media apps like Fb, Whatsapp and Instagram additionally briefly shut down this week, he talked about that it didn’t trouble him as a result of “I lived in conditions the place they weren’t accessible.”
The siege reportedly gave Khatib immunity towards sure points of life, in addition to permitting him to see the true worth of issues. “We now have to understand that we stay in a consumerist world. We worth issues that go by, that may break, like a fridge. We don’t contemplate the true values just like the relationships between individuals, for instance, or the human being itself.”
When listening to in regards to the rising and more and more vocal class of public figures, lecturers and journalists who help the Assad regime and echo its declare that it’s only preventing terrorism, Khatib in contrast them to a thief who “would ask himself for an ethical excuse to rob the financial institution.”
Through the use of the rhetoric of preventing terrorism, Damascus and its supporters goal to justify their atrocities and crimes towards humanity. “Everybody at all times tries to seek out the ethical justifications, though in the long run they’re political and financial pursuits.”
He added that the whole idea of preventing terror utilizing atrocities is “the rhetoric of the prevalence of the West,” referring to the favored narrative following the state of the US-led ‘struggle on terror.’ “This serves the pursuits of the West, so the entire world circles round them and their pursuits. We must always not settle for within the very starting this rhetoric of preventing terrorism,” Khatib insisted.
Abdallah Al-Khatib’s movie ‘Little Palestine: Diary of a Siege’ is, due to this fact, the intimate and revealing—with dashes of humour and knowledge—account of that siege of Yarmouk camp, dropped at us by exhausting copy footage smuggled by Khatib’s buddies, as soon as he fled Syria to Turkey after which Germany, the place he now lives. Will probably be screening in London on 13 and 15 October, as a part of the British Movie Institute’s (BFI) London Movie Competition.
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