Over the course of the continuing decade-long Syrian battle, documentation of the conflict and its results has at all times been desired by the skin world. From footage unfold on social media to complete masterpieces produced by those that lived via it, such because the film ‘For Sama’ in 2019, those that had been lucky sufficient to solely witness the battle had 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 report precisely what they noticed round them, with none certainty of whether or not the world would, at some point, see it or if they might even survive the ordeal. Abdallah Al-Khatib was one such particular person.
What made his state of affairs 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 website which was house to lots of of 1000’s 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 assist 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 digital camera of a pal—Hassan Hassan, who tried to go away however was detained and tortured to demise—Khatib filmed footage of the state of affairs inside the camp for others who would use it outdoors to provide their very own movies. “I assumed I might 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 complete pressure of the regime’s repression, and Khatib’s movie has an intense approach of displaying that. With hunger ravaging the camp and assist assets operating dangerously dry, the camp’s inhabitants—together with quite a few kids—could possibly 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 could possibly be seen all through the camp as testimony to Assad’s long-perfected technique of ‘siege and starve’ warfare.
Other than 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 delusion 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.
Moderately than a betrayal, the siege “was moderately 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 harassed that, via acts reminiscent of historic massacres and the concentrating on of lots of 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 targets.”
All through the movie, the viewer typically notices that, opposite to fashionable 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, nonetheless, that it “was really nothing distinctive to us as Palestinians, however it’s also possible to see it in different elements of Syria and you may additionally see it in Afghanistan.”
The essential 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 might 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 operating water, and different fundamental each 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 affect was most blatant when he was about to title his movie ‘The Siege inside Me’ moderately than the present and ultimate title of ‘Little Palestine: Diary of a Siege.’
“There are additionally constructive features,” he mentioned, recalling when every part was locked down throughout 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 features of life, in addition to permitting him to see the true worth of issues. “We now have to understand that we dwell in a consumerist world. We worth issues that go by, that may break, like a fridge. We don’t think about the true values just like the relationships between individuals, for instance, or the human being itself.”
When listening to concerning the rising and more and more vocal class of public figures, teachers and journalists who help the Assad regime and echo its declare that it is just combating 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 combating terrorism, Damascus and its supporters purpose to justify their atrocities and crimes towards humanity. “Everybody at all times tries to search out the ethical justifications, though in the long run they’re political and financial pursuits.”
He added that all the idea of combating terror utilizing atrocities is “the rhetoric of the prevalence of the West,” referring to the favored narrative following the state of the US-led ‘conflict on terror.’ “This serves the pursuits of the West, so the entire world circles round them and their pursuits. We should always not settle for within the very starting this rhetoric of combating terrorism,” Khatib insisted.
Abdallah Al-Khatib’s movie ‘Little Palestine: Diary of a Siege’ is, subsequently, the intimate and revealing—with dashes of humour and knowledge—account of that siege of Yarmouk camp, delivered to us by laborious copy footage smuggled by Khatib’s pals, 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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