Massacres and resilience in Hama, Syria’s insubordinate city

The Hama that Mohammed Hisham Barazanko paints does not exist any more.

Some features in his pictures are recognisable: there are alleyways covered by pointed arches like the ones near his studio.

And if you look hard enough, black and white stone ablaq features can be found decorating some of the older buildings.

Yet, much of the cultural heritage depicted in his shimmering pastels has been erased.

Cities across Syria have been pulverised by a decade and a half of civil war. Syrians are quite literally picking up the pieces now that Bashar al-Assad and his government have been removed.

Hama’s levelling came much earlier, in 1982, during a massacre that began on 2 February, lasted for 27 days and remained unspeakable during the Assad family’s 54-year rule.

Barazanko was 20 at the time. He watched as soldiers under the command of Assad’s uncle Rifaat encircled the city, bombarded it with air strikes and slaughtered an estimated 40,000 people.

Afterwards, Barazanko could barely recognise his home town. “I was shocked. There was nothing. Half of the city had been destroyed,” he told Middle East Eye.

“These neighbourhoods had stood since the 12th century and their stones gave out a special kind of energy, a feeling of relief,” he added.

“I paint so the whole world can see Hama as it was.”

‘Strength and a desire to live’

The Orontes river whips through Hama, making its famous medieval water wheels groan as they turn.

In Arabic, the river is known as the Asi, or the insubordinate, a name folklore attributes to the way it flows in the opposite direction of all other nearby rivers.

It is a characteristic Hamawis adopted with relish.

“The people of Hama are known for their preservation of traditions, their generosity and their resilience in the face of adversity,” says Syrian Network for Human Rights director Fadel Abdulghany, a son of the city.

“The history of the city and the spirit of its people reflect strength and a desire to live despite the difficult challenges.”

Since the Baath party seized power in a 1963 coup, Hama has repeatedly been an epicentre of unrest, often with deadly results.

In 1964, Syrians protested against their new Baathist leaders across the country and Hama was at the forefront of the movement.

The ensuing crackdown in the city killed scores and fomented the rise of the Fighting Vanguard, an armed group associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

By the early 80s, Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, had staged a coup of his own within the Baath party and had led Syria for a decade.

As Hafez cemented his dominance over the state and the military, repression, corruption and sporadic armed resistance led by the Fighting Vanguard grew.

In April 1981, troops went door to door in Hama seeking members of the Muslim Brotherhood and affiliated fighters. More than 300 were killed as security forces stormed the city.

Ten months later, Hafez, Rifaat and the military came for the city again.

Faced with popular protests, fierce criticism from prominent local figures and tensions with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Assad government decided to make an example of Hama, its residents and the few hundred fighters embedded there.

Barazanko’s paintings depict some of the pain inflicted during those days of siege and murder: women weeping and a child thanking God for a piece of bread.

His words paint an even bleaker picture. “They rounded up the young men, lined them against walls and killed them. I remember seeing the soldiers put people’s heads in a press and cracking them open,” he said, choking on his words.

Flooding the prisons

Maher Mohammed, 66, sells clothes from a trestle table on al-Obaisi bridge, an area that hums with the sound of informal merchants.

For much of Hama’s 3,000-year-old history, the city has been a market town, and it still draws in traders from the surrounding countryside.

“Under Assad, the military would come and take whatever they wanted from your stalls without paying,” Mohammed recalls ruefully.

Mohammed participated in the 1964 protests, though he was just a child. He remembers soldiers responding to his throwing of stones with gunfire.

Later, in 1982, he was one of the thousands of youths who were made to stand in a line along an execution wall.

“Somehow, the bullets missed me and I stayed alive,” he says, laughing in disbelief.

Though both Mohammed and Barazanko survived, being from Hama and a religious Sunni put targets on their back, and they were eventually imprisoned.

Barazanko was arrested in 1985 and held for years in Syria’s most notorious prisons. The first four months he spent with his hands tied behind his back, eating scraps from the floor using only his mouth.

“I wrote poems to the birds on the windowsill. When my cellmates were dying in my arms, I’d read them what I wrote,” he says.

Syria’s prisons were flooded with Hamawis after the massacre. Former inmates from across the country told MEE of the close bonds they formed with them.

“The fact that many Hama residents were detained in prisons during the 1980s and 1990s contributed to shaping a general Syrian perception of Hama as a symbol of resistance against injustice,” says Abdulghany.

“This perception strengthened the solidarity of many Syrians with the people of Hama, but the regime tried to distort their image by describing them as extremists and terrorists.”

The final battle

Bashar al-Assad inherited the presidency when Hafez died in 2000. But the government’s methods of oppressing Hama stayed the same.

There were sporadic arrest campaigns, sham trials and strict surveillance. The city was also marginalised politically and economically.

Naturally, when the Syrian revolution broke out in 2011, Hama became an opposition stronghold. The largest protests were held in the city, drawing half a million people.

Abdel Basset al-Sarout, a footballer-turned-singer, addressed the massacre and wall of silence that met it in his revolutionary anthem Jannah, jannah.

“Oh, city of Hama, forgive us. For we owe you, you are one of us,” he sang.

Well aware of its symbolism, the government crushed the uprising in the city with one of the earliest bloody crackdowns.

‘The massacre of Hama in 1982 had a deep impact, not only on us but on all Syrians and the world’

– Mahmoud Ibrahim al-Saed, former rebel

Maher Baz, a 64-year-old taxi driver, remembers the military closing off all the streets as soldiers and tanks closed in.

“They were shooting everyone, including children. I saw a lot of bodies,” he tells MEE.

Mahmoud Ibrahim al-Saed was 15 when the war broke out. He lived in Khafseen, a small village in northern Hama. 

When his brother was killed by attacks on his village, Saed joined the rebels to exact revenge. He says Hama’s history of massacres and oppression also motivated him to take up arms.

“The massacre of Hama in 1982 had a deep impact, not only on us but on all Syrians and the world – especially the residents of Hama city and its suburbs,” he says.

Hama remained in Assad’s hands throughout the civil war until a shock rebel offensive late last year.

Syrian soldiers, impoverished and demoralised, melted away as rebels charged out of Idlib, a province north of Hama.

Within days, the front line reached the city’s doorstep and Assad’s military dug in for what would become its final stand.

The battlefields are now littered with abandoned tanks crawling with curious children.

Shrapnel holes and bullet casings hint at the five days of ferocious fighting in early December – battles Saed took part in.

“When we liberated Hama, we acutely felt the end of the regime,” he said.

“We did not expect to return to Hama at all in all our life. We dreamed of the city, and our land and our villages. Seeing the city and our home really brought tears to our eyes.”

Time for justice

Syria’s new rulers have been left with a broken and traumatised country.

Bringing perpetrators of atrocities to justice is just one of a long list of priorities Ahmed al-Sharaa, the rebel leader who has now become interim president, needs to address.

But 43 years have passed since the Hama massacre and most of the figures behind it are dead or have disappeared – except Rifaat al-Assad.

The 87-year-old known as the “Butcher of Hama” is believed to have escaped to Russia like his nephew Bashar.

Anwar al-Bunni, a Berlin-based human rights lawyer from Hama, hopes justice will be done.

He escaped the city in 1981 during that year’s massacre and is now part of a team that has pursued Syrian officials in European courts, including Rifaat.

“We submitted cases against him in Switzerland and there is an arrest warrant against him,” he tells MEE.

Russia is unlikely to hand over Rifaat anytime soon. Moscow granted the Assad family asylum on “humanitarian” grounds after Bashar fled Syria on 8 December.

However, a trial in absentia may still take place in Switzerland.

“No one will forget the massacre,” says Bunni. “And no one will allow Rifaat to escape punishment.”