IRELAND/SYRIA:Raghida Issa has come to Dublin to accept an award on behalf of her jailed husband, a Syrian human rights lawyer, writes Lara Marlowe
RECENT VISITORS to the home of the jailed Syrian human rights lawyer Anwar al-Bunni told his wife Raghida Issa that she had been invited to Dublin to receive the "Front Line Award for Human Rights Defenders" on his behalf.
"The phones are tapped," Issa explained in Front Line's office in Blackrock, Co Dublin. "So they had to tell me in person. The only people I told were our children and Anwar's lawyers. I was afraid if the government knew, they'd stop me travelling. I sent my passport to Dublin via DHL [courier service], and Front Line got the visa."
President Mary McAleese will present Issa with the award in Dublin's City Hall this morning. "I don't know if it will help," Issa says. "But we need pressure from outside, just to remind them there are people in prison."
On May 17th, 2006, plainclothes mokhabarat (intelligence agents) grabbed Bunni in front of his apartment building and bundled him into a car. He was blindfolded and beaten, then charged with seeking to overthrow the regime, threatening public order, incitement to sectarian hatred and being in contact with foreign powers. He was later sentenced to five years in prison.
Issa is allowed to visit her husband once a week, in a 15m-long prison corridor where families and prisoners are separated by wire mesh. The couple, both aged 49, married in 1987. Their only physical contact is touching fingers through holes in the mesh.
"There are about 100 men, women and children crowded into the corridor. It's very noisy," Issa says. "For the political prisoners, the mokhabarat push other people away and stand next to us. They tell us to talk only about the house and the children."
Bunni lives in fear since he was attacked by one of his cell mates, a common law criminal. He is forbidden from going to the library, having books or writing, and is allowed to read only official Syrian newspapers. "It is like torture for him," says Issa. Their sons Iass (21) and Aram (17) and daughter Lilas (19) rarely visit. "It upsets them too much to see their father in a prison uniform, behind bars," Issa says. "I only take them when they ask me."
When I interviewed Bunni in Damascus, four months before he was arrested, he told me he represented 650 political prisoners, some of whom had been held for a quarter-century. He believed another 1,000 were held secretly by the intelligence services.
Six days before his arrest, Bunni signed the Beirut- Damascus Declaration, along with 273 other Syrian and Lebanese intellectuals. It demanded that Syria accept Lebanese sovereignty. Six of the Syrian signators arrested in 2006 are still held, including Bunni. Last December Bunni's brother Akram, who is married to Issa's sister Rosette, organised a meeting of opposition groups in Damascus. Akram and 13 other participants have since been imprisoned.
These 20 prisoners are the seed of a democratic, western-oriented Syria. Though they are not allowed to establish a formal organisation, their families support each other with frequent phone calls and visits.
Bunni was one of the most outspoken. "This regime built its system on human rights violations," he told me in 2006. "They know if they open the smallest window, it will be the beginning of the end. They know it, and we know it."
The situation has deteriorated over the past two years. "When Anwar was arrested, he was charged and taken to Adra prison the next day," Issa says. "Those arrested in December were held incommunicado for two months before their families knew where they were."
On April 21st five international human rights groups, including Front Line, hand-delivered a three-page letter to Syria's ambassador to London, Dr Sami Khiyami. They brought up the case of Dr Kamal al-Labwani, a physician and the founder of a political party, who was last year sentenced to 12 years in prison because he met US and European officials. Faeq al-Mir, another political activist, was sentenced to 18 months for telephoning a friend in Lebanon to offer condolences on the assassination of a Lebanese politician.
The letter appealed for clemency for Dr Arif Dalilah, the former dean of the faculty of economics at the Syrian University, who has served seven years of a 10-year sentence for criticising Syrian authorities. In solitary confinement, Dalilah has lost the use of a leg because of blood clotting, and suffers from heart disease.
Issa is "afraid of what will happen when I go back. They may interrogate me: 'Why did you go? Who did you meet?'. . . When they kidnapped Anwar, I lost my job". Issa was fired without notice after 27 years as an engineer in the transport ministry. Now she helps nuns working with Iraqi refugees.
Does she ever wish her husband had just kept quiet? "All the time," Issa admits. "I would still love him as much. Anwar thought only of helping political prisoners, to the point of neglecting his family. When he gets something in his mind, he is like his five brothers (two of whom have served 15-year prison sentences). He has to do it - for Syria."
Though a frail, humble man, Bunni has the aura of a future Nelson Mandela or Mahatma Ghandi. When I ask what she loves most about him, Issa at last breaks into a smile. "His enthusiasm," she says. "He never gives up. He is brave." Then she sighs.