SYRIA:Syrian dissident Nizar Nayouf spent 10 years in prison and was crippled by torture. Yet he says there is no peaceful alternative to the Assad regime, writes Lara Marlowein Paris.
Nizar Nayouf is living proof that it is worth signing petitions, supporting human rights organisations and writing to faraway dictators.
After nearly a decade in Syrian prisons, Nayouf was freed by President Bashar al-Assad when Pope John Paul II went to Damascus in May 2001, armed with letters from Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders and other groups.
Two months later, again bowing to international pressure, Damascus allowed the award-winning journalist, writer, poet, painter, cartoonist and human rights activist to travel to France to be treated for Hodgkin's disease, a form of blood cancer that is now in remission, and wounds inflicted by torture.
Nayouf (45), who now lives mostly in Holland, laughingly calls himself "the Ibn Batuta of Syrian prisons" after the great Arab traveller. He's an expert on Syrian jails: the military intelligence headquarters near the Damascus Sheraton, Palmyra, the Mazzeh prison, Sydnaya . . .
He was tortured only in the first two, he says. When he heard Gen Hisham Bukhtyar order underlings, "Put him on the chair", he passed out.
As the co-founder of the underground Committee for the Defence of Democratic Freedoms and Human Rights, Nayouf had spent years listening to accounts of torture in Syrian prisons. The chair - known as the German chair because it was allegedly invented by the Gestapo - was the Syrian instrument of choice. "Anyone would prefer to die," Nayouf says, "because he knows he is going to be paralysed for life."
The metal chair has moving parts that pull the spinal cord apart.
Victims cannot breathe; their vertebrae are fractured, and they are often paralysed from the waist down.
In Palmyra, Nayouf's jaw was broken - "I ate through a straw for three months," he says, and his occipital bone (back of the skull) was crushed. He went on hunger strike to demand transfer back to Damascus, where the torture stopped. Just as he once moved from prison to prison, he now goes from one European hospital to another. He walks with difficulty, leaning heavily on a cane. Yet he says he has "no personal case against the Syrian regime".
Through nearly a decade in solitary confinement, Nayouf kept his sanity by writing, painting and drawing cartoons. It was difficult to obtain books, so he wrote comparative studies of the rise of dictatorships in Franco's Spain and Mussolini's Italy, Nasser's Egypt and Ba'athist Syria, relying on memories from university. In one prison, he adopted a marmalade cat that squeezed under his cell door, calling it Ali Douba, after the then chief of Syrian military intelligence.
Today, Nayouf publishes an online magazine called Al Hakikah (The Truth).
He is completing a 20-year investigation into the Syrian regime's past use of prisoners as guinea pigs for chemical and biological weapons, sometimes with Western complicity.
He keeps in touch with dissidents inside Syria and campaigns on behalf of the estimated 2,000 political prisoners. Among them are Aref Dalila, who taught him economics at university, and his lawyer, Anwar al-Bunni. Bunni's wife Raghida just lost her job as an assistant engineer at the ministry of communications, because her husband is a dissident.
He is also concerned that the Syrian government has refused to allow Riad Saif, another prominent dissident who was released from prison last year, to travel to Europe for treatment of aggravated prostate cancer.
Though he doesn't like George W Bush, Nayouf was happy when the US president was re-elected.
"I had a theory that criminals in the Middle East could only be broken by criminals like Bush," he explains. "[The German philosopher] Hegel wrote about 'hydraulic societies', like Egypt under the Pharaohs and Syria today, where the state distributes water. He said they cannot be broken from within; that they must be cracked from the outside, like walnuts.
"But we saw what happened when Bush cracked the Iraqi walnut.
"The Americans created mass graves, not democracy. Democracy cannot happen in Syria in the foreseeable future. It would be like Iraq.
"The present situation is better than blood flowing in our streets."
Through long access to sources within the military and intelligence establishment, Nayouf has collected what he calls "the most dangerous archives of Syria." He distrusts intensely the Western intelligence agencies that court him. "They are very dirty; all like each other. They are criminals," he says.
Under Bashar al-Assad, Syria has improved, Nayouf says, not because the dictator is better than his late father, but because of the struggle of men like himself, and international pressure.
"Since I was released, I haven't heard of the German chair being used, or cigarettes. My whole back is scarred with cigarette burns. They still slap people around, but it's less than in the past.
"Seventeen thousand people disappeared in Syria since the mid-1970s. Now it's become impossible for people to disappear without trace."
The least bad option, Nayouf says, is for UN agencies, the European Parliament and human rights groups - "not hypocritical states" - to continue to press for an end to ill treatment, respect for fundamental rights and the release of political prisoners. "But to change the regime by force?
"No. I don't want to see Syria destroyed."