The Morning They Came for Us by Janine di Giovanni Read Free Book Online Page B

years of French occupation, coups, years of Ba’athists,’ she said. ‘Now we do not want the years of Islamists.’
    After dinner, we sat on the balcony amongst flowering jasmine plants, smoking apple-flavoured shisha. Ahmed sat in a wicker chair. ‘I am one hundred per cent behind the government – not that I believe everything Assad is doing is right,’ he said, ‘but because the time is not right for change and it should not be imposed by the West.’
    â€˜Syria is geopolitically important,’ he added. ‘People want to get their hands on it. And why should we take democracy lessons from Saudi Arabia, which arms the opposition?’ Saudi Arabia, he reminded me, ‘did not let women drive’.
    The party did not break up until after midnight, and we went out into the street. There was no curfew. People were still out on the streets, walking home from dinners or from visits with family. We passed a bank of floodlights on a street corner: a commercial was being filmed in the middle of a country that had just declared civil war.
    â€˜Life goes on,’ Ahmed said.
    There was a crowd of people watching the shoot, and a few actors were waiting for their call. I saw an actress named Dima, whom I had met at the hotel the day before while she was dressing up in Gucci and Christian Louboutin heels for a magazine photo shoot. The shoes, she pointed out, were a brand that was a favourite of the President’s wife, Asma al-Assad.
    In an interview with Asma for US
Vogue
entitled ‘A Rose in the Desert’, the journalist Joan Juliet Buck praised the beauty and philanthropy of Asma al-Assad, wife of the dictator. The piece had unwisely been published in the magazine’s March 2011 ‘Power’ issue, just as the Arab Spring was erupting in the Middle East. It caused a storm of criticism and was pulled off
Vogue
’s website in May 2011, as it became clear how many people the government was willing to kill to remain in power.
    Buck later said she had been pressured not to mention politics to the Assads. In other words, reading between the lines, she was not to counter the glowing references to Asma’s beauty with the fact that her husband’s father’s regime had killed thousands of people in three weeks to wipe out Muslim extremists (in the Hama massacre in 1982). And that Asma’s husband was now basically doing the same.
    Like Asma, Dima wanted to be in
Vogue
. She was sitting in a chair near the window being made up when I first saw her: like Asma, she was stunning: alluring eyes and strong bone structure. Dima saw me and smiled, motioned for me to come in: she spoke good English and wanted news of the world.
    â€˜Not of war,’ she said. ‘Please don’t talk of war. Talk of the world. What’s happening out there? I want to go to New York, to California . . .’ She wanted to hear about Kanye West and Kim Kardashian; about films showing in cinemas where there was no war; about music and magazines and dresses.
    That night with Ahmed, Dima spotted me in the car, and called me over. ‘Do you want to come and watch?’ she asked. ‘We just started filming.’
    Behind her, looming slightly, were two burly men in leather jackets. One of them motioned for her to come back after she talked to me, and she obeyed, head bent. She looked solemn as they spoke. Then she approached our car again. She was no longer friendly.
    â€˜Maybe you’d better go,’ she said. ‘It’s late. I’ll call you tomorrow. We can drink coffee or something.’
    â€˜Who are those men? Your bodyguards?’
    She looked at them to make sure they were not listening, and then cupped her hands around my ear, as if telling a little girl a secret. She shook her head.
    â€˜They are Shabiha,’ she said. ‘Just go home.’
    Damascus has two faces.
    There are the opposition activists who are working day