Our Memory Belongs To Us begins with a generic quote from George Orwell. «Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.» We’ve heard generic aphorisms from 1984 deployed so many times before to criticise such a massive plethora of scenarios that applying such a quotation to the Syrian democide is a borderline ridiculous minimisation. Assad’s Syria is so, so much worse than an Orwell quote.
According to the most recent UN stats, more than 300,000 people have been killed in Syria since 2014. The wider death toll is thought to be closer to 600,000 – much, much more than the deaths Orwell ever witnessed in Spain, for example. There are a further 5.6 million registered refugees.
Statement of intent
It slowly becomes apparent that this opening Orwell quote is less a frame of reference to encourage the engagement of an international audience (which I’m sure it also is) than it is a statement of intent too. This group of four men, who managed to leave their homeland, want to reclaim and rejuvenate the narrative that they were denied while living in Syria. They want to construct their own ideas of past, present, future. They want to control the story, which has been warped and manipulated on all sides by people with vested interests in the conflict.
The footage is largely the result of work by Syrian activist Yadan Draji, who crossed the border into Jordan in September 2012 carrying a hard drive containing 12,756 clips of footage shot by himself and other citizen journalists in the southwestern city of Daraa – which birthed the revolution in the country. Draji documented the transformation of a non-violent uprising into the carnage we now know followed.
«I wanted to show how the regime’s media tried to deceive the world by depicting the uprising as an act of terrorism,» reads the director statement from Rami Farah. «I wanted to show how those who filmed on the ground found themselves amid a worldwide media conflict; everyone fighting to gain control over, and shape, the truth.» He reunites three of five friends (the other two were killed by the Assad regime) ten years later, «to really look at what they had shot and reflect on the knowledge they had produced.»
Draji documented the transformation of a non-violent uprising into the carnage we now know followed.
The three men in question are lead organiser Yadan Draji, Odai Al-Talab – an athlete on the national volleyball team, and Rani Al Masalma, studying law at Damascus University when it all started. All educated with strong professional prospects. Draji and Masalma are a good seven years older than Al-Talab, who would have been in his early 20s when everything began.
As they watch the shots of shells falling and sounds of gunfire, they recollect how they managed to capture the footage: Shaky handheld cameras clumsily obscured, for example, by hiding them in the tissue box on a car dashboard. Now they watch it from an almost clinically bare movie theatre.
A strong solution
It would have been very hard to make a watchable movie from these chaotic, unstabilised images alone. They reconstruct their memories of events by projecting the footage in front of the three men present as the camera films over their shoulders. This is a strong solution.
Somehow, they retain humour throughout the footage shown. In the clips, they make jokes about how they worried about electricity, how to access the Jordanian internet network whether lamb is still the same colour as they share a single potato. The humanity and sense of camaraderie in the face of overwhelming oppression convey well what they feel they are fighting for. To be an activist, they say, is to become homeless. Rani on tape that he has been homeless for eight months. «I’m in a different area and a different house each day. We’re defying logic.»
But there is palpable sadness, anger, and frustration, especially from the younger Al-Talab. The willful ignorance of the international community is clearly still a tremendous sore point. The UN has perpetually rendered itself cautious to the point of uselessness in times of extreme crisis. One need only remember Rwanda and the United Nations assistance mission (UNAMIR) ‘s failings from 1993-1996. «We’d been asking for international protection,» Al Talab recalls.
It would have been very hard to make a watchable movie from these chaotic, unstabilised images alone.
He describes how he left the corpse of a child freshly killed by the regime on a UN car and how the delegation was directly targeted after a truce was declared. He spoke to Kofi Annan, then the UN special envoy to Syria. «You came to check [the truce] was observed, and they killed us,» he told him. Even after meeting with the UN delegation at the dead child’s house, it was bombed even after the regime kept firing at them. «They didn’t protect us.»
Their defenses were paltry; the protests initially were non-violent. «I did nothing besides participate in protests and film them. So they accused me of being a terrorist,» recalls Draji. After they received some sparse access to arms, the narrative began to shift. «We asked for help from the UN, USA, France, etc. They didn’t protect us … they gave us weapons to kill each other … they provided weapons and funded the people they chose. Hand-picked and trained them in their camps and under their labels.» They explain how specific locations were of international interest, especially if they were a good vantage point for spying on Saudi Arabia, for example.
They add that the Bashar Al-Assad regime deliberately released some militants to skew the narrative. «It’s not a civil war; it’s a revolution,» says Odai painedly. The feeble arming of rebels combined with this release of militants to mix with the revolutionaries allowed the international community (no doubt egged on by Assad-allied nations like Russia) to style the conflict as a civil war, as opposed to a government against its people. «A girl was arrested and raped by regime soldiers [at a checkpoint],» Odai continues. «They broadcasted her rape on speakers. And we could hear the woman screaming for help. What would you have us do? Hand them a flower?»
«The international community saw. And then held us accountable for holding a rifle.»
We see debate within the group about how different events unfolded, lending a certain air of authenticity to the documentary – and bolstering the attempt to forge some sort of collective memory from the mayhem. One notable point of reflection is the fact that the government could have steamrolled the protesters at any time. Still, again, they wanted to prove to the world that there were «dangerous» or «armed» militants and terrorist uprisings in the country.
To the regime, of course, they were both. These are men who didn’t fear for their lives – who almost cheerfully expected to die in the name of freedom. «When you get involved in something like this, you must expect death at every turn,» says Al Masalma. Shortly afterward, we see the shelled-out husk of one of their temporary accommodations after tanks targeted their position. «They bombed our stories and our memories in this flat.» In claiming their memories as their own, they’re simultaneously claiming the different spaces they occupied in Syria as their own.
These are men who didn’t fear for their lives – who almost cheerfully expected to die in the name of freedom.
One wonders if they would have been so casual with the knowledge we now have. They say, «once they arrest you, it’s over» – but this statement comes with the chilling realization that all might just be beginning too. Pictures leaked from Syrian military hospitals over the years have shown extensive, horrific evidence of torture – «gouged eyes; mangled genitals; bruises and dried blood from beatings; acid and electric burns; emaciation; and marks from strangulation,» as Vanity Fair recorded back in 2015.
Now, it is not just the protesters’ physical movement that has been destroyed by the Syrian regime but also their sense of any justice in the world.
«I consider myself defeated by Bashar Al Assad,» Draji says resignedly towards the close. As it winds up, we hear the director speaking, «I witnessed how they restored their individual memories. So we could create and share our collective memory….is the collection of the story worth all the violence that memory brings back? How does one survive?»
Who is «we»?
I do wonder, though, who is «we»? To whom do the women’s memories belong were also involved in the conflict. The girl who had her rape broadcast, lower-key forms of resistance, and those exploited by the very civil society organisations and NGOs who claimed they were there to protect them. What of the female revolutionaries? We get the past, present, future of three well-educated men who managed to escape, who have served in international organisations themselves. Their memories become part of the narrative. Other stories and memories are lost – and if they do seep out, they are only a small part of someone else’s chronicle. Any women lost along the way have no way to claim them.
