How much blood has to be spilled just so you can stay in power? for the sake of your arrogance and ego ? How many souls have your taken so you can keep enslaving your people ?

It is difficult for us, nay it is impossible for us to know how many lives you’ve taken. You are the judge, the jury and the executioner, you are the prison guard and the murderer. Only you know the numbers. We are merely your victims, your unknown shell-shocked slain victims.

Hama, the city that was completely destroyed in 1982, under an incredible media cover-up. When the whole world stayed silent, then denounced, then forgot. It was after all an internal matter to slaughter us in silence. It was our fate to die silently and to be forgotten by the world.
Abu Selim, a prison in which every method of torture, oppression and humiliation was perpetrated. Its jailers decided to kill prisoners, so they killed them, and in doing so they set them free from the horrors of this prison and its torturous ways to their Lord. They were buried underneath the prison so they could be poured one onto another in a mass grave. Because in our lands, the prison industry is always booming, customers multiply like rabbits and they have to be put in line to be controlled.

So many massacres, so many prisoners murdered with their death certificates forged to absolve the prison officer who was working on orders from a higher up. We don’t know how many were killed. We were the ones being imprisoned, tortured and killed. It is a shame to ask a member of a massacre how many there were with him. Dead men tell no tales.
Hama and Abu Selim, and other massacres unheard of except as myths and horrifying legends told in secret by those who survived by some miracle. A story travelling without a narrator or evidence. We all still believed that it happened, because those regimes were not known to stop at any cost, especially not for such a higher purpose as staying in power to enslave its people.
The media black out:
Those massacres were carried out under complete media blackout, as well as an iron curtain to stop anything or anyone from making it outside. Tyrants used the media (their media) to defame decent men, and to brain wash and terrorize the masses.
Their media was a stream of lies, it turned the victim into a criminal “armed gangs, terrorist cells, killers, murderers”. The media cronies continuously praise the leader as a god, not out of fear but out of sheer hypocrisy and in some cases actual belief. You see the tyrant leaders assigned tyrants in the media to more easily control the media and the masses.

Their media never mentioned any massacres that happened, it never mentioned any of the crimes its oppressive security personnel carried out against its people. How could they when they, alongside the government has united together against the people and declared them mortal enemies ?

The iron wall:

Years ago, our land was surrounded by an iron wall. No news reaches the world about us unless it was allowed to by the tyrants and their crony media tyrants.

We lived under an iron wall, nobody on the outside knew about the horror and panic we felt every day from the government’s security apparatus. How could the outside world know then of what was happening from torture, murder and oppression ?
Their iron wall did not just control news going out to the world. Even here. Prisoners were declared to be executed ten whole years after their execution. They did not tell the families that brought food and clothing for the prisoners that their children were dead for 10 years. How humane of those of those jailers.
Internal Affairs:

“This is an internal issue the relates to us, who gave you authority to meddle in our affairs?”

Our tyrant leaders were so arrogant that declared to the world that they have a right to massacre their people, and that no one country had any right to interfere or object, or denounce or even to show alarm or concern. Those tyrants even abhor that the world would even speak in the name of humanity ! It seems that the page containing term “humanity” has been removed or burned off from their dictionaries, to be added to the pages containing other terms such as freedom, justice, dignity, and respect. All terms they decided to remove from their lexicon and from the hearts of the people.
They have even refuse the idea of the world’s lower moral support for those victims: just speaking to them. Those tyrants see “internal affairs” as allowing them to control the world as well and to demand its silence in the face of their crimes and acceptance and cooperation in their horrendous crimes.

Silence after the knowledge:
What can we do ? Except to seek vengeance from God. All was silently trying to forget, to live and move on with their lives. It has been a very long time since this massacre and that massacre. The world knows nothing about it. Only of the family of the victims remember it now. Those widows and orphans, or the towns people who live in fear when remembering the bloody crime and the grizzly details etched in their memories for ever.

Now however, when the ghosts of the past have returned to haunt their families, and the world with those details. It will be a curse to remind us about our media failure and the silence of our pens and papers when it came to those martyrs. So that now we have declare to you, oh tyrants, we will not allow Hama to take place again, we will not let Abu Selim to happy again. Those martyrs are the ones who lighter the light of freedom in us.

Written by : Dr.Hamza E.e Mousa .

Translated by : Nasser Alkhateeb .