How I Became a Syrian Activist

Student describes his journey from government backer to political dissident.

I used to be a supporter of the regime before I became an activist five years ago. Like pretty much everyone in Syria, I bought the leadership’s propaganda and thought foreign critics of our country were just jealous because here we have free health care, free schools, and so many other services. I thought Assad was the most generous person on earth and that everything we had, even our daily bread, was down to him. I worshipped him.

I only began to change my views when a girl I knew was murdered in a so-called honour killing in 2006. Her brother, who carried out the crime, spent just six months in jail before being released. I was astonished. I thought, “Come on, that’s not fair. He killed another human being and he spends just six months in prison?”

I found out after that that an article in Syrian law means that people only need to serve a short sentence for honour killings. It was a real shock. In our country, it seemed it was legal to kill a woman even if you just had some suspicions about her sexual behaviour.

At that time I knew nothing about the internet, but I wanted to find out more about this subject so I went to a friend of mine who had a computer and internet access and asked him to help me research honour crimes in Syria. I found many interesting articles, read them all and discovered that there were people in Syria who were already working in this field, using the internet to try and change the law. So I bought a computer, signed up for an internet connection, and joined one of the groups, the Syrian Women’s Observatory, to start campaigning with them on this issue.

It was then I became aware of the wider circle of repression in Syria. Thinking of ways to get the article on honour killing changed, I suggested that we go protest outside the parliament. I was told that we couldn’t do this because there was still martial law. I realised that in a democratic country, you could get the article regarding honour killing changed almost immediately because it contradicts even our own constitution. But in Syria, there was no possibility of change.

At this point, I finally understood what the fundamental problem was - that in Syria we lacked political rights, free expression and civil liberties. We could fight for 20 years to change the law on honour killing and nothing would happen, because the regime would not listen and we have no tools to change anything. We have no legal way to put pressure on the regime and they simply do not care what the people think or feel. They just deny and ignore us.

I started talking to friends of mine about what we could do to bring about change. We began by defining our problems to identify what we needed to focus on. We decided that we could not make any changes until we got people interested in the issues. In Syria, people are not involved or excited by politics. So first of all we needed support from our communities, we needed to mobilise young people, to work with them to make them aware of the issues and to convince them to care enough to take action.

We created a daily electronic newspaper, called Syria Press, in 2009, with funding from the wealthy father of a friend of ours. Three of us started it, and we eventually had ten employees. It aimed to target young people, with stories about music, sports and other issues of interest to them. But there was also a section dealing with politics and community affairs to introduce youth to these topics, while not focusing on them as we didn’t want to put anyone off. We were getting 2,000 visits a day, a huge number by Syrian standards, proving that young people were indeed interested in this combination of issues.

So next up we started a campaign to boycott mobile phone companies for an hour on a couple of set dates - because the prices they charged were too high and because the owners’ government connections meant they had no competition – and this was picked up by our readers. The boycott started to actually happen.

Eventually the secret police put pressure on us to stop this e-newspaper, but we didn’t give up our activism. While we were working on the mobile phone company boycott, we had started using Facebook and recognised its power as a great tool for us to organise with, even though it was blocked in Syria. This meant we only got 2,000 people signed up to our campaign, because these were the only ones who knew how to circumvent the ban. We needed to bring people to Facebook so as to get them involved.

To do this we started another group, called Get Your Rights. Our ambition was to deliver a proxy programme to each and every Syrian internet user, eventually deciding that Ultra Serve proxy software would best meet our needs.

So we developed an email campaign to promote this. It started off with ten of us each sending the link to the software via email to 100 contacts, and asking him or her to send it to all of their contacts. It’s hard to know just how many people we actually reached, but I estimate thousands got the email in just the first day of the campaign, which ran from 2008 to 2009.

After we launched the initiative, it was hard to track it - but I and all my friends received the original email that we had sent out at least five times each. We soon started to notice the effect on Facebook. Although you couldn’t guarantee that everyone who received the details of the proxy server went on Facebook, the number of our supporters on the site grew from 2,000 to 5,000 and then within a few months to 10,000.

Even though it was banned until a few weeks ago, Facebook is now in the top three most popular sites in Syria and I think we played a big role in that.

Our next campaign dealt with the draft of a new personal law in Syria, concerning marriage, children and family. It was a completely Islamist law, really bad for women and clearly created by radical clerics. We started a huge campaign against the bill across lots of websites and blogs. A whole network of activists from many different groups cooperated on this one.

And the draft law was stopped. This was the first time we could say that we successfully put pressure on the government. It was a great achievement, and we won’t ever give up.

Malath Aumran is the pseudonym of a 26-year-old cyber activist and political science student.