(Zaman Al Wasl)- This is not a fictitious story or a kind of journalistic suspense, but a true story lived by a Syrian refugee in Lebanon who escaped the war with his family from Alhajar Alaswad district south of Damascus.
Ahmed told Zaman al-Wasl about the painful story in those words: "On May 28, a young man rung at our door and asked me: “Are you Abu Muawiya? There is someone asking about you downstairs." So I looked through the window and saw a Range-Rover down below the building.”
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He adds: “I went downstairs and told them hello. In the car there were the driver and 3 persons, one in the front seat and two were at the back seat. One of them asked me: "Are you Abu Muawiya Tarrash?". I replied joking: “No, I am Abu Muawiya The Painter. (It was the occupation of the man.)
"The same person told me: bring your son Muawiya to help you", Abu Muawiya continues, then replied: "Let’s agree first and then I will bring him to work with m"
Ahmed tells the details of the play which ended by kidnapping him and driving him to a place situated in Beirut after having beaten him with a pistol’s grip on his right eye.
Abu Muawiya continues to tell his tragedy: "I found myself inside a house some steps further. As soon as we came in, they started beating, insulting, and stepping on me forcing me to take off my clothes. They took my mobile, tied me up and left me two hours during which nobody talked to me."
The victim carries on: “They took me to a living room containing 6 persons two of them were smoking hookah, and they started to ask me questions in a kind of investigation: where I am from? Am I for or against the regime? When I replied them that I do not belong to any party they started to beat me in a more savage way.”
Then they asked me: "Why did you call your first son Muawiya and the other one Umayya, believing that Umayya was a boy while it was the name of my daughter."
He carries on: "When I said that the reason is because it is a historical name, they grew more and more savage beating me collectively with a piece of plastic on my head, my shoulders and my back with their feet, hands and with the hookah’s hose on my stomach, my head and all my body while uttering sectarian shouts."
Abu Muawiya reaches the maximum level of pain in his tragedy when he tels us how they forced him to sit on the wooden piece of the hookah’s hose before they call a giant drunk man and ordered him to rape the victim who lost consciousness while hearing their last words: Take him and throw him away!”
Abu Muawiya woke up that day at 2 a.m. on the side of the road and asked one of the passing cars to take him to a place not far from his house.
“A few days after, I woke up from my shock and went to the U.N. Commission to report what happened to me”, says Abu Muawiya, “But it was a routine meeting which did not provide me with medical care or travel, or even minimum protection.”
The raping and torture acts underwent by the refugee from Damascus imposed him feelings of fear, apprehension and disability that devoured his soul.
Abu Muawiya continues: "Every time someone rings at the door I felt panic and fear. Since three months I did not dare to leave my house and my health was getting worse day after day, after the medical reports showed 56 % physical disability following the accident."
Abu Muawiya insists on addressing a message to "the consciousness of the humanity, the UNHCR and human rights organizations who take pity on a dog run over by a car and look after it, as for the human whose blood is forbidden in all religions and laws, they let him offended, tortured and killed."
Lebanon has one million registered Syrian refugees, but believes the number is more like 1.5 million.
Syrian refugees in Lebanon have called on the UN refugee agency to protect them from the abuses of Lebanese security that uses the identity of UNHCR employees to delude refugees in its latest arrest campaign.
Lebanese officials have accused the UN refugee agency of deliberately discouraging refugees from returning.
Zaman Al Wasl
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