A note from a torture chamber

A note from torture chamber

Thanks to digital cameras, millions of people around the world were instantly able to see the gruesome images of the Iraqi prisoners’ torture. However, in spite of the impressive delivery speed that relayed what happened inside the prison, those images were still only snapshots-pictures that are devoid of the context that only human eyes and minds can record and convey.

For me, there wasn’t any camera in the Egyptian torture chamber, there wasn’t any witness to tell the story. But after many years the deep physical and emotional pain and its tragic details remain vivid in my memory. I was a freshman at Cairo High School. Anti-government protesters were a daily routine of the landscape of Egyptian streets. I was too young to grasp the serious political implication of the event. Like most students my age, I was glad that classes were canceled that day.

Thousands of students poured into the streets from schools all over Cairo, but after shouting a few anti-government slogans, we moved away from the crowd to a side street in the affluent Garden City suburb. Without any warning we were rounded up by the Egyptian secret police (The Mukhabarat), who were zealously trying to fill their daily quota of random arrests.

We were lined up with common criminals in front of the police station . A tall handsome police colonel standing at the front started shouting the worst kind of profanities at us, his harsh words quickly extended to our families and parents. Without thinking and in a fearful voice I protested the excessive profanity, Unfortunately, the colonel took an issue with my soft protest; what happened after that has changed my life forever and shattered my faith in authority; my innocence was tarnished forever.

The angry police colonel stopped his verbal humiliation and without looking at me, he ordered one of his guards to take me away to … “the room.” The guard knew exactly where to take me; inside the prison, it was a small dark smelly windowless cold room, naked room stripped out of any human sign, the dark silence in the room seemed as if it has witnessed lots of broken souls.

Shortly, the colonel entered the room, where he calmly and without uttering a word or acknowledging my presence, closed the door, picked up a big riot stick and started hitting me savagely and indiscriminately. I stood helplessly overwhelmed by the colonel’s outrage; the severity of the beating escalated, until my skin start peeling off my body before my own eyes. I lost my feeling and any connection to my body; my confusing thoughts were trapped with no place to go.

I wasn’t trying to be a hero, I couldn’t muster any words, I couldn’t scream or resist. I couldn’t understand the colonel’s anger and outrage, but I knew he had a free hand to do to me whatever he pleased in that room. He didn’t ask about my name, he never looked me in the eyes, he never explained my crime. I was reduced to a nameless, faceless object, as I stood motionless and void of any rights or expression.

I wasn’t the usual suspect — a communist, a Jihadist or a government agitator. This wasn’t a national security issue, it was personal insecurity issue; The Colonel, unaccustomed to the slightest challenge, needed to break my will. He wanted me to beg for mercy, he needed a complete conquest.

My silence was deafening, and as the colonel grew more infuriated, he started getting more creative in his abuse. His relentless physical torture made his early verbal profanity seem like a friendly conversation. There is nothing more humiliating than unjust physical abuse; I couldn’t resist or retaliate, his savage hitting destroyed my ability to express my pain. At the time, I wished he would mix his severe beating with some verbal humiliation.

After what seemed like an eternity, the beating suddenly stopped, and without saying a word, the colonel stormed out of the torture room, he couldn’t stay and face his unbroken victim. I found myself standing alone licking my wounds, only to realize for the first time that the guard who brought me to the room was still there; he was standing in the corner wiping his tears. His display of sadness brought a much-needed touch of humanity to the torture chamber.

I often wondered how my brief confrontation with this colonel could generate so much fury against a helpless young boy. He was not following any orders; he was the whole chain of command. I now realize we were both victims. I was a victim of unjust violence and abuse. He was a victim of his sadistic obsession with violence and his intoxication with power. I was physically paralyzed for weeks. He was morally paralyzed for life. There wasn’t any digital camera to tell what happened inside the torture room that day; all these years, my own memory has had to carry the entire load … alone; … this is the real torture.

Ahmed Tharwat
Producer/Host of the Arab American TV Show Belahdan

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An Average Man

The American people have seen enough Muslims behaving badly all over the world; Saddam, Ghdaffy, Assad, Ossam, Alsadar, Zarqawi and with the Bush administration illusive crusade on terrorism; this list gets longer by the day. American people in a dire need to see some reasonable Muslim, please meet my dad.

My father was a small petite man, with a big nose and sharp piercing small eyes; he wasn’t a heavy-handed, intimidating father figure. However, he believed that to survive raising a large family of 10 on $7 monthly salary, you needed to be vigilant in reconstructing our family values.

First, to put our house in order, he gave us character-based nicknames; our original Arabic names had been either those of a prophet or a servant of God, Muhammed, Ahmed, Abdelraffe, Aabdellnasser, Abdelaal, etc… didn’t reflect who we really are, so I became the Sursarah, the small cockroach; my mom was Walad, one of the boys; the skinny one was Feseekhah, dried fish; the enigmatic one was Brovdaah (I still have no idea what it means); the oldest was Abul-ossi, the father of sticks; then, the comfort-seeker was Oomdah, the mayor; the youngest was Hando’ah, the cutie; and my only sister was Al-arousah, the beautiful bride.

He wasn’t a religious zealous man; he was what you could call a moral relativist. He would quietly pray the mandatory five daily prayers without lecturing us. He would tell us biblical stories to spread his moral ploys; each story would have a disguise message made to shape our outlook on life. The prophet said: to sleep hungry is to be merry, he would say when one asked for late meal. “The Hebrew people got lost in Sinai for 40 years, you know” he reminds us when we drifted to our ways, and if you don’t listen to his advise he would say “Well suite yourself but remember; Noah’s son didn’t make it ” .

He was a frugal man; to my dad, consumption was an evil state of depletion. Nothing terrified him more than one of us breaking into the kitchen to snack before mealtime. It was a violation of house golden rules. He even developed a home security sound-code alert system reflecting the level of threat to any domestic consumption around the house. Regardless of where he was, he managed to monitor and sense what was going on in our kitchen even in his sleep. Clearing his throat was a special warning alarm to alert us to his level of annoyance. He would clear his throat once if you broke into the kitchen, twice, for opening the refrigerator, and three “ahems” meant don’t touch that cold watermelon.

A conservationist before it became fashionable; He would walk around the house turning off radios, stoves, electricity and shut windows— as his daily mission to defeat ominous waste.

Reusing old stuff around the house for him was a divine resurrection ritual. Eating questionable leftover food was his small triumph over the tyrant of the decaying process. Sending the mail in used envelopes was his personal signature, reusing old batteries even for just a few minutes was magical, and for him, nothing was ever too precious for him to be wrapped in scraps of old newspaper.

My dad was an average man who never wanted to be a hero, he passed away a few years back and finally is resting in a divine place where there isn’t much to do or to say— the way he always wanted, god bless you dad. 

Ahmed Tharwat
Producer/Host of the Arab American TV Show Belahdan
Minnetonka, MN

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