Riad al-Turk, a veteran Syrian opposition chief often called the “Mandela of Syria” after spending practically twenty years in jail for talking out in opposition to his nation’s dictatorial regimes, died on Jan. 1 in Eaubonne, a northern suburb of Paris. He was 93.
Mr. Turk’s dying, at a hospital, was confirmed by his daughter Khuzama Turk in an interview.
Mr. Turk’s life was a darkish mirror of his nation’s torments, and his inconceivable survival was testimony to his will to endure. He was imprisoned 4 occasions, tortured repeatedly and spent practically 18 years in solitary confinement, largely in an underground cell with no home windows. “We are able to say that it was about my peak — it was the dimensions of a small elevator,” he mentioned in one in every of his final interviews.
One occasion of torture, in 1987, left him in a coma for 25 days. Described by those that knew him as a modest, easy man, Mr. Turk repeatedly fought the Syrian authorities till 2018, on the age of 88, when he reluctantly fled to France to reside in exile.
His “whole life has been about dissent,” the journalist Robin Wright, who interviewed him in Damascus, wrote in her e book “Desires and Shadows: The Way forward for the Center East” (2008).
Mr. Turk started his profession as a militant Communist, talking out in opposition to dictatorship, and ended it as a logo of resistance to successive tyrannies in Syria.
After being launched within the spring of 1998 following practically 18 years in jail below the long-ruling president Hafez al-Assad, Mr. Turk continued to talk out in opposition to Mr. Assad’s successor, his son Bashar al-Assad, regardless of realizing that he may very well be arrested once more.
In August 2001, lots of gathered within the Syrian metropolis of Homs, Mr. Turk’s birthplace, to listen to him communicate because the secretary normal of the outlawed Syrian Communist Get together’s political bureau, a breakaway faction that opposed the celebration’s subservience to the Soviet Union and Hafez al-Assad, who had died the 12 months earlier than.
Mr. Turk advised the group that the elder Assad’s regime had “relied on terror” and known as Bashar’s rule “illegitimate,” saying it represented “despotism.”
Lower than a month later, he was in jail for the fourth time on the age of 71. He was sentenced to 2 and a half years in jail for treason however, following worldwide stress, was launched in November 2002 due to poor well being.
Not lengthy earlier than his fourth arrest, the filmmaker Mohammad Ali Atassi interviewed Mr. Turk for a 2001 documentary, “The Cousin,” asking him: “You bought out of jail. However did jail get out of you?”
“No,” he replied. “Jail continues to be in me. It’s not that I’m afraid of it or one thing. However as a result of jail represents oppression, and oppression continues to be practiced in my nation, destroying jail continues to be a serious purpose on which the nation’s liberty relies upon.”
As a younger College of Damascus regulation college graduate and new member of the Syrian Communist Get together, Mr. Turk was first imprisoned in 1952 for talking out in opposition to the navy coup of Adib al-Shishakli. He was held for 5 months, tortured and by no means tried.
He was imprisoned once more in 1958 for protesting Syria’s union with President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. He was held and tortured for 16 months, once more with out trial.
His third imprisonment, which started in 1980, was essentially the most extreme. Brokers of Hafez al-Assad, the air drive normal who seized energy in 1970, arrested Mr. Turk after he “refused to denounce violence by the Muslim Brotherhood” and as a substitute declared that he was in opposition to “violence by all sides,” mentioned Najib Ghadbian, a political scientist on the College of Arkansas. That declaration amounted to condemnation of the Assad regime, Professor Ghadbian mentioned in an interview, including, “He paid a heavy value” for that assertion.
For practically 18 years, Mr. Turk was stored in close to whole isolation, allowed solely three visits all through his incarceration. He was set free of his windowless cell for 3 journeys to the bathroom a day, throughout which he scavenged for bits of clothes left by different prisoners within the trash. For the primary 10 years of his sentence, he slept on the ground of his cell. His solely diversion was to make footage utilizing the arduous bits of grain collected from the meager gruel his jailers gave him.
“They should isolate me from the world,” he advised Mr. Atassi within the movie. “In the event that they put me with different prisoners, they concern I might raise their morale. Isolation is fixed psychological torture.”
But “jail didn’t break him,” Mr. Atassi mentioned in an interview from Beirut.
Riad al-Turk was born in Homs on April 17, 1930, to Mohammed Ali Turk, an area hotelkeeper who died when Riad was very younger, and his spouse, Amina, a lady of restricted means. Riad was raised in a faculty for orphans, his daughter Khuzama mentioned. He entered regulation college on the College of Damascus across the age of 20, she mentioned, and joined the Syrian Communist Get together in 1952.
The remainder of his life was spent in politics, “my blood and a part of my life,” Mr. Turk advised Mr. Atassi.
After his last launch from jail, in 2002, he remained lively within the Syrian opposition, signing in 2005 the Damascus Declaration, an try to unify the Assad regime’s numerous opponents. “He needed to push for a fantastic unification,” Mr. Atassi mentioned.
When the rebellion in opposition to the Assad regime started in 2011, one that may result in outright civil struggle, Mr. Turk sought out younger demonstrators, encouraging them whilst he entered his eighth decade. He later acknowledged that he had underestimated the toxicity of the Islamists whom he and different opponents of Assad had initially appealed to.
“His dedication was superb,” mentioned Mazen Darwish, president of the Syrian Heart for Media and Freedom of Expression. “He was a logo, a nationwide hero.”
By 2013, Mr. Turk’s well being and continued opposition had left him confined in semi-clandestinity in his small condominium in Damascus, Le Monde wrote in 2018. That 12 months, with failing eyesight and poor well being, he lastly left Syria on the urging of his two daughters, enterprise a harmful journey by Islamist-held territory to succeed in Turkey and ultimately France, the place he was accepted as an exile.
His spouse, Asma Al-Faisal, who had additionally spent years in jail, died in exile in Canada in 2018. Along with his daughter Khuzama, he’s survived by his different daughter, Nesrin Turk.
Mr. Turk remained combative to the tip, denouncing the Assad dynasty whilst he acknowledged that his lifelong battle remained unfinished.
“The decision that the outdated dissident attracts is that of a failure,” Le Monde wrote after going to see him in 2018, “the political testomony of a person who gained’t see his life’s work completed.”
His daughter Khuzama doesn’t see it fairly that method. “He was the one man who mentioned no to the Syrian regime,” she mentioned. “He was the one one who mentioned, ‘Syria gained’t stay the dominion of silence.’ He devoted his life to the battle for democracy.”
Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris, and Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut.
