‘I was raped by Assad’s thugs – Syrian man
It belonged to his grandmother. Something solid. A thing to hold in his hands, and run his fingers across, and trace the path of memory. A small thing of beauty, inlaid with a delicate mosaic.
René opens the music box, and a tinkling music begins to play, the same song heard long ago in his Damascus sitting room.
“This is all I have left of my home,” he says.
Everything about this young man suggests gentleness. René Shevan is short in height, slender and speaks softly.
All week his emotions have gone back and forth. Joy at the fall of Bashar al-Assad. Heartbreak at the memories it has triggered of his months in Syrian prisons.
“There was a woman. I still have her image here in my head. She was standing in the corner, and she was pleading…it’s clear that they raped her.
“There was a boy. He was 15 or 16 years old. They were raping him, and he was calling his mother. He was saying, ‘Mama… my mother… Mom.'”
There was his own rape and sexual abuse.
When I first met René, he had just escaped from Syria. That was 12 years ago. He sat opposite me, shaking and in tears, terrified of showing his face on camera.
The secret police had picked him up because he had gone to a pro-democracy demonstration. They also knew that he was gay.
Three of them gang raped René. He begged for mercy, but they laughed.
“Nobody heard me. I was alone,” he recalled back in 2012.
They told him this was what he got for demanding freedom. Another officer abused him every day. For six months he suffered this abuse.
