Overnight, Ramya’s life was turned upside down. The government seized her house after her husband was arrested and then died in the prisons of the Syrian regime. Despite the failure of her attempts to restore her children’s right to their father’s inheritance, she refuses to give up.
“If I had been detained and not my husband, my children would not have suffered so much,” says Ramia, who has been drained by intimidation and insults in the security branches. Once I am a woman, things become almost impossible. This sums up the suffering of many wives of detainees and missing persons.
The mother of three and a refugee in Lebanon since 2016, adds, “We lost everything we have…but I want to take something in return” from the country that robbed the family of their previous life.
Since the start of the war in 2011, the number of detainees in the regime’s notorious prisons has doubled. During more than a decade, half a million people entered prisons and detention centers, most of them men, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Tens of thousands died under torture or as a result of appalling detention conditions.
The wives and widows of detainees and missing persons, according to the lawyer, Ghazwan Kronfol, who resides in Turkey, told AFP, “the first of which is the failure to clarify the husband’s fate, and how to dispose of his property, as there is no inheritance without death, then guaranteeing the guardianship of her children, and whether she can after years For his absence to marry again? Except for society’s view of her.”
Complications increase if the husband’s property is seized, and women are plunged into exhausting legal procedures, according to Kronfol, who adds, “in addition to being subjected to financial blackmail, sexual harassment and the mood of officers in the absence of any legal controls.”
In 2013, regime forces arrested Ramia’s husband, an engineer and government employee, in Damascus. Several months later, Ramia received his body number, and when she asked about the cause of death, the answer came to her: “Do not open the gates of Hell.”
Her visits to the security branches did not pass smoothly. “I was insulted a lot (…) on one occasion, they kept me in the branch for a whole day, and on another time an officer asked me to work as an informant for them,” she says.
Fear prompted her to flee to Lebanon, carrying with her family ownership documents and every paper she obtained during her frequent visits to security branches and official institutions for reasons that varied between asking about her husband, issuing his death certificate, trying to benefit from his salary and property, and establishing the guardianship of her children.
“There is exploitation from all sides, and (women) feel that they are up for grabs,” she says.
And she adds, “Even the people around you (feel you) that you have no support when the husband goes, so you fight and live your battle alone.”
“My biggest concern”
Ramia dreamed of her son becoming an engineer and the other a doctor, but they dropped out to help her.
In the face of a difficult financial situation, she decided to sell the family’s house and farm, only to find that the authorities preceded her and booked them “in reserve” on charges of her husband’s involvement in “terrorism”.
Under the 2012 Anti-Terrorism Law, the Public Prosecutor has the right to prohibit the disposal of movable and immovable funds for anyone who commits a crime related to a “terrorist” act, and the judiciary has the right to confiscate them and transfer their ownership to the state.
Since the beginning of the conflict, the authorities have charged many detainees with “random terrorism-related” accusations, according to human rights defenders. Thus, women and widows found themselves with nothing in a corrupt society in which most property was registered in the name of the man.
Ramia has been trying for years, through lawyers and mediators, to break the seizure.
“This is my biggest concern, and all I want is to remove the seizure sign. As soon as that happens, I will sell for my children” who you want outside Lebanon and Syria, she says.
In a report issued in April, the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons at Sednaya Prison estimated that the regime had confiscated the detainees’ property worth more than 1.538 billion dollars, including homes, land, shops, cars, bank balances, and others.
say “no”
Salma, 43, who asked to use a pseudonym, asked only once in 2015 about her detained husband.
She says, “They put me in a room, and from time to time a security element came in and threatened me. I was very afraid and decided not to ask about him again.”
“I lived through hell, I couldn’t sleep, I was always afraid,” she says.
After she made her choice to seek refuge in Lebanon, she decided to sell her husband’s car and house to bear the cost of displacement and secure a decent living, only to find that the state preceded her and seized them. All she did was to circumvent the law, so she sold the car for half its price according to a forged contract on a date prior to the husband’s arrest.
And when one of them tried to take advantage of her by offering to buy the house for a small amount because it was foreclosed, she refused.
“I sold my gold to buy the house. Should I sell it and lose it too?” she says.
And it’s not just laws. Women also defy the constraints of a conservative society.
“The war gave them strength. And they are learning to say no,” says a lawyer in Damascus who preferred not to be named.
Breaking the Chains
Thus, Tuqa, 45, broke social restrictions that surrounded her for the rest of her life, after she had to take responsibility for her five children alone, one of whom was arrested and tortured at the age of 15.
“I didn’t even go out (from the house) to buy vegetables and bread,” she says, but suddenly she was faced with another reality: “I have to treat my son, find my husband, and feed my children.”
Tuqa left behind in Syria a home that became part of her past. “Even if I go back, I don’t have any rights” as a woman, refugee and wife of a detainee, she says.
In Lebanon, she isolated herself from the world, especially after she was exposed to incidents of harassment. “At first, I blamed myself, because what we learned is that women are always to blame,” she says.
But she soon got up on her own, worked and attended psychotherapy and training sessions.
“I lost a lot, but the positive thing is that I became a strong woman, able to protect my children, work and learn,” she says.
She adds, “I am no longer the woman on whom the door is closed, and I have not brought up my children as I was raised.”