Sometimes there are people who blame me that I work about the fate of Specific Detainees, and I consider them with another value than other . I will not reply if this is truth or false. Personally, as a human and ex-detainee, I have both the detainees and the human nature more than I have myself. If I do that, I really have failed as a human and as a Clinical Psychologist. For me every human is unique, and every cause of detainee in Syria has its own value. So I am here my brothers and my sisters for helping me to post every single story, our detainees and their families should be our priority as the Freedom is. After this prologue, let me introduce you Oday Tayem who I had read before one year an article on( budourhassan.wordpress) about his fate which is still unknown. On 29 August 2013, Syrian security forces arrested Palestinian-Syrian activist Oday Tayem after raiding his house in Jaramana, a regime-controlled suburb southeast of Damascus. So I really wonder : Where are the people who support Palestinians and all them who consider themselves as “Friends Of Palestine?” Born on 12 May 1993 south of the Syrian capital in al-#Yarmouk Refugee Camp, Oday is the eldest of three brothers. His father is a refugee from the ethnically-cleansed village of al-Shajara, near Tiberias, and his mother’s family was displaced from Kafr Kanna, a town near Nazareth, in the 1948 nakba. When the Second Palestinian Intifada broke out, a group of Palestinians and Syrians set up a protest tent in Arnous Square in central Damascus to express solidarity with their brethren in occupied Palestine. Oday was as young as seven at the time, but he regularly participated in the demonstrations against the Israeli occupation, memorised Palestinian revolutionary songs, and attended the sit-ins along with his mother who was among the organisers. Eleven years later, Syria was to have its own intifada, an intifada against a home-grown occupier. And Oday, who was studying political science in Lebanon at the moment when Syria’s uprising for freedom and dignity began, would know exactly which side he was on. The ever-smiling young refugee who demanded freedom for Palestine at the age of seven would, eleven years later, demand freedom for both Palestine and Syria, stressing that both demands go hand-in-hand. Many now-retired Palestinian revolutionaries, together with the bulk of left-wing intellectuals, would either unashamedly support the Syrian regime or demonise the Syrian revolution, shrouding their positions with the cloak of neutrality and objectivity. In sharp contrast, Oday, like an entire generation of the youth of Syria’s Palestinian camps, relinquished the safety of silence, spoke truth to power, and reclaimed the Palestinian cause exploited and appropriated for so long by the Syrian regime and its apologists. Oday was to leave his studies in Lebanon and return to Syria shortly after the uprising’s outbreak. Combining peaceful and civil dissent and organising together with diligent relief work, he sought to help civilians and those displaced, who became trapped under the regime’s state of siege in places such as Yarmouk by bringing in food and medical supplies. In the current situation, where too many continue preaching neutrality and insist on an exclusively humanitarian discourse regarding Yarmouk’s plight, it is essential for us to learn more about Oday and the hundreds of Palestinian refugees in Syria who have been arrested, killed, or tortured to death in Syrian regime jails for attempting to break the siege on Yarmouk. While for the neutrality discourse it may be convenient to suggest that “both sides” are equally culpable for the humanitarian catastrophe in Yarmouk, this apolitical argument is anything but: on the contrary, it condones collective punishment and systematic starvation, de-contextualises the suffering of besieged civilians, and overlooks the fact that thousands in Syria, including many Palestinians, have paid with their lives to break the siege on the Camp and other besieged areas. The case of Palestinian prisoners in Syria must be a priority for anyone who supports the Palestinian cause. Oday Tayem, the Palestinian-Syrian whose identity was greatly influenced and shaped by the Palestinian as well as the Syrian intifadas, is one among thousands of Palestinians and Syrians caged behind Syrian regime bars. Let those who dare argue with them and only with them that the freedom struggle of Palestinian prisoners in Israel is separate from the struggle of Palestinian prisoners in Syria. Let those who dare deny to themand only to them that the siege on #Yarmouk is imposed by a regime that has purposefully punished peaceful activists and relief workers in Yarmouk, at times by death. Let those who dare throw at them and only at them suggestions that Palestinian prisoners in Syria are to become mere figures; figures whose freedoms are now to be up for more negotiation. The passion for Freedom is strongest,than any cell
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 08:13:38 +0000
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