Riad al-Turk, the 'Mandela of Syria', dies in exile at 93

Riad al-Turk, a veteran Syrian opposition leader known as the “Mandela of Syria” after serving nearly two decades in prison for speaking out against his country's dictatorial regimes, died on January 1 in Eaubonne, a northern suburb of Paris. He was 93.

Mr Turk's death in a hospital was confirmed in an interview by his daughter Khuzama Turk.

Mr. Turk's life was a dark mirror of his country's torments, and his unlikely survival was a testament to his will to persevere. He was imprisoned four times, repeatedly tortured, and spent nearly eighteen years in solitary confinement, usually in a windowless underground cell. “We can say it was about my height – it was the size of a small elevator,” he said in one of his last conversations.

One case of torture, in 1987, left him in a coma for 25 days. Described by those who knew him as a modest, simple man, Mr Turk fought continuously against the Syrian government until 2018, at the age of 88, when he reluctantly fled to France to live in exile.

His “entire life revolved around dissent,” wrote journalist Robin Wright, who interviewed him in Damascus, in her book “Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East” (2008).

Mr. Turk began his career as a militant communist, speaking out against the dictatorship, and ended it as a symbol of resistance against successive tyrannies in Syria.

After being released in the spring of 1998 after nearly 18 years in prison under long-ruling President Hafez al-Assad, Mr. Turk continued to speak out against Mr. Assad's successor, his son Bashar al-Assad, despite knowing that he could. be arrested again.

In August 2001, hundreds of people gathered in the Syrian city of Homs, Mr. Turk's hometown, to listen to he speaks as secretary general of the political bureau of the banned Syrian Communist Party, a breakaway faction that opposed the party's subservience to the Soviet Union and Hafez al-Assad, who had died the year before.

Mr. Turk told the crowd that the elder Assad's regime had “relied on terror” and called Bashar's rule “illegitimate” and said it represented “despotism.”

Less than a month later, at the age of 71, he was in prison for the fourth time. He was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for treason, but was released under international pressure in November 2002 due to ill health.

Not long before his fourth arrest, filmmaker Mohammad Ali Atassi interviewed Mr. Turk for a 2001 documentary, “The cousin,” and asked him, 'You have come out of prison. But has prison gone from you?'

“No,” he replied. “Prison is still in me. It's not that I'm afraid of it or anything. But because prison represents oppression, and oppression is still practiced in my country, destroying prison is still an important goal on which the country's freedom depends.”

As a young law graduate from Damascus University and a new member of the Syrian Communist Party, Mr. Turk was first imprisoned in 1952 for speaking out against Adib al-Shishakli's military coup. He was held for five months, tortured and never tried.

In 1958 he was imprisoned again for protesting against the Syrian union with President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. He was held and tortured for sixteen months, again without trial.

His third captivity, which began in 1980, was the most severe. Agents of Hafez al-Assad, the air force general who seized power in 1970, arrested Mr Turk after he “refused to denounce the Muslim Brotherhood's violence” and instead declared he was against “violence from all sides” . Najib Ghadbian, a political scientist at the University of Arkansas. That statement amounted to a condemnation of the Assad regime, Professor Ghadbian said in an interview, adding: “He paid a high price” for that statement.

For almost 18 years, Mr. Turk was kept in near-total isolation and was allowed only three visits during his captivity. He was let out of his windowless cell for three trips a day to the toilet, during which he searched for items of clothing that other prisoners had left in the bin. He slept on the floor of his cell for the first ten years of his sentence. His only distraction was taking photographs using the hard bits of grain he collected from the meager porridge his prison guards gave him.

“They have to isolate me from the world,” he told Mr. Atassi in the film. “If they put me with other prisoners, they are afraid that I would improve their morale. Isolation is constant psychological torture.”

Still, “prison did not break him,” Mr. Atassi said in an interview from Beirut.

Riad al-Turk was born on April 17, 1930 in Homs to Mohammed Ali Turk, a local hotelier who died when Riad was very young, and his wife Amina, a woman of limited means. Riad grew up in a school for orphans, his daughter Khuzama said. He went to study law at Damascus University around the age of 20, she said, and joined the Syrian Communist Party in 1952.

He spent the rest of his life in politics, “my blood and part of my life,” Mr. Turk told Mr. Atassi.

After his final release from prison in 2002, he remained active in the Syrian opposition and signed the Damascus Declaration in 2005, an attempt to unite the various opponents of the Assad regime. “He wanted to push for great unification,” Mr. Atassi said.

When the uprising against the Assad regime began in 2011, an uprising that would lead to a full-blown civil war, Mr. Turk sought out young protesters and encouraged them, even when he was eight years old. He later acknowledged that he had underestimated the toxicity of the Islamists he and other Assad opponents had initially appealed to.

“His commitment was tremendous,” said Mazen Darwish, president of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression. “He was a symbol, a national hero.”

By 2013, Mr Turk's health and persistent opposition had left him confined in semi-clandestine conditions in his small Damascus apartment, Le Monde. wrote in 2018. That year, with poor eyesight and poor health, he finally left Syria at the insistence of his two daughters, undertaking a perilous journey through Islamic territory to reach Turkey and eventually France, where he was accepted as an exile.

His wife Asma Al-Faisal, who also spent years in prison, died in exile in Canada in 2018. In addition to his daughter Khuzama, he is survived by his other daughter, Nesrin Turk.

Mr. Turk remained combative to the end, denouncing the Assad dynasty even as he acknowledged that his lifelong struggle remained unfinished.

“The judgment drawn by the old dissident is that of a failure,” Le Monde wrote after visiting him in 2018, “the political testament of a man who does not want to see his life's work completed.”

His daughter Khuzama doesn't quite see it that way. “He was the only man who said no to the Syrian regime,” she said. “He was the only one who said: 'Syria will not remain the kingdom of silence.' He dedicated his life to the fight for democracy.”

Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris, and Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut.