BBCIt belonged to his grandmother. Something solid. A thing that you can hold in your hands, run your fingers over and trace the path of your memory. A small piece of beauty inlaid with a delicate mosaic.
René opens the music box and jingling music begins to play, the same song heard long ago in his living room in Damascus.
“This is all I have left of my home,” he says.
Everything about this young man suggests gentleness. René Shevan is short, slim and speaks quietly.
His emotions went back and forth all week. joy of the Overthrow of Bashar al-Assad. Heartbreak over the memories it brought back of his months in Syrian prisons.
“There was a woman. I still have her image in my head. She stood in the corner and pleaded…it’s clear they raped her.”
“There was a boy. He was 15 or 16 years old. They raped him and he called his mother. He said, ‘Mom…my mom…mom.'”
There was his own rape and sexual abuse.
When I first met René, he had just fled Syria. That was 12 years ago. He sat across from me shaking and crying, afraid to show his face on camera.
The secret police arrested him because he went to a democracy demonstration. They also knew he was gay.
Three of them raped René. He begged for mercy, but they laughed.
“Nobody heard me. I was alone,” he recalled in 2012.
They told him this was what he got because he demanded freedom. Another officer insulted him every day. He suffered this abuse for six months.
When images of prisoners walking free in Damascus appeared on television this week, René was transported back to his own images.
“I’m not in prison now, I’m here. But I saw myself in the photos and pictures of the people in Syria. I was so happy for them, but I saw myself there… I saw the old version.” I saw them raping me and when they tortured me, I saw everything in a flashback.
He cries and we end the interview. A few minutes, he says.
I look at the wall of his living room.
There is a photo of his destroyed house in Syria, one of René running the marathon in Utrecht. Then a picture of the Jesuit priest Father Frans Van Der Lugt, 75, a psychotherapist and ecumenical activist in Syria until he was murdered in 2014.
It was Father Van Der Lugt who told René – who was struggling in a deeply conservative environment – that he was a normal person and that Jesus loved him, regardless of his sexual orientation.
René drinks a glass of water and then asks to continue our conversation.
Why did he now agree to show his face on camera, I wondered?
“Because the Republic of Fear is gone. Because I’m no longer afraid of them. Because Assad is a refugee in Moscow. Because all the criminals in Syria have run away. Because Syria has returned to all Syrians,” he replies.
“I hope that we as a people can live in freedom and equality. I am so proud of myself as a Syrian, as a Dutchman, as an LGBT.”
But that doesn’t mean that he is yet confident about living as a gay person in Syria.
Under the Assad regime, homosexual acts were criminalized.
The country’s new rulers have fundamentalist religious roots and have been involved in violence and persecution against gays.
“There are many Syrian LGBT people who fought,” says René.
“They were part of the revolution and lost their lives. (The Syrian regime) killed them just because they were LGBT and because they were part of the revolution.”
René tells me that he is “realistic” about the prospect of change. He is also concerned that all religious and ethnic groups – including the Kurds – are granted protection.
Getty ImagesRené is one of the approximately six million Syrians who have fled the country and found protection either in neighboring countries such as Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey – the majority – or further away in Europe.
Several European countries have already suspended asylum applications from Syrians following the fall of the Assad regime. International human rights groups criticized the move as premature.
An estimated one million Syrians live in Germany. Among them was a remarkable disabled Kurdish girl whom I first met in August 2015, when she had joined a huge convoy of people that had landed on the Greek island of Lesbos.
On the way north she traveled further through Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Austria.
To get from northern Syria to Europe, Nujeen had to cross mountains, rivers and the sea – her sister Nisreen pushed the wheelchair.
“I want to be an astronaut and maybe meet an alien. And I want to meet the queen,” she said.
I crouched next to her on a dusty street where thousands of asylum seekers lay exhausted in the midday heat. Her good mood and hope were contagious.
This was a girl who taught herself fluent English by watching American television programs. Nujeen grew up in Aleppo and then, as the war escalated, moved to her family’s hometown of Kobane, a Kurdish stronghold that was later attacked by the Islamic State (IS) group.
I meet her now on the busy Neumarkt in Cologne, surrounded by Christmas market stalls, where locals eat sausage and drink mulled wine and the dramas of Syria seem far away.
But not for Nujeen.
She sat in front of the television all week long after the rest of the family had gone to bed. It doesn’t matter that she has an exam for her business studies. She will do it.
Nujeen understands that there will never again be a moment like the fall of Assad, a moment of such unique hope.
“Nothing lasts forever. Darkness is followed by dawn,” she says.
“I knew that I would never return to a Syria where Assad is president and that we would never have the chance to be a better nation with this man at the helm. We knew we would never find peace unless he was gone. And “Now that this chapter is over, I think the real challenge begins.”
Like René, she wants a country that is tolerant of diversity and takes care of people with disabilities.
“I don’t want to go back to a place where there is no elevator and only stairs leading to a fourth-floor apartment.”
As a Kurd, she is very familiar with the suffering of her people in the region.
Now, as Kurdish forces are forced to withdraw from cities in the oil-producing north, Nujeen sees the danger posed by a new regime backed by Turkey.
“We know these people who have now come to power. We know the countries and the powers that support them, and they are not exactly fans of the Kurds. They don’t exactly love us. That’s our biggest concern right now.”
There are also fears of a possible regrouping of IS if Syria’s new leadership cannot achieve stability in the country.
There are constant calls to family members who still live in the Kurdish areas.
“They, like all of us, are anxious and worried about the future,” says Nujeen.
“We never stop calling and we always worry when they don’t pick up after the first ring. There is a lot of uncertainty about what will happen next.”
The uncertainty is increased by the changing asylum policy in Europe.
Yet this is a young woman whose life experience – experiencing severe disability since birth, experiencing the horrors of war, traveling to safety through the Middle East and Europe – has created the capacity for hope.
In the almost ten years I have known her, it has remained intact. The fall of Assad has only strengthened their trust in Syria and its people.
“There are a lot of people who are waiting for Syria to fall into some kind of abyss,” she says.
“We are not people who hate or envy each other or who want to destroy each other. We are people raised to be afraid of each other. But our default setting is that we love and accept who we are.”
“We can and will be a better nation – a nation of love, acceptance and peace, not one of chaos, fear and destruction.”
There are many hearts in Syria and beyond that hope she is right.
