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Riad al-Turk (b. April 17,1930, Homs, Syria – d. January1, 2024, Eaubonne [a northern suburb of Paris], France) was a Syrian opposition leader, a political prisoner for about 20 years, and supporter of democracy, who was called "the Old Man of Syrian opposition." He was secretary general of the Syrian Communist Party (Political Bureau) from its foundation in 1973 until 2005.
Al-Turk joined the Syrian Communist Party while a student. He was imprisoned for the first time in 1952 shortly after finishing law school for opposing the military government that came to power in a coup. He was held for five months and tortured but never tried in court. He later wrote articles for the party newspaper, Al-Nour, and became a leading party ideologue. He was imprisoned again in 1958 under Nasser for opposing the merger of Syria and Egypt into the United Arab Republic and held for sixteen months. Again, he was tortured but not tried for any crime.
Turk had for some time been leading a faction within the Communist Party that demanded a more positive view of Arab nationalism, in opposition to Secretary-General Khalid Bakdash, who ruled the party with an iron fist. In 1972, Bakdash decided to merge the party into the National Progressive Front, a coalition of organizations allied with the ruling Arab Baath Socialist Party. Along with supporters on the radical wing of the party, Turk formed the Syrian Communist Party (Political Bureau), consolidating a split that had been apparent since the late 1960s. The SCP-Political Bureau initially negotiated with the government for terms of legalization and membership in the Front. However, it later took a strong opposition stance, especially from 1976 on after the Syrian intervention in favor of the Maronites right-wing government in the Lebanese Civil War. This led to repression of the party, which was stepped up at the beginning of the 1980s when the Hafez al-Assad government felt itself under increasing pressure from both Islamists and the secular opposition. Al-Turk was arrested and imprisoned on October 28, 1980, and held under very difficult conditions for almost 18 years. He spent most of this period in solitary confinement and suffered regular torture. Al-Turk was locked away in a windowless underground cell, about the length of his body or the size of a small elevator compartment, at an intelligence headquarters. Al-Turk was never allowed out of his cell to exercise. Until the final months, he was not allowed a book, newspaper, mail or anything else to keep his mind occupied. For the first thirteen years of his imprisonment, he was allowed no communication from, or information about, his friends and family, including his two young daughters. His only activity was being allowed three times a day to go to a shared toilet. He was never allowed to use it when other prisoners were there but did scrounge the toilet bin for discarded clothing as his own clothing was worn out. One of his few diversions was collecting grains of dark cereal he found in the thin soup he was served in the evening and using the grains to create pictures in his cell. He suffered considerable ill-health, including diabetes for which he was refused treatment. He was released on May 30, 1998.
After his release in 1998, al-Turk was initially not particularly active politically. In June 2000, however, Syrian president Hafiz al-Asad died and his son Bashar succeeded him. This was followed by an outburst of political debate and demands for democratic changes, known as the Damascus Spring, and al-Turk resumed a prominent role. His statement on al Jazeera television in August 2001 that "the dictator has died" was seen as a direct cause of renewed repression by an angered government, and al-Turk himself was arrested some days later on September 1, 2001, and subjected to a trial widely seen as unfair before a state security court. In June 2002 he was sentenced to three years imprisonment for attempting to change the constitution by illegal means. This led to international protests, especially given his poor health.
Al-Turk was released after serving fifteen months of his sentence. After his release, he resumed his political activities. In spring 2005, the Syrian Communist Party (Political Bureau) held a secret congress at which it decided to change its name to the Syrian Democratic People's Party. At this congress, Turk stepped down as party secretary, but he remained an influential member of the organization. In the same year, he also emerged as a prominent name in the Damascus Declaration, a pro-democracy coalition of Syrian opposition activists and organizations.
In 2011, he welcomed the onset of the Syrian revolution against Bashar al-Assad's regime. However, the country descended into civil war. Initially supporting an alliance under the National Council of all opposition currents, including Islamists, Riad al-Turk later expressed regret, acknowledging the oversight of ignoring certain violations committed by Islamist groups during the emergency. By 2013, he had been living in seclusion, confined to an apartment in Damascus. Reflecting on his decades-long involvement with the Syrian Communist Party, al-Turk revealed to Le Monde: "Since I joined in the 1950s, clandestine life has been a tradition. My generation understands the importance of secrecy against such a regime. The young revolutionaries were unaware, and they paid a steep price." His wife left the country at the conflict's onset and died in Canada in 2017. Despite initial reluctance, al-Turk eventually yielded to the persuasion of his daughters, who were already refugees abroad. In late July 2018, he went into exile, passing through Turkey, and eventually settling in Paris, France.
Riad al-Turk died on January 1, 2024, in Eaubonne, a northern suburb of Paris, France.
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Riad al-Turk, the ‘Mandela of Syria,’ Dies in Exile at 93
Imprisoned four times, he spent almost 20 years in Syria’s prisons, nearly 18 in solitary confinement, for speaking out against the Assad regimes. He died in France.
Riad al-Turk, a veteran Syrian opposition leader known as the “Mandela of Syria” after spending nearly two decades in prison for speaking out against his country’s dictatorial regimes, died on Jan. 1 in Eaubonne, a northern suburb of Paris. He was 93.
Mr. Turk’s death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his daughter Khuzama Turk in an interview.
Mr. Turk’s life was a dark mirror of his country’s torments, and his improbable survival was testimony to his will to endure. He was imprisoned four times, tortured repeatedly and spent nearly 18 years in solitary confinement, mostly in an underground cell with no windows. “We can say that it was about my height — it was the size of a small elevator,” he said in one of his last interviews.
One instance 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 continuously fought the Syrian government until 2018, at the age of 88, when he reluctantly fled to France to live in exile.
His “entire life has been about dissent,” the journalist Robin Wright, who interviewed him in Damascus, wrote in her book “Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East” (2008).
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Mr. Turk began his career as a militant Communist, speaking out against dictatorship, and ended it as a symbol of resistance to successive tyrannies in Syria.
After being released in the spring of 1998 following nearly 18 years in prison under the 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 gathered in the Syrian city of Homs, Mr. Turk’s birthplace, to hear him speak as the secretary general of the outlawed Syrian Communist Party’s political bureau, 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,” saying it represented “despotism.”
Less than a month later, he was in jail for the fourth time at the age of 71. He was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for treason but, following international pressure, was released in November 2002 because of poor health.
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Not long before his fourth arrest, the filmmaker Mohammad Ali Atassi interviewed Mr. Turk for a 2001 documentary, “The Cousin,” asking him: “You got out of prison. But did prison get out of you?”
“No,” he replied. “Prison is still in me. It’s not that I’m afraid of it or something. But because prison represents oppression, and oppression is still practiced in my country, destroying prison is still a major goal on which the country’s liberty depends.”
As a young University of Damascus law school graduate and new member of the Syrian Communist Party, Mr. Turk was first imprisoned in 1952 for speaking out against the military coup of Adib al-Shishakli. He was held for five months, tortured and never tried.
He was imprisoned again in 1958 for protesting Syria’s union with President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. He was held and tortured for 16 months, again without trial.
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His third imprisonment, 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 violence by the Muslim Brotherhood” and instead declared that he was against “violence by all sides,” said Najib Ghadbian, a political scientist at the University of Arkansas. That declaration amounted to condemnation of the Assad regime, Professor Ghadbian said in an interview, adding, “He paid a heavy price” for that statement.
For nearly 18 years, Mr. Turk was kept in near total isolation, allowed only three visits throughout his incarceration. He was let out of his windowless cell for three trips to the toilet a day, during which he scavenged for bits of clothing left by other prisoners in the trash. For the first 10 years of his sentence, he slept on the floor of his cell. His only diversion was to make pictures using the hard bits of grain collected from the meager gruel his jailers gave him.
“They need to isolate me from the world,” he told Mr. Atassi in the film. “If they put me with other prisoners, they fear I would lift their morale. Isolation is constant psychological torture.”
Yet “prison didn’t break him,” Mr. Atassi said in an interview from Beirut.
Riad al-Turk was born in Homs on April 17, 1930, to Mohammed Ali Turk, a local hotelkeeper who died when Riad was very young, and his wife, Amina, a woman of limited means. Riad was raised in a school for orphans, his daughter Khuzama said. He entered law school at the University of Damascus around the age of 20, she said, and joined the Syrian Communist Party in 1952.
The rest of his life was spent in politics, “my blood and part of my life,” Mr. Turk told Mr. Atassi.
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After his final release from prison, in 2002, he remained active in the Syrian opposition, signing in 2005 the Damascus Declaration, an attempt to unify the Assad regime’s various opponents. “He wanted to push for a great unification,” Mr. Atassi said.
When the uprising against the Assad regime began in 2011, one that would lead to outright civil war, Mr. Turk sought out young demonstrators, encouraging them even as he entered his eighth decade. He later acknowledged that he had underestimated the toxicity of the Islamists whom he and other opponents of Assad had initially appealed to.
“His commitment was amazing,” 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 continued opposition had left him confined in semi-clandestinity in his small apartment in Damascus, Le Monde wrote in 2018. That year, with failing eyesight and poor health, he finally left Syria at the urging of his two daughters, undertaking a dangerous journey through Islamist-held territory to reach Turkey and eventually France, where he was accepted as an exile.
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His wife, Asma Al-Faisal, who had 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 verdict that the old dissident draws is that of a failure,” Le Monde wrote after going to see him in 2018, “the political testament of a man who won’t see his life’s work accomplished.”
His daughter Khuzama doesn’t see it quite that way. “He was the only man who said no to the Syrian regime,” she said. “He was the only one who said, ‘Syria won’t remain the kingdom of silence.’ He dedicated his life to the fight for democracy.”
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