Price rises at the local souq are one sign of the troubles, writes MICHAEL JANSENin Maadamiya, Damascus
AT THE entrance to the market shops overflow with musty second hand clothing, piles of jumpers and battered shoes from Europe.
“Some people prefer these to new things made locally,” observes W, but there are few shoppers picking over the stocks.
The primary colours of fruit and vegetables blossom on stalls like oil paint on palettes. Red tomatoes, carrots and beets; purple and white turnips; green custard apples, cucumbers, spinach and parsley; orange pumpkins and sweet potatoes. All fresh and, for foreigners with euro, cheap. But not for Syrians.
There is fresh chicken and mutton, frozen beef from India and fish from Vietnam and the Gulf. People queuing outside the tiny government bakery collect hot, flat rounds of bread and hang them over wooden rails fixed to the wall to let the bread cool before carrying it home.
A baker invites us in to see the Heath Robinson mechanised marvel that mixes huge basins of dough, fashions thousands of loaves, and bakes and conveys them to the window for sale at nine Syrian pounds, about six cent (in euro), a kilo.
W and his wife, I, pause to buy processed cheese, macaroni, fresh milk in plastic bags, onions, and other staples, 25-40 per cent more expensive than 11 months ago when the troubles began. Potatoes and eggs have doubled in price. “Food is fresher and cheaper here than in our village,” I remark.
We lunch off plates of a sweet made of semolina and cheese and served warm with sugar syrup. Further along the souq is an elegant blue-tiled entrance to an Ottoman hammam (bath); at the end, a green-tiled minaret on a medieval mosque, its black and white horizontal striped exterior typical of Damascus.
We catch a minibus to the suburb of Maadamiya where W and I have dwelt for a dozen years. At the checkpoint at the entrance of Maadamiya, a polite soldier checks the identity cards of men but not women and waves us through. We get out in the town centre, shops shuttered, streets empty, dusty, littered with stones and rubble, anti-regime slogans painted over.
A few women sit in the sun outside the doors of half-finished breeze-block buildings. “Welcome, welcome,” they call, urging us to drink coffee. We thank them and walk on, toting our bags of shopping to the modest flat where W and I live. The neighbourhood is poor, the people friendly.
Working-class Maadamiya, inhabited by Sunnis and heterodox Shia Alawites, has seen “hundreds of demonstrations” against the government over the past 11 months observes W. “The army has come in three times to search for weapons and make arrests . . . Some men have been held for a few days and freed, others remain in prison.”
At first detainees were treated well, but not later on.
Maadamiya has a longstanding grudge against the authorities which 30 years ago expropriated land at a risible price to build a military base and housing for officers. The people have been in dispute with the government ever since; they want to be compensated at today’s prices in millions of pounds while the government is offering five times the amount originally paid.
On some occasions, 1,500 people protested during daylight hours, but currently 50-100, half of them children, turn up at two in the morning outside mosques. A man died of heart attack in custody and 5,000 attended his funeral.
Armed elements entered from the olive groves and poured petrol into the bases of a line of lamp posts and set the wiring alight, blowing the neighbourhood’s electricity. “The streets had to be dug up to lay new wiring,” remarks W.
When ultra-orthodox Salafis, women completely covered and men with heavy beards, parade, others stay in their homes even though the Salafis do not challenge anyone, W says.
Two women wearing coats and headscarves stop to chat and soon launch a tirade against the government. “We are not afraid to speak . . . We want freedom, we want democracy, we want this regime to go,” states the younger. “My nephew is in prison . . . every time we deal with the government, we face corruption.”
Children play among the few remaining olive trees. Few attend school because of rumours about bombs. Some shops have shut because their owners are in prison, others open for a few hours a day. “People are leaving, or want to leave, but they own their houses and cannot afford rents elsewhere,” W says as we catch a minibus back to the broad boulevards, glittering fountains and chic boutiques of Damascus.