Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, a round-faced 13-year-old boy, was arrested at a protest in Jiza, a southern Syrian village near Daraa on April 29. Nothing was known of him for a month before his mutilated corpse was returned to his family on the condition, according to activists, that they never speak of his brutal end.
However, the remains themselves testify all too clearly to ghastly torture. Video posted online shows his battered, purple face. His skin is scrawled with cuts, gashes, deep burns and bullet wounds that would probably have injured, but not killed. His jaw and kneecaps are shattered, according to an unidentified narrator, and his penis chopped off.
“These are the reforms of the treacherous Bashar,” the narrator says. “Where are human rights? Where are the international criminal tribunals?”
In Syria and beyond, the youth’s battered body has cast into shocking relief the terrors wielded by the Syrian state against its people.
Circulating in various versions, the video has injected new life into a six-week uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad that has appeared to settle into a bloody stalemate of protests and violent government responses. In the days since news of the death spread, more than 58,000 people have visited and expressed support for a Facebook page memorializing Hamza as a “child martyr.”
Demonstrators in several Syrian cities protested the boy’s death over the weekend, weaving chants and banners dedicated to him into the mix of anti-government slogans that have become staples of the uprisings shaking the Arab world.
In a revolutionary season that has seen countless “Fridays of Rage” in half a dozen countries, Syrian activists marched on a day that some dubbed “the Saturday of Hamza.”
“People are very upset about the death of the young boy Hamza,” said one man active in protests in Homs, who asked not to be named for fear of the security forces. “He was just a child. It is a crime, a serious crime.”
In the Damascus suburb of Douma, protesters marched through the night chanting “Leave! Leave!” to Assad while holding signs declaring: “We are all Hamza al-Khateeb,” according to a video posted on YouTube. Video from another suburb, Dereya, showed women and children demonstrating, with a chorus of young voices shouting, “The people want the overthrow of the regime.”
They held aloft signs that read, “Did Hamza scare you that much?”
“Hamza has become a symbol of the Syrian revolution,” said Radwan Ziadeh, an exiled Syrian human rights activist and a visiting scholar at George Washington University. His death, he said, “is a sign of the sadism of the Assad regime and its security forces.”
The video pans slowly over the boy’s swollen and disfigured corpse as it lies on a plastic sheet. The narrator’s somber voice intones in formal Arabic that he is “the latest martyr of freedom” and recounts his wounds one by one.
Ziadeh said he had been in touch with the boy’s family. He said they stopped speaking to journalists after their part in producing the video, an act of defiance that may have cost them dearly. Hamza’s father was detained after the release of the video, Ziadeh said.
The full impact of the death is difficult to assess; foreign journalists have been barred from entering Syria since the unrest began in mid-March, and many Syrians live in deep fear of the security apparatus.
However, many of the recent uprisings across the region have drawn energy and moral power from the violent deaths of young people at the hands of the state.
The Syrian uprising was incited by the arrest in early March of a group of children, ages eight to 15, caught spraying anti-government graffiti on the wall of their school.
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