“I was raped by Assad’s thugs

It belonged to his grandmother. Something solid. A thing to hold in your hands, run your fingers through and trace down the memory lane. A beautiful little thing, inlaid with fine mosaic.

Rene opens the music box, and the tinny music begins to play, the same song he heard long ago in his living room in Damascus.

“This is all I have left of my house,” he says.

Everything about this young man points to fragility. René Chevan is short, slender and soft-spoken.

All week his emotions changed. Joy at the fall of Bashar al-Assad. Heartache at the memory of the months he spent in Syrian prisons.

“There was a woman. I have her image in my head. She stood in the corner and begged… it was clear that she had been raped.

“There was a boy. He was 15-16 years old. He was raped, and he called his mother. He was saying, “Mom…Mom…Mom.”

There was his own rape and sexual assault.

When I first met Rene, he had just fled Syria. That was 12 years ago. He sat across from me, shaking and in tears, afraid to show his face to the camera.

The secret police detained him for going to a pro-democracy demonstration. They also knew he was gay.

Three of them gang-raped Rene. He begged for mercy, but they laughed.

“No one heard me, I was alone,” he recalled back in 2012.

He was told that this was what he got for demanding freedom. Every day a different officer bullied him. He endured this violence for six months.

As images of prisoners being released in Damascus appeared on television this week, Rene returned to his own images.

“I’m not in prison now, I’m here. But I saw myself in photos and images of people in Syria. I was so happy for them, but I saw myself there… I saw the old version. I saw how I was raped, and when I was tortured, I saw everything in retrospect.”

He cries and we stop the interview. A few minutes, he says.

I look at his living room wall.

There is a photo of his destroyed home in Syria, one of which shows René running the Utrecht Marathon. Then an image of Jesuit priest Father Frans Van Der Lugt, 75, a psychotherapist and ecumenical activist in Syria until he was killed in 2014.

It was Father Van Der Lugt who told René – who struggled in a deeply conservative environment – that he was a normal person, that Jesus loved him regardless of his sexual orientation.

Rene takes a glass of water, then asks to continue our conversation.

Why would he agree to show his face on camera now, I wondered?

“Because there is no fear of the republic. Because I am, I am no longer afraid of them. Because Assad is a fugitive in Moscow. Because all the criminals in Syria escaped. Because Syria has returned to the entire Syrian people,” he answers. .

“I hope that we will be able to live as a nation in freedom and equality. I am so proud of myself as a Syrian, a Dutchman, as an LGBT person.”

This does not mean that he is yet sure that he is living in Syria as a gay man.

Under the Assad regime, homosexual acts were criminalized.

The country’s new leaders have fundamentalist religious roots and are involved in violence and persecution of gays.

“There are many Syrian LGBT people who have fought,” Rene says.

“They were part of the revolution and they died. (The Syrian regime) killed them just because they were LGBT and because they were part of the revolution.”

Rene tells me he is “realistic” about the prospect of change. He is also concerned that all religious and ethnic groups, including the Kurds, receive protection.

Rene is one of around six million Syrians who have fled the country and found safety either in neighboring countries such as Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey – the majority – or further afield in Europe.

After the overthrow of the Assad regime, several European countries have already suspended the acceptance of asylum applications from Syrians. International human rights organizations criticized this step as premature.

According to estimates, about one million Syrians live in Germany. Among them is a remarkable disabled Kurdish girl whom I first met in August 2015 when she joined a large convoy of people who landed on the Greek island of Lesbos.

In the north, it passed through Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Austria.

To reach Europe from northern Syria, Nujin crossed mountains, rivers and seas, with her sister Nisreen pushing a wheelchair.

“I want to be an astronaut and maybe meet an alien. And I want to meet the Queen,” she said.

I sat beside her on the dusty road where thousands of asylum seekers lay exhausted in the midday heat. Her good spirit and hope were contagious.

She was a girl who learned to speak English fluently by watching American television programs. Nujin grew up in Aleppo and then, when war broke out, she traveled to her family’s hometown of Kobane, a Kurdish stronghold that later came under attack by the Islamic State (IS) group.

Now I meet her in the bustling Neumarkt square in Cologne, around the Christmas markets, where the locals eat sausage and drink mulled wine, and the dramas of Syria seem far away.

But not for Nujin.

She watched TV all week long after the rest of the family went to bed. It doesn’t matter that she has an exam in a business administration course. She will manage.

Nujin realizes that there will never again be a moment like the fall of Assad, a moment of such special hope.

“Nothing lasts forever. After darkness comes the dawn,” she says.

“I knew I would never go back to Syria with Assad as president and that we would never have a chance to be a better nation with that man at the helm. We knew we would never find peace without him. And now that this chapter is over, I think the real challenge begins.”

Like Renee, 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’s no elevator and the only way up to the apartment on the fourth floor is the stairs.”

Being a Kurd, she knows well the experience of her people’s suffering in the region.

Now that Kurdish forces have been forced out of oil-producing northern cities, Nujin sees the danger posed by the new Turkish-backed regime.

“We know these people who have now come to power. We know the countries and authorities that support them, and they are not exactly pro-Kurdish. They don’t really like us. That’s our biggest concern right now.”

There are also fears of a potential IS regrouping if Syria’s new leaders fail to bring stability to the country.

There are constant calls to families still living in Kurdish areas.

“They’re worried and worried about the future, like all of us,” Nujin says.

“We never stop calling and we always worry when they don’t pick up after the first call. There’s a lot of uncertainty about what’s next.”

Uncertainty is heightened by changes in asylum policy in Europe.

However, this is a young woman whose life experiences – the experience of being severely disabled from birth, witnessing the horrors of war, traveling across the Middle East and Europe to safety – have created a capacity for hope.

In the last ten years that I have known her, she has not darkened. The fall of Assad only deepened her faith 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, envy or want to destroy each other. We are a people raised to fear each other. But by default we love and accept ourselves as we are.’

“We can and will become a better nation – a nation of love, acceptance and peace, not a nation of chaos, fear and destruction.”

There are many hearts in Syria and beyond that will hope she is right.