I'm a minor celebrity get me out of here!

On the whole, Channel 4 News correspondents can walk the Britain’s city streets without too much concern about being recognised by every other passer-by (although, a few years back, someone did once recognise me in a Sainsbury’s checkout queue).

I have just left Damascus, and as I write I’m driving over the mountains into Lebanon.  All day though, I have had people come up to me, wherever I went, saying:  “I know you. You are the journalist who asked ‘the question'”.
By the time I left, I had begun to feel the unfamiliar pressure of minor celebrity.  On Monday afternoon, I attended a news conference with Syria’s Foreign Minister. It had been carried live on state TV.  It seems half the country was watching.

My question had been simple. It was what any journalist would ask – it’s just that I was one of only two foreign journalists in Syria who had been granted official visas .

I had challenged the minister on why there were still tanks in Syrian cities after he’d sidestepped the same question first time round.  And I’d asked whether his government might not have averted painful sanctions by simply withdrawing those tanks, as they’d actually promised to do.

The question had clearly chimed with many Syrians who quietly despair of their repressive regime’s violent response to the revolt against Bashar al-Assad. It was the question so many wanted to ask, but either couldn’t or didnt dare.  The answer – in which the minister denied tanks had ever fired on civilians in the nine-month-long revolt – had exposed their government as liars.

To those of us who have watched video on the internet showing tanks firing shells into cities this seemed ludicrous. It must have seemed even more so to state TV viewers holed up in Homs, Hama, Idlib, Deir Azour and Dara’a, people staring down the barrels of guns pointed at them by their own government.

Quiet protest

The first Syrian to recognise me as ‘the questioner’ was a shop-keeper in Damascus Old City. Then came the restaurant waiter.  People in our hotel, it turned out, had also been watching the news conference on telly. There was the X-ray machine attendant at a government ministry, the young men behind the counter in the pistachio sweet shop and the Syrian journalist – who sidled up to me after the news conference.   And there was customs official at the Syrian border.

There were others – but to say where they’d approached me would risk their being identified.

Those who approached me would first look around them to check to see that our government minder was out of earshot and there wasn’t a mukhabarat secret policeman skulking in the background.

Then they’d speak quietly, eyes smiling.  One or two would add: “Good question.” Or sometimes just: “Thank you.” Each time this happened, my heartbeat would quicken; each quiet comment a registration of protest.

Once or twice, if there weren’t any people about, I would ask why they had liked my question. But it was dangerous to do so. They’d made their point, they were letting me know and that was enough.  In Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, particularly in the loyalist heartland, you survive by keeping your head down.

The agents of the mukhabarat, al-Assad’s feared secret police, are everywhere, watching and listening out for thought crimes happening.

‘Good question’

I’m finishing writing this having arrived in Beirut, where I got into conversation with Nadim Houry, Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch for the Middle East and North Africa.  He had watched the Damascus news conference too.  I told him of my experience.

“It was a real question,” he said. “It challenged the narrative and asked for a real answer. This is what people want. They just don’t believe the wooden language of the regime any more and they want ministers to be challenged.  They want straight answers.”

The last person I met before leaving Damascus was the Presidential Adviser, Bouthaina Shabban. I met her in the Presidential Palace. When she arrived for the interview, she called me into her office for a quick word.

“I saw you at the minister’s news conference yesterday afternoon,” she said. “It was on TV.  It was a good question.”

Syria is a shamelessly brutal regime – which Nadim Houry dubbed “the Republic of Fear”. The paranoid  world of Bashar al-Assad lies half way between Kafka and Orwell.  In fact, it is 1984.  And Bouthaina Shabban had just illustrated perfectly that Orwellian concept of “doublethink”.

Follow Jonathan Miller’s insights on world affairs via Twitter: @MillerC4