Free People Like Us by Joris Luyendijk Page A

can skip the three-year draft and just write a letter.” Walid explained why he avoided Western journalists. He played in a band, and a year ago a reporter from the Los Angeles Times had interviewed him for an article. “We were over the moon,” Walid said with a self-deprecating smile. “It was going to be our breakthrough in America! After playing, we got plastered, and then we made jokes about Jurassic Park , which is what we call the regime. He quoted that, and not a word about our music. Yep, then the secret services called. I had to report to them every day for weeks. Always the same questions, and hours of waiting. Boring, boring, boring. Why was I making Western music? Why was I going to Internet cafés? As if that was deviant behavior! Those motherfuckers have
no idea what the world’s like outside Syria. They’re boring us to death, literally.”
    The waiter brought us more beers. Four moustachioed men in leather jackets came in and went to sit at the front table nearest to the dancing girls. Further up in the street, the most important “investigation facility” was located—it was obvious that the moustaches worked there. So that must be how you wind down after a hard day’s work putting electric cattle prods up people’s bottoms. How did the moustaches’ wives explain that to their children? Uncle Mohammed is a teacher, Uncle Yasser is an engineer, and Papa tortures enemies of the president. “Tell me something positive,” I said after yet another beer.
    Walid’s response was to tell me about a neighbor who had had an enormous wall built around his garden. “The whole neighborhood went mad and called in their connections. A few days later, a colonel came along, but he was too late. The neighbor had painted a colossal portrait of the president on the wall and Yes-Yes-Yes President Assad For Ever ! The colonel was powerless to do anything about it.”
     
     
    I learned the most about dictatorships from Western expats. They were high up in the pecking order, the regimes couldn’t do much to them, and many of them liked a drink, which made talking easier. At one dinner party, a European Union consultant told me that he’d been going to help the Lebanese government with “transparency.” The idea was to list on the Internet all the documents that civilians might need to have whenever they had to seek approval for plans or projects. Civil servants had sabotaged the plan immediately, the consultant said. As long as citizens didn’t know exactly
which documents to take with them, the civil servants could carry on making up new requirements and saying “Come back tomorrow” until the citizens reached for their wallets.
    During an Arab summit meeting, I got to know Gerhard, a German manager of a five-star hotel. A few hours before the summit, a man from the security services had come in—did Gerhard want to sign for 150 Egyptian tricolors? “I thought I was supposed to hang them up somewhere,” the inebriated Gerhard recounted. “But suddenly there were three vans in front of the door, and I had to release 150 employees so they could go and cheer the president as he came down the street. I had a hotel full of guests for the summit, and not a single member of staff.”
    More power to alcohol, I would often think to myself—and even more so when I bumped into Roland’s Dutch colleague from the Fayum oasis water company at a drinks party for the Dutch community in Cairo. He’d told me earlier that the ministries of irrigation and construction had sabotaged the project.
    Now, after a refreshing number of half-pints of Saqqara beer, he continued. “The problem is the words. We say ‘ministry’ because the regime uses that word, but actually it’s something quite different. A ministry isn’t set up here to make irrigation more efficient and less corrupt; rather, it’s to buy the support of thousands of farmers with offers of land, water, and fertilizer. In exchange, these farmers keep other