News spread fast that Syrian security forces let Khaled Khalife go free after subjecting him to torture and humiliation. The talented writer left prison with a broken arm and a sad heart resulting from the terrible massacre Asaad regime thugs authored in Houla and that left over 100 child, women, youth and others dead.
Khalife participated in the funeral of the Houla victims, and in peaceful, unarmed demonstrations against the state responsible for the mass killings.
Statistics say that across the last 15 months, the entire duration of the Syrian revolution, some 13,000 have fallen as martyrs — a loss greater than all the life lost for all the Arab countries combined across all wars with Israel. The Assad regime is recklessly carrying on until the very last demonstrator is killed.
What Khalife, who stated two months ago that the revolution would win, did is what an intellectual should do in critical turning points of history: join the lines of the people, not authority, risking his life just like those dying everyday in confrontations or even in their homes if regime thugs decide to bury them alive there after tearing their bodies apart.
The Syrian security forces know the stance of Khalife and many other honest intellectuals in Syria who expressed their opinion about the regime before the revolution and who stood by freedom, human dignity and social justice for all during the revolution. They refuse a dictatorship that has suppressed Syrians freedoms and left Syrians hungry while stealing their wealth to benefit a small corrupt clique around the regime.
Khalife has revealed the crimes of the regime in his novels and his scripts for TV dramas, focusing his artistic lens on the 40-year long tragedy of destruction in Syria. His novel In Praise of Hatred, published in 2006, was banned in Syria. He bravely portrayed the crimes of Hafez Assad 30 years earlier in Hama, shedding light on the state of Syrians today.
The environments described in the novel are nearly prophetic for what awaits Syria in the confrontation between the state and the people, as if he foresaw the future with his artistic sense. The minority ruling regime is fighting to prevent diverse Syrian forces from uniting to build a democratic, pluralistic and free Syria that is not ruled by gangs of corrupt officials.
Khalife's prophecy about the victory of the revolution touched many, especially as the regime deepens its brutality under the nose of the international community. The artist says that justice will win.
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