Al Jazeera America, 18 May 2015
A rooftop garden in Yalda, a neighborhood bordering Yarmouk on the southeastern outskirts of Damascus. Yarmouk has endured a siege since 2012, and one key to survival has been for residents to grow their own food. Lens Young Yeldani
Source: http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/5/18/a-garden-grows-amid-a-siege-in-syria.html
In the desperate Damascus neighborhood of Yarmouk, growing food is matter of life or death
In a dark kitchen, by the flickering light of a single safety candle, two men bundled in hats and jackets against the cold put on an impromptu video satire: live from Yarmouk, at the southernmost edge of Damascus, a cooking show for people under siege.
“This is the new dish in the camp of Yarmouk. It hasn’t even hit the market yet,” said the man on the right, 40-year-old Firas Naji, the blunt and humorous host.
He picked up a foot-long paddle of sobara, Arabic for prickly pear cactus. Holding it carefully by one end to avoid thorns, he displayed first one side and then the other for the camera.
“In the U.S., they get Kentucky [Fried Chicken], hot dogs. In Italy, spaghetti and pizza,” he said, his raspy voice caressing the names of unattainable foods. “Here in Yarmouk, we get sobara.”
“It’s not enough we have checkpoints in the streets and shelling,” he added, laying the cactus back on the counter with a sad laugh. “Even our cooking has thorns.”
When the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and Jabhat Al-Nusra (the Nusra Front) swept in and seized control of Yarmouk last month, they were fighting people who had been under siege by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime for more than two years. Since December 2012, the 18,000 people trapped in this neighborhood have been living with hardly any electricity or fuel. They have had no running water since September 2014. They had so little food that at one point a Muslim cleric in Yarmouk issued a ruling allowing people to eat the flesh of donkeys, dogs and cats.
But one thing they have always had in Yarmouk, which was originally a camp for displaced Palestinians, is sabr. Roughly translated, sabr is the patience and perseverance that gives the prickly pear cactus its Arabic name. For Palestinians, the sobara — thorny, tough, often planted at the borders of vegetable gardens as a living fence — is a symbol of resilience.
Under siege by the regime and now by insurgents, Yarmouk’s forgotten civilians have been fighting the medieval weapon of hunger with creativity, humor and the ultimate grass-roots resistance strategy: gardens.
A matter of life and death
Yarmouk is one of a handful of neighborhoods, villages and towns being held under siege in the four-year Syrian conflict. Across the country, civilians under siege have been devising creative survival strategies for feeding themselves and their neighbors. Many of them are based on age-old agrarian practices like foraging, communal kitchens and community gardens. In Yarmouk a new generation of urban gardeners has defied bullets and artillery fire to cultivate as many as seven large community plots and dozens of smaller kitchen gardens.
“Most of the people in Yarmouk do gardening today,” said Abdallah al-Khateeb, a 25-year-old Yarmouk native and student-turned-activist-turned-gardener, over Skype, in an interview conducted before the ISIL takeover. “Most of them have made little farms inside their houses or close to their homes.”
Lettuce growing in Damascus. Across Syria, citizens under siege have turned to gardens to help them survive. Lens Young Yeldani
Between buildings, in abandoned lots and on rooftops, the siege gardeners of Yarmouk have been cultivating everything from eggplants to mulukhiyeh, a jute plant whose glossy leaves make a rich green stew. Come harvest time, they bag the produce into 1-kilo portions, hang the bags on the handlebars of beat-up bicycles and pedal around the camp distributing the food to their neighbors. They focus on those most in danger of starving: children, poor people and the elderly.
In besieged Yarmouk, gardening is a matter of life or death. In June 2014, a government shell killed three men just outside one of the neighborhood gardens. At least two people have been shot and killed by snipers while foraging for wild greens. And anyone providing food, water or medical care is especially at risk of being assassinated, kidnapped by armed groups or disappeared by the government. In the first three months of 2015, as fighters from ISIL and Jahbat Al-Nusra were infiltrating the camp and preparing to take over, at least 10 nonviolent activists were killed.
Naji, the playful host of the mock cooking show and a longtime community activist, was one of them.
When the siege began, Khateeb and others formed the Basmeh Social Foundation, a community-based relief group in Yarmouk. They organized clown shows and play groups for children, a community garden, a water distribution project and a series of videos showing life under siege — including the satirical cooking show. Naji was a mentor to the younger activists at first and took a more active role as many of them were arrested or killed. On Feb. 23, he was found dead in his house. He had been shot execution-style in the head.
Naji’s killers have not been identified. But his death fits ISIL’s pattern of eliminating homegrown community leaders whose popularity might challenge their control. “It’s not just anybody who can mobilize hungry people,” says Salim Salamah, a Yarmouk native and spokesman for the Palestinian League for Human Rights. “Mobilizing the 18,000 people inside Yarmouk was possible for only a few people. And those were the people who were killed.”
Naji and Khateeb were close friends; Khateeb is the one who recorded the satirical cooking show. On March 8, two weeks after Naji’s murder, a group of armed men surrounded Khateeb as he was leaving his house and tried to force him into a car. He was able to escape. But the assassinations continued.
Naji’s friends and colleagues believe he was killed because his work threatened the main power brokers inside the camp: the black-marketeers who profit because the siege has sent food prices into the stratosphere, the pro-regime militias and the armed groups such as ISIL that are increasingly extending control over the population.
“Firas Naji was killed because he offered people a choice of dignity, of food sovereignty,” says Raji Abdulsalam, a human rights defender with the Palestinian Human Rights Organization, a non-partisan group that monitors conditions in Palestinian camps. “And many people didn’t like that. I’m talking about both extremists and the regime.”
A deal for seeds
The Syrian government established Yarmouk in 1957 as a camp for Palestinian refugees. But over the years, it took in more and more Syrians, especially in the mid-2000s, as drought and government neglect ravaged the farming areas in the country’s northeast. By 2011, it had become a dense, vibrant neighborhood where several hundreds of thousands of people were packed into four-fifths of a square mile. Fewer than a third of them were Palestinian.
When the rebellion against Assad began, in March 2011, displaced Syrians flooded into Yarmouk. Opposition groups like the Free Syrian Army began to clash with local pro-regime militias. On Dec. 16, 2012, the government sent Mig fighter jets to bomb a mosque, a hospital and four schools where displaced people had sought shelter.
From then on, the siege tightened every day. The government checkpoints in and out of Yarmouk would close for four days, then five, then six. Soldiers would confiscate any amount of food over a kilo. They would open bags of bread and count the pieces to make sure there were no more than 10.
Lettuce growing in Damascus. Across Syria, citizens under siege have turned to gardens to help them survive. Lens Young Yeldani
“You can say that this was something psychological,” says Osama Jafra, the alias of an organizer for the Jafra Foundation, a community development group that started several of Yarmouk’s large communal gardens.
About six months into the siege, around the end of June 2013, a neighbor hailed Jafra on the street. Since Jafra worked for a charity group, the man asked, could he get him money to buy seeds?
“Why?” Jafra asked.
“Come. I’ll show you,” the man replied.
He took Jafra to one of the schools that warplanes had bombed six months earlier. In the abandoned courtyard, a playground was alive with flowers and greenery. With seeds, they could transform it into a vegetable garden.
Jafra made a deal with his neighbor: I’ll get you $50 for seeds if you agree to share them. The next day, Jafra recruited staffers and volunteers to cleaned up the camp to cultivate the abandoned play area. Neighbors saw what they were doing and began to help. Even children pitched in. They finished in four hours.
“When the people and the children started to work with us, everybody was so happy,” says Jafra. They planted dandelions, parsley, tomatoes, eggplants and lentils. They called it the Palestine Garden.
And so a transformation began among the urban inhabitants of Yarmouk. They discovered the secrets of farming, like the best time to water the garden — at night, so the precious water would not evaporate. They learned how certain plants, like fava beans, can renew exhausted soil. They found seeds and farming skills among the rural farmers who had fled to Yarmouk when drought and later war engulfed the Syrian countryside.
The Syrian regime allowed only certain approved seeds in the country. But with the limited water and fertilizer under the siege, the hybrid commercial seeds were useless. Enter the international food sovereignty movement, a worldwide confederation of farmers, food producers and land rights activists. Farmers from over half a dozen countries donated organic, open-pollinated seeds, which were then smuggled, at considerable risk, into Yarmouk.
Desperation, then a harvest
A few weeks after Jafra and his friends planted the Palestine Garden, on July 21, 2013, the regime closed the main checkpoint into Yarmouk for good. The siege was total: Nobody could leave, and nothing could enter except what the soldiers permitted. The checkpoint is closed to this day.
Over the next six months, the price of everything went up. A single radish reached $1.50 at one point; a kilo of rice was $100. “All of us, even me, we were living on two or three spoonfuls a day of whatever we had — rice, lentils,” says Jafra.
But even on the hungriest days, they kept gardening. They figured out how to charge their laptops by hooking them up to tractor batteries. Whenever they could get precious electricity and even more precious hacked Internet, they tried to watch YouTube videos on urban farming. “Everyone was laughing big time, saying ‘What the fuck are those kids doing?’” says Abdulsalam. “Everyone was laughing at them until maybe the third month, when they started to harvest some of the quick things, like lettuce. And little by little, people started to believe that this makes a difference.”
Loren Duca says:
June 4, 2015 at 10:15 pm -
A garden represents Life no matter where it grows, no matter under whose politics or dictatorship, under whose reign, under whose siege — a Garden Grows is the most inspiring thing I”ve read for a while — Many prayers and blessings go out to the people of Syria, particularly this neighborhood. Wonderful, wonderful… sad but wonderful.