‘Khiam cost me my baby’

The hardest moment of Mona Ashour’s life was when she had to tell her husband Adel that she couldn’t present him with his child because the beatings she suffered at the hands of her "Israeli"-allied captors caused her to miscarry.
In 1993 ­ just two days after Adel was imprisoned ­ the militia snatched her from her home in the then-occupied village of Dibbine and took her to the Khiam detention center. Her brother-in-law, Riad Kalakish, had already been inside Khiam for seven years. Both Adel and Riad remained detainees until last week’s storming of the prison.
Mona was two-and-a-half months pregnant with their first child. The first insults were the forced removal of her veil and the fondling of her body.
At first the harassment was psychological. “They threatened to remove my clothes and hang me outside in front of all the men,” Mona recalled. “Then they said they’d rape me while my husband watched.”
Terrified, she answered their questions. “My husband was a Hizbullah fighter and I told them what I knew,” she said. “But he never told me anything so there was nothing much I could tell.”
The "Israeli"-proxy interrogator was obviously not convinced. So for a whole day, Ashour was made to kneel with her hands tied behind her back facing a toilet. There she stayed and was forced to watch as militiamen relieved themselves.
“And on the way in and out, they threw either cold or hot water on me,” she said.
Meanwhile, she was deprived of sleep as interrogations continued. “The interrogator slept but I wasn’t allowed to,” she recalled. “I had to sit there watching him sleep, then wait for him to wake up and sip his coffee ever so slowly.”
Taking a break from questions, the interrogator would then masturbate in front of her.
“I kept thinking to myself,” she said, “that I was a married woman. What about the young girls who came through here?”
Then the physical harassment began. Slaps and beatings became the norm.
She lost her baby around the third day after a militia woman ordered her to clean some rooms and carry heavy items. Already dizzy from the beatings, Mona miscarried and fell unconscious. She was taken to Marjeyoun Hospital.
Back in prison, she was placed in a small cell with four others. The women quickly bonded. Once a week, they received a bucket of water to wash themselves and their clothes. “We had a system going among us that whoever was menstruating would get all the water,” she said.
They cut up their blankets to use as sanitary napkins ­ though these were later provided. “We always looked out for each other,” she said. “We found ways to cling together.”
When one of the women from nearby cells was taken away for interrogation ­ frequently during the night ­ the woman would find some way to signal to the others that she was being taken away.
“For example, she’d cough as she’d go by our door and we knew who it was,” Mona said.
And then they listened intently. If they heard her screaming they would scream back.
“One time a woman was taken to another room,” she said. “And there, a militiaman stripped her clothes off and his as well. Then he tried to rape her. She was strong and pushed him off. And she screamed loudly. We heard her and screamed back. This somehow scared the militiaman and he let her go.”
With Adel’ return, these memories are now behind her. It’s time to settle down to a new life ­ one in which children will hopefully play a part.

The Daily Star, 31-5-2000.