Alice Su - Sep 27, 2017
Basel Khartabil hoped the internet would lead to a flowering of freedom and openness in Syria. Then he was arrested and imprisoned by the Assad regime.
In 2003, when Jon Phillips was 24, he met someone who changed everything about how he perceived the world. At the time, Phillips was a graduate student in computer science and visual art at the University of California, San Diego. Rather than work for a big tech company, as most of his friends were doing, he wanted to use his computing skills to “build society and community.” So he turned to open software, collaborating with strangers every day on Internet Relay Chat, a platform that software developers use to chat in real time while working on projects together. One day, while he was on an IRC channel developing an open source clip art site, someone with the username Bassel popped up.
Bassel wrote a patch for the site, then went on to develop a software framework for a blog platform that he and Phillips called “Aiki,” which was also the name of Bassel’s pet turtle. Phillips had no idea who Bassel was, where he lived, or what he looked like, but they spent hours hacking together, and eventually Phillips picked up more details: Besides the pet turtle, he learned that his collaborator lived in Damascus and was of Palestinian and Syrian descent; he taught Phillips that the Arabic term inshallah, “God willing,” could also mean “no.” He would joke with Phillips while hacking, “Don’t say inshallah, dude, don’t hex it, inshallah means it’ll never happen!” Eventually, Phillips learned his full name: Bassel Khartabil, though he went by Bassel Safadi online, a reference to his Palestinian origins in the town of Safad.
Phillips and Khartabil met at a time of great optimism for “open culture” advocates like them. Both men became active in the Creative Commons, a movement dedicated to open source programming and a culture of sharing knowledge across the world. Khartabil saw the internet and connectedness in grand, almost utopian terms, and in November 2009, he and Phillips organized an event at the University of Damascus called Open Art and Technology. It was the first significant “free culture” event in Syria—and the first time Phillips and Khartabil met in person. They invited a variety of artists, including the Syrian sculptor Mustafa Ali. After a speech given by the CEO of Creative Commons, who had traveled from the United States to Damascus, the artists stood up one by one and pledged to put their art in the commons, licensed for sharing, open to all.
“It was cool, like, is this really happening?” Phillips says. “We were sitting there, like, Dude, yeah, we did this, man. This is our thing. This is the ultimate social hack.” For Khartabil, it was a highlight of his effort to bring more Syrian art, culture, and knowledge onto the internet; it was the web as a peaceful revolutionary force.
Six years later, Khartabil was dead. Syrian military intelligence arrested him in Damascus on March 15, 2012. He was interrogated, tortured, and imprisoned in the Saydnaya military prison and Adra prison, sometimes in solitary confinement. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention determined that Khartabil’s imprisonment violated international law and called for his release, to no avail. Then, in October 2015, he disappeared from Adra, without any government statement of his whereabouts. Friends and family started a #freebassel campaign, believing he was still alive somewhere. But on August 1, 2017, Khartabil’s wife, Noura Ghazi Safadi, who is a human rights lawyer, announced that his family had confirmed his death. “He was executed just days after he was taken from Adra prison in October 2015,” Ghazi Safadi wrote on Facebook. “I was the bride of the revolution because of you. And because of you I became a widow. This is a loss for Syria. This is loss for Palestine. This is my loss.”