In 1974 a young British traveller ended up being held in a Syrian prison for 110 days. 50 years later Johnathan Mitchell shares his story.
The French delicacy of the songbird is thought to be so decadent that it should be eaten with a napkin placed over one’s head to savour the rich aromas.
The bird is traditionally consumed whole. It is said another reason one covers their face is to avert God’s gaze from the shame of eating something bones and all.
It was a cold winter morning on the south side of the Meadows in Edinburgh when Johnathan Mitchell agreed to share his story with me. Clearing his throat he began to describe the events that took place half a century ago.
“Around 10 years ago I was being introduced at a conference by a senior solicitor. He said: ‘Johnathan Mitchell is somebody who is always able to come out with a funny story and tell you something which can’t be true’.
“He had made a joke in reference to when I was a young lawyer interviewing with a firm. I had said to the panel that I had been late to college because I hadn’t been let out of prison in time. But you see this wasn’t a joke. It was the truth.”
In 1974 the climate in Syria was one of nervous movement and preying eyes. The country was under the socialist Baathist regime, which, although was still a newer power, had infiltrated all parts of everyday Syrian life.
A young British traveller found himself caught up in a web of misinformation: “This was like a spider’s web and a fly coming along and saying ‘Can I come into your parlour please?’ But I digress, this is what actually happened.”
“When I was 22 I’d been out travelling in the Middle East. I travelled through Syria and Lebanon, I went into Jordan, then crossed the Jordan River to go into the West Bank and from the West Bank into Israel. I spent a couple of months there and then I came back via the same route,” he began.
It is very common for young people on the cusp of adulthood to go travelling today, there’s a whole stereotype that goes with the idea of a ‘gap year’ which includes 20-somethings carrying backpacks three times the size of them and ‘finding’ themselves on the beaches of South East Asia.
Johnathan’s version of this started out as an adventure through the Middle East as a way to fill in time before his next academic conquest. He could have never predicted the events that would take place next.
“I came back from Israel, through the same route I had taken there. There are no entry or exit stamps in Jordan because the Jordanian theory of this was that you are still just travelling within the same country. When you do that route it’s important to watch out that you don’t have any Israeli passport stamps in your passport. A lot of Arab countries take this extremely seriously even then”.
Johnathan hints here at the deep-rooted tension between Israel and the surrounding Arab countries. In 1974 tensions were very high as this was only a year after the Yom-Kippur War in October 1973.
Johnathan, like others who made the same journey, ripped out the Israeli visa stamp from his passport. Not understanding that this would lead to gaps in his whereabouts.
In 1974 the atmosphere of Syria was wound tight but there was still a sense of leisure when it came to travelling between countries. Johnathan explains that many of the borders including the Jordan-Syrian were made up of soldiers who were used to only small amounts of commercial traffic every day. “They were bored out of their skulls!” He muses.
“When I came up to the Syrian border control post, the conscript soldiers like most Syrians that I had met were generous and hospitable. They asked if I wanted to stay for lunch and offered me quantities of tea and coffee.
“I was sitting there for quite some time having an idle chat with the border guards. At different times other guards came up and talked to me and at one point one of them was just glancing at my passport.”
It is at this point the tone of Johnathan’s story shifts. “The guard, he started to read it carefully and he worked out on the calendar that what had happened was that I had gone out of Syria into Jordan when I was coming south and had got a visa for two to three weeks but I had then come back having wildly overextended my stay. With no apparent reason or explanation.”
Without realising it a 22-year-old Johnathan had given the Baathist soldiers reasonable belief that he was lying about his recent pilgrimage.
This would be the start of what would lead to his three-month incarceration: “I didn’t have the imagination to come up and say somebody asked me if I could help make a film on Lawrence of Arabia or something like that.”
Without any real explanation, Johnathan found himself being pinned as crossing enemy lines. He described it as “this was a bit like – if you can imagine coming in on a plane from Sweden to Britain in 1943 and saying you had been travelling around Europe.”
It’s almost impossible for one to put themselves in Johnathan’s shoes at this moment in time. Although he connects his error to an almost youthful indiscretion which many can relate to: “I look back and I think I was pretty gormless for my age but I just thought if someone was saying to me to do this then it’s not a problem. You just believe them.”
Still, at this point, nothing seemed out of his control. Johnathan described the guard’s reaction to this realisation: “What they did next however out of embarrassment and the consciousness that they were abusing the hospitality that they were giving me. They said they would give me another stamp in my passport that said that before you leave Syria you’ve got to have spoken to the police and got them to sign off on my being there.
“They told me not to worry about it its not a big deal. So I hitched a ride with a Norwegian camera crew to Damascus, hoping to put this all behind me.”
However there was one detail the border soldiers had failed to mention, for Johnathan to leave Syria he had to be vetted by the Mukhabarats. The Syrian Secret Police.
“This was like a spider’s web and a fly coming along and saying ‘can I come into your parlour please?'”
Johnathan Mitchell
It wouldn’t be wrong for one to think emotions would be heightened at this point of Johnathan’s story but Johnathan still describes his experience up until now as on the whole friendly and respectful.
“The secret police, the Mukhabarats, they took me rather at face value they were under the impression that if I was told to come up here I was no threat. They told me that I can’t leave Damascus until I’ve been signed off. I stayed in a cheap hotel in the city in between interrogations,” Johnathan lightly added.
“I had what I think by Syrian standards a very unusually courteous, leisurely, and polite interrogation over several days for only a few hours a day. They wanted to know where I’d been in the West Bank, who I visited, all the names of the sort of people I’d spoken to. All of which I happily gave them.”
Sitting in a living room on a worn leather sofa in Edinburgh, it’s hard to picture being interrogated in a Damascene police headquarters but Johnathan tells his story with such honesty that I felt like I was in that room with him in 1974.
“Then one day they came along, they said we’re putting you out of the country now but instead of driving me to the border like they said. they drove me to this small prison which I don’t think exists anymore,” he said.
“I think what happened was that I had been so naive about this that I think that bought me some credit in a sense. I had been left at freedom which people are not normally left at in the context of the secret police.”
He described the jail as “a small prison that only held about 100 people i didn’t know this at the time. It looked like a sort of townhouse with a courtyard with rooms going off as extensions.”
From Johnathan’s accounts so far the innocence of being young prevented him from seeing the full picture: “I was ushered into this. I walk through a door into a room and then the door bangs behind me and then the penny started to drop. I was then told you’re gonna be held here overnight and I again assumed that was the truth.”
Over 110 days Johnathan spent most of his time in quiet imprisoned solidarity. “The experience was like a monastic retreat. I had nothing to read, nothing to do just sitting on a dirty old blanket on the floor staring into space. I’d never done this before in my entire life just having nothing to occupy myself.”
Throughout this first stint, he described his mindset: “They had put me into this cell and I am still assuming I’m going to get out; people there told me that I would get out very soon. I think they told me that just to be nice. They said nobody is held here for more than a few nights and then the days went by and after several weeks I was sitting in my cell by myself having, in effect, quite a nice time, it could be said.”
Johnathan described the atmosphere: “This prison was run by the Baathist party. They were totally in control, they had been for many years. This happened right back in the early years of Baathism when it still portrayed itself as a genuine political party. As a socialist movement. In truth, it had never been that its roots had always been fascist. They had been closely linked to Italian fascism and its routes were very much racist Arab nationalists.
“I was just there, nothing to do all day, the cell got increasingly crowded. I inhabited a space that was wide enough to lay down on your back and nothing much else. You would have to take turns at a little window with no ventilation, fanning yourself to bring in fresh air.” The harshness of his conditions was inescapable.
The far-left Neo-Baathist party gained control in 1963 when hardliners from the dominant Syrian and Iraqi regional parties joined forces to impose a radical leftist line.
Johnathan touches on the Baathist technique of forging a genuine political idealism. The party only relinquished its control fully in 2024. In the 70s they were still climbing the ladder to full power but their grasp was already tight in Syria.
“One day they opened the door and about 10 other guys are ushered into my cell because they had run out of space. So instead of giving me a cell to myself, there were now all these other people coming in who were a mixture of Arab political prisoners.”
Drawing on his own knowledge of the Baathist party at the time he said: “I knew a certain extent about them politically so I didn’t take them at face value when they said they were just socialists. Coming into the prison cell at this point were other Arab political prisoners and it’s at this point I start to realise that I am indeed a genuine prisoner. Then the penny fully hit the floor.”
With the realisation of him actually being imprisoned finally hitting, Johnathan became acquainted with his new cellmates bonding with them in a surprising way.
“The other prisoners, who are for the most part lovely gentlemen, mostly Muslim brotherhood people which I found very educational. I had never before or since met lots of fundamentalist Muslims. They were very civil and polite. I heard later that the prisoner commander had assumed I was Jewish because of my time spent in Israel and consequently thought I would be ‘victimised’ by the Muslim brotherhood.”
He explained how that could not have been further from the truth: “They nicknamed me in Arabic the follower of Jesus. On the whole, I got on with them all very well.” He reflects positively it’s honourable that even in what can only be called the worst of times there was still a branch of comradery handed out to him.
When he talks about the jail itself Johnathan is less enthusiastic: “The prison was a hell hole and not long before I came in they had changed what had been the practice of everybody who had come into the prison getting a quick spell of torture just to show them who was boss. That had only stopped a month or two before I ended up there. I was fortunate to avoid it. So I never got any bad treatment, I never got tortured, I never got beaten up, but most of the people I had been in with had been.”
This centralises the brutality of Johnathan’s situation, the constant reminder of what had taken place in the same space was all around him.
“Life went by. A couple of times during the 110 days I was in for, I got brought out again for further interrogations. I had been brought back a couple of times again very polite going back to police headquarters they would always offer me tea or coffee,” he said.
“They would ask me detailed specific questions like ‘When were you in Aleppo? What were you doing in Aleppo?’ After a time they came back and at that point, I had been there over three months and I was starting to wonder if I was ever going to get out.”
Throughout his time in the prison, Johnathan was never given a true answer to why he was being held. In ways there wasn’t really any above-board reason His incarceration was based on suspicions. We can look at this from the lens of a 21st-century Western society and be confused.
However, in Syria, this time period and up until 2024 was tumultuous and uncertain and being held prisoner without a reason was not uncommon.
Three months in the same cell, with the same four walls around, went by slowly and monotonously and then one day the door opened. “One day some soldiers showed up and told me I was leaving.” This was not the end of Johnathan’s story though.
This is not the first time Johnathan has shared his story. In 2022 Ewan Macbeth, Johnathan’s son, directed and produced the documentary short Prison with Songbirds in which Johnathan narrates his experiences in the prison and the events that took place after his release.
The documentary focuses on the darker side of his experience, centralising the undertones of brutish danger and uncertainty. Macbeth centred the documentary short around a letter Johnathan had sent to Amnesty International after his release.
The film explores how Johnathan ended up in the company of two smugglers whose job was to get him out of the country. Just before he left, the two men took him to a high-end restaurant where they dined on the cuisine of songbirds.
“One of the dishes was this enormous plate, a big silver cover on top of it. What was inside it were all of these songbirds. Tiny little birds like sparrows. These birds are kept in darkness. Blinded. Force-fed. Drowned in brandy. A meal so cruel we hide from God,” Johnathan explained.
One can look at the treatment of these birds and the men in this prison in a similar light. Kept in the dark, held without any explanation, kept away from view in deprived conditions. They were swallowed hole by the prison.
Johnathan Mitchell’s story, although extraordinary, also gives us a line to an experience that has not been vocalised in Western Media. The Baathist party faded into history in recent years.
From Johnathan’s time in prison in the 1970s to today has been a period of uncontrolled totalitarianism forced upon a country but for a large part kept out of the eyes of the rest of the world.
The fall of Baathism in December of 2024 has left behind a country that has been depleted and stripped of its population and rights. Like the songbirds, over the past century has Syria been torn apart, tortured, and hidden away.
Featured image by Mr Shiva via Unsplash.