Munif Mulhem was born in Homs in 1951. A ground-to-air missile officer, he was expelled from the army, which was completely controlled by the Baath party, in 1973 for being a Marxist. In 1974, he initiated the creation of a Marxist workers’ circle. In 1976, the League for communiste action was founded. After going underground, he was elected a member of the political bureau in 1978. He was recognised as the representative of a Trotskyist sensibility in the party. In August 1981, a clandestine general conference of the ‘Party of Communist Action’ was organised in Lebanon. The Baathist security services were able to arrest almost all the delegates shortly afterwards. This was a period when the regime violently repressed Communists who did not pledge allegiance to it, as well as Islamists, thousands of whom were imprisoned and tortured. Mounif spent 17 years in Hafez-el-Assad’s jails. After six years, the authorities offered him a customary deal: release in exchange for a promise not to engage in politics again, which he refused along with other comrades. The same proposal five years later met with the same refusal. Unable to obtain acceptance of the terms of their release, the authorities finally brought them to trial - they had been held until then without charge - before the State Supreme Court, which sentenced them to terms of up to twenty years. Transferred to the sinister prison of Palmyra, the last four years of his detention were marked by daily sessions of torture. He was released from prison in 1997.
In the early 2000s, after Bashar al-Assad came to power, a brief period of openness known as the ‘Damascus Spring’ saw the emergence of ‘Forums’, discussion and debate forums, across the country, in which a number of former members of the PAC played a role. The weight of long years in prison, combined with the disintegration of the USSR, had led many of them to abandon their convictions, some even becoming supporters of American democracy.
Mounif Mulhem, for his part, founded the ‘Left Forum for Dialogue’ in Damascus with young Marxists. They were all quickly closed down under pressure from the security services. At the end of 2002, he initiated the movement against capitalist globalisation, until the stranglehold of surveillance by the security services forced them to cease their activities.
Mounif Mulheim endured in precarious material and health conditions throughout these years, thanks in particular to the material solidarity of friends and comrades.
After the popular uprising of 2011, he continued to seek to be active within the popular protest movement. As a result, he was imprisoned again in 2019. He was released after nine months, which he describes as worse than what he had experienced during his 17 years in prison up to 1997.
With the fall of the regime, he has undertaken to help bring together activists who want to return to the democratic and revolutionary objectives of 2011, to liberate the whole of Syria from the occupying forces, whether Israeli, Turkish, US, Iranian or Russian, so that the people can gain confidence in their ability to organise society from below.
Pierre Vandevoorde