Riyad Avlar spent twenty years in Syrian jails, including ten in the infamous Saydnaya prison. He inherited the after-effects, and an obsession: to document and repair the atrocities committed there under Bashar al-Assad.
“I am certain that one day we will see Bashar al-Assad in court,” prophesies the Turkish activist, who co-founded in 2017, a few months after his release, the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons from Saydnaya Prison (ADMSP ).
“We don’t want revenge, we want justice,” the ex-prisoner explains to AFP from the headquarters of his association in Gaziantep, in the south-east of Turkey, from where he and other elders of Saydnaya amass and cross-check testimonies and documents recounting the horrors that were perpetrated there.
Thousands of detainees, some crammed since the 1980s in this prison in northern Damascus that Amnesty International has described as a “human slaughterhouse”, were freed by Syrian rebels on Sunday as they entered the Syrian capital.
Images of haggard and emaciated prisoners, some carried by comrades because they were too weak to escape their cells, went around the world.
“It made me happy to see them (free), but when I saw the walls and the cells, it brought me back to this place. I am still traumatized,” confides this now father, arrested in 1996 in Damascus, where he was studying, for having mentioned abuses by the Syrian regime in a letter sent to relatives.
– “Art therapy” –
Even today, Riyad Avlar sometimes wakes up at night with a start, believing he is chained, as he was for two months in Syria in a cell plunged into darkness.
“I saw people die before my eyes, many of them from starvation,” says the activist with thin black glasses and a salt-and-pepper beard, who retains a scar on his left wrist inherited from the torture he suffered there. is twenty-five years old.
He also describes seeing Saydnaya guards, after starving detainees, throwing meager rations of food into toilets. “The prisoners ate them to survive,” he certifies.
Its reconstruction was done through theater and learning the saz, a long-necked lute popular in Türkiye. “Art therapy,” he sums up.
But also through his work in his association, with which he helped countless families obtain proof of the life of loved ones imprisoned in Saydnaya.
“Insiders”, employees of the prison, sent them internal documents until recently, he confides without being able to say more.
– “never again” –
Saydnaya prison, where crowds of relatives of the disappeared rushed after its release, expecting to find their loved ones in underground dungeons, is now empty.
According to the Prison’s Association of Detainees and Missing Persons, more than 4,000 detainees were released by the rebels.
The association estimates that more than 30,000 inmates were executed within the prison or died there under torture, for lack of care or food between 2011 and 2018, pushing its authorities to create “salting rooms”, morgues there. of makeshift used to preserve corpses in the absence of cold rooms.
Faced with so much horror, Riyad Alver does not consider one day returning to Damascus. But he confides that he “always dreamed that Saydnaya would one day become a place of memory”.
“I am so happy that there is no longer a single detainee inside,” he adds immediately. “I hope it never happens again.”
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