It’s difficult to find the right superlatives to describe the horror of the macabre discoveries made in Saidnaya prison, north of Damascus, since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
Published at 7:00 a.m.
We first saw images of emaciated political prisoners who were unable to believe that they were finally being released. Who feared another sadistic ruse from their jailers. Injured or disabled as a result of mistreatment, some had to crawl to save themselves or were lifted up by their comrades in misfortune.
Others, thought dead, have seen the light of day again. “A man I know was there for 44 years. It was Bashar al-Assad’s father who put him in prison and he has just been released! “, told me Lina Chawaf, journalist and instigator of Radio Rozana, an independent Syrian media outlet.
A photo taken Monday by a photographer for Turkey’s Anadolu news agency shows rooms in the prison in which inmates’ clothes and shoes are piled up. You don’t have to look far to see the parallel with the Auschwitz camp, where the Nazis exterminated 1.1 million people.
In the case of Saidnaya, which Syrians nicknamed “the slaughterhouse of humans”, it is not yet known how many people died within its walls at the hands of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, but reports from Amnesty International tell us give an idea. According to the international organization, around 30,000 detainees died of execution – most by hanging – or as a result of torture between 2011 and 2018.
This number was believed to have declined since 2018, reaching around 500 in six years of stagnating conflict. However, the opening of the prison and the discovery of corpses showing signs of recent torture suggests that we have only seen the tip of the iceberg of the human cruelty that has prevailed in this infamous establishment built by Assad Sr. in the 1980s.
Saidnaya’s liberation is a huge symbol for Syrians, but unfortunately, it raises as many questions as it answers. Where have the tens of thousands of missing people gone who did not emerge from the overcrowded cells on Sunday?
“My family has a list of eight people we’re looking for – cousins of mine and cousins of my father – and we can’t find them,” Muzna Dureid told me. Originally from southern Damascus, she fled Syria after the assassination of her uncle by the regime and continued to fight for her country from Montreal.
On Sunday, like thousands of other Syrians, she sent photos of her missing to Syrian White Helmet rescuers who combed Saidnaya prison, trying to uncover secret underground cells described by former detainees . On Monday, empty-handed, they announced that they had ended their search. Elsewhere in the country, it is still a race against time to find clandestine prisons.
PHOTO HUSSEIN MALLA, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Two men inspect a corridor in Saidnaya prison.
The White Helmets, as well as a committee representing the families of detainees, also hope to get their hands on documents that were left behind at Saidnaya and other regime prisons, but many have disappeared, swept away by the chaos of the fall of the regime. dictator.
Although the images from the past few days are shocking, they are not surprising. The horror that unfolded at Saidnaya had been known for many years, and this is particularly true here in Canada.
Canadian engineer of Syrian origin Maher Arar was detained there in 2002 with the complicity of the American and Canadian governments. This was also the case at the same time for Abdullah Almalki, a Canadian-Syrian who was arrested in Syria on the basis of information provided by Canadian authorities which turned out to be false. They both received official apologies from the Canadian government as well as financial compensation in the case of Maher Arar.
In total, in the years following the attacks of September 11, 2001, four Canadian citizens experienced torture in the jails of the Assad regime. The role – direct or indirect of Canada – has been the subject of investigative reports.
We also knew that the horror had escalated several notches since the popular uprising of 2011, which led to a wave of repression and the start of the civil war. A former military photographer for the regime – who took the pseudonym Caesar – defected in 2013, taking with him tens of thousands of photos documenting arbitrary executions taking place behind closed doors. Although the regime denied it, Human Rights Watch researchers managed to authenticate them. They are now used as evidence in trials brought in Germany against former executioners.
Despite all this evidence, Western governments have done little to stop the butchery of Saidnaya and other detention centers that served to crush the Syrian dictator’s opposition. The denunciations did not save many lives.
Now that a new era begins, it seems clear that these same governments – starting with those in Ottawa and Washington – should deploy significant resources and efforts to provide care to newly released prisoners and to help the families who remain. without news of theirs to obtain answers. It would be a first step to atone for the faults of the not-so-distant past.
