A year after the brutal, seemingly unassailable regime of Bashir al Assad crumbled like a house of cards, for the first time in the country’s history Syrians are next week preparing to publicly mark UN-designated Human Rights Day. Welcomed back into the mainstream of the international community, Syria, now led by Islamist militia leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, is a very different place, though the shadow of Assad’s legacy weighs heavily.
An important new light on the bloody inner workings of his security and intelligence agencies has been cast by a leaked trove of 174,000 documents from the old regime’s files, including some 33,000 pictures of emaciated cadavers, 10,200 of them detainees of the regime. These have come to light courtesy of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), of which The Irish Times and 24 media outlets are partners, and will help the thousands of traumatised relatives still desperately trying to trace their disappeared loved ones. And, hopefully, help to bring some of those responsible to trial.
Many of the bodies bear clear signs of torture, including emaciation, bruising, bloodied and swollen faces, bloodied body parts, bandaged limbs, visible lacerations and missing teeth. Nearly half are naked and about three-quarters show signs of starvation. During the period reflected in the files, many detainees were kept for no plausible reason, some swept up in security dragnets, at checkpoints or because they came from a town considered rebellious.
The files reveal the chilling meticulousness of Assad’s security bureaucrats charged with recording the workings of their killing machine and reporting on this to the courts. Like the Nazi guards’ records in the death camps, or in Cambodia the Khmer Rouge dossiers in the torture house of Toul Sleng, these more than vividly reflect the blind loyalty, and sense of absolute impunity, of the regime’s minions.
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Assad, now reportedly living under asylum in Russia, is, unfortunately, well away from the reach of Syrian or international justice. He presided over Syria during the country’s 13-year bloody civil war during which about half a million people were killed , according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights ,including more than 200,00 civilians at the hands of the regime and more than 160,000 were forcibly “disappeared” by the state or its agents between 2011 and last year.
Syria’s government, which has promised to help, and set up two commissions to investigate the old regime’s record, has still not put an end to disappearances – nearly 100 this year – and is struggling to stop violent sectarian clashes with the Druze and Alawite communities. Israeli bombing raids in the south and occupation of Golan make normalising regional relations impossible. Syria’s transition remains difficult.
