These crimes
should be remembered periodically for multiple reasons: first, so as not to be
forgotten; second, to build war crimes cases upon them; and third, to strip
immunity from the perpetrators. Additionally, the facts and the contributing
factors should be scrutinized in order to dissect the philosophy of Assad’s
rule, as well as the political and symbolic goals of the regime’s violence.
The following text
is therefore an attempt to do so by focusing on two particular criminal
operations, organized simultaneously by the regime within the span of its
geographical control (that is, outside of warzones and areas of remote
bombardment). Both crimes embody and exemplify the regime’s desired
relationship with its “citizens”: confiscation and desecration
on the one hand, and the detention of tens of thousands — and killing of
thousands of them through torture and the disappearance of their corpses — on
the other hand.
On ta'afish (confiscation and desecration) and
its meanings
The robbery of
houses and private property is not only linked to the behavior of soldiers and shabiha [regime-allied militias or
gangs] in besieged or bombarded areas that are then invaded and opportunistically
looted — both as revenge and to humiliate the enemy. The issue of “ta'afish
[desecration or defilement],” as Syrians call it colloquially, transcends these
behaviors or the “field initiatives” and chaos that accompany war.
It is the regime’s
systematic policy. Ta'afish offers spoils to fighters defending Assad’s rule and
thereby reinforces their loyalty to the regime. In contrast, to the general
public, ta'afish reveals their vulnerability and fragility. If they survive
being killed, the prospects remain of total confiscation of their public lives,
desecration of their private affairs, and expropriation of their household
belongings.
Unleashing
soldiers and shabiha on the survivors
and what survived the destruction of their homes, offices, and workshops is a
reminder from the regime to Syrians that they are beings without rights, stripped
of their present and whose future hinges on the regime’s whims. The regime has
final say in matters of life and death, turning lives to ashes, and
confiscating what it wills of personal memories of the intimate past. This
includes living rooms, libraries, offices, computers, walls, lockers, drawers,
and bedrooms, which in a flash become the property of the thieves, who mess
with it and sell some of it in markets known by sectarian names (“Sunni
sales”), so that purchasers know the source of what they are buying. In the
process, by their actions, the thieves not only rob their victims of their
needs and of their past lives, but they also worsen the fear and hatred among
other, which could give rise to new violence in the future.
Thus the regime
seeks to transform those it rules into two main factions: those who rob (the
thief), and those who are robbed (the thieved from). In between the two groups
lies the rest of the population: either aghast and silent, or gloating. The
only condition, the difference between power and powerlessness, is loyalty to
the regime and the act of practicing violence in its name. Impunity depends on
silence, the acceptance of humiliations as either duty born of obedience, or as
an inescapable form of taxation.
Murder in
detention centers and the abduction of corpses
The most brutal,
hideous atrocity out of the many types it adopts, is of, course what the regime
is doing in its prisons, where tens of thousands are detained, abducted, and
missing. It is a mixture of medieval brutality and modern bureaucracy in
running the prisons, as machines to torture, kill, and disappear the decaying
bodies. The situation is built upon uncertainty, constructed based on rumors, a
Mafia-like economy, mysterious deaths, and eyewitness testimonies from hell.
There are three levels to the issue of detention and disappearance in Syria
today.
The first level is
linked to the transformation of detention “management” and torture into a
routine bureaucracy. According to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reports,
by 2017 this had led to an industry of extermination, with at least 30,000 male
and female detainees murdered by torture, starvation, disease, or execution.
The lens of a military photographer who defected and was given the pseudonym “Caesar”
alone documented more than 5,000 of these dead bodies. The corpses were
numbered carefully (sometimes sequentially). Survivors from the detention camps
testify that they were forced to bear the bodies to trucks that transported the
corpses to unknown places.
The second level
is connected with the creation of a Mafioso economy, based upon extorting the
families of detainees in exchange for promises about the detained: promises of
their release, or information about them, or release of their bodies, or
protection from severe torture, or providing medication, or transferring them
to “less difficult” or “less overcrowded” prisons. Military officers, lawyers,
judges, and brokers have all benefited and continued to benefit from the
machinery of the regime. They make promises that are often not kept, and
provide information that is mostly false. They snap up what is left of the
property of the relatives of the missing, in a complementary fashion with the
killing machine and its administrative apparatus: the security forces, the
judicial bodies, and the intermediaries and promise-making brokers who take
whatever is left.
The third level is
based upon spreading fear, concern, and a culture of rumors and doubt that not
only affect the families of detainees, but also all those around or in contact
with them. This is done by keeping every bit of information about the fate of
the disappeared as something closer to rumor than to fact, and by refraining
from delivering the bodies of those who are said to have perished, then
providing death certificates or dates of death to be put in the boxes of
official records. This keeps large swaths of society in a constant state of alert and anticipation, as if they are hostages awaiting
certainty. Their loved one never comes
out, whether from behind the walls or from under the ground.
Thus, the regime
does not conceal its practices and its targets, especially through the theft of
victims’ bodies, in order to hide the effects of its crimes. Instead, the
effect is intensified: the threat of loss hangs over the heads of the families
of the victims and their social networks, a sword suspended over their necks, even
if the worst has in fact already happened. Some live in fear of the fate of
their missing loved ones. For others, the lack of a body prevents them from
mourning and suspends their lives, turning every day into tormented waiting. No
affirmation of life, no confirmation of death, no date fixed as long as those
involved pass away without a trace. No ability to identify the places of
detention or burial. The missing become wandering ghosts, making conversations
about them speculative, wishful, and sorrowful.
Living among the
ghosts
The Assad regime
kills Syrians and Palestinians residing in Syria, and hides many of the
murdered. It tortures, rapes, and starves to rebuild the walls of fear and
silence that had fallen apart in the year 2011. Pain, hunger, and degradation
are engraved in the memories of the survivors. The relatives of the missing
remain suspended forever between hope and despair, and they are vulnerable prey
for the promises of the regime’s affiliated mafia members, searching for the
bodies that have been swallowed up, just as the looters gobbled down the
possessions of the victims, their photographs, their past and their present.
Through this, the
regime tyrannizes
the living just as it does the corpses of the dead. As if this genocidal industry
is not content with killing alone, but also looks for ways to turn its victims
into ghosts. For there is no murder victim without a dead body. There is no
death without a grave. There are only ghosts reminding the survivors every day
of what may await them. The ghosts remind the killers themselves of what will
follow them if their killing machine totters and the regime collapses.
“Assad’s Syria” is in this sense a Syria of ghosts, a
Syria of terror, rumor, degradation, and agonizing waiting. In this, as in
other matters, it is no longer a Syrian or regional issue, nor a battleground
for established or emerging international actors. It has become an existential
issue, which must be dealt with as a challenge to all of humankind. These tens
of thousands of ghosts may not remain imprisoned in their soil, behind their
walls, or within the borders of the country.
Ziad Majed
Text
first published in Arabic in al-Qudsal-‘Arabi, 25 August 2018
Translated
by Jeff Reger
