The Assad regime in Syria is not only responsible for the worst state-orchestrated mass killings so far this century, it now appears to be trying to cover up at least some of its tracks in the belief that this will one day help it evade accountability when the war is over. It is a cynical ploy which must not be allowed to succeed.
A place where this new sinister development can be most clearly seen is a military prison on the outskirts of Damascus: the infamous Saydnaya detention centre, where thousands of opponents of Bashar al-Assad have died of torture, starvation, hangings and summary executions. A former inmate, quoted in an Amnesty report earlier this year, described it as “the worse place on earth”.
A US State Department official has reported that a crematorium has been built at the prison which could be used to dispose of the bodies of victims of the regime. That would leave identities impossible to identify, lives vanished into the void, and more families endlessly searching for the disappeared. International justice investigators, if ever they went to Saydnaya, would struggle to establish the facts. Dispose of the remains, and no one will ever track you down – or so the regime hopes.
Syria’s nightmare continues. A now six-year-old war unleashed on civilians still has no end in sight, despite more diplomatic summitry and opaque suggestions of creating “safe zones”. The country has become a bloodbath of infinite cruelty, one whose perpetrators know no shame and feel no constraints, because they believe they can rely on their impunity.
The Syrian government immediately denied any of this had happened in Saydnaya, just as it had dismissed the findings of the February Amnesty International report, titled Human Slaughterhouse. Information that a crematorium had been built and used was, the Assad regime said, “a new Hollywood story detached from reality”. The US insists that analysis of aerial images of the site reveals a newly built crematorium.
It may seem paradoxical that the Assad dictatorship should go to such lengths to conceal the traces of the massacres it commits. After all, when it targeted civilian areas with barrel bombs, when its army imposed starvation sieges on entire neighbourhoods, or when it fired Grad missiles at cities whose inhabitants had defied it with calls for freedom, there was little effort to hide its responsibility.
Terrorising one’s own population is an old habit for the Assad dynasty. Since 2011, it has done so relentlessly with the full force of its military arsenal. It has been increasingly propped up by Russia and Iran. International justice may seem entirely impotent today on Syria, not least because of Russian and Chinese vetoes in the UN – but that doesn’t mean it will for ever be paralysed.
In December, the United Nations general assembly established a special investigative mechanism. Last week, a German prosecutor began hearing the testimonies of former Syrian detainees, in a criminal complaint about the systematic use of torture by the Syrian military intelligence service. The use of a crematorium would evoke crimes on an industrial scale. Burning bodies was a tactic used in Bosnia in the mid-1990s. It took years to find and prosecute those responsible, but it was done. There can be no peace without justice in Syria. No one should turn a blind eye
