10th December 2024
To commemorate this year’s United Nations International Day of Human Rights, we asked Lily, a member of both the Syrian diaspora and of our Diaspora Humanitarian Exchange Group, for her reflections on the situation in her home country.
By now, everyone knows the news that the Assad regime in Syria – a family dynasty for over half a century – was brought down by a coalition of opposition fighters. They started from the North in Idlib and took Aleppo, Hama, Homs, while in the South other groups formed and freed Daraa and Suwayda and united to free Damascus.
In all these developments, one very important act occurred in each city liberated: the opening of the brutal, torture prisons of the Assad regime and the freeing of their prisoners. Some of these prisoners had not seen daylight in eight, ten, twenty, forty years.
When the moment finally came, members of the opposition spent hours trying to locate and open the prison cells with the hopes of releasing the detainees. With the hopes of reuniting more family members with each other. With the hope of opening the cell on their own detained family members. With these releases, horrific videos came out.
The Assad regime has long been known to arbitrarily arrest hundreds of thousands of Syrians just for criticising the regime. Essentially, if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, you would be arrested, taken from your home, without a fair trial or any judicial process, and brought to an unknown prison in an unknown location for an indefinite period of time.
This modus operandi has led to the enforced disappearance of at least 96,321 people as of August 2024 (Syrian Network for Human Rights). I want to emphasise the words at least once again, because the degree of secrecy from the regime on this topic means that there may be many more forced disappearances that are unrecorded and unrecordable as they have been erased from the files so completely. In an interview given to Al-Araby, Fadel Abdulghany, the founder of the Syrian Network for Human Rights estimated that about 200,000 people have been enforced disappeared since March 2011 (Al-Araby Interview, 09 December 2024). In this interview, he clarified that there has been a systematic practice by the regime to torture and murder the victims of enforced disappearances.
This creates so many difficulties for victims’ families to find out the fate of their loved ones who have been disappeared by the Assad regime.
Since early on Sunday, the White Helmets (Syrian Civil Defence) and other rescue teams have been searching Sednaya prison relentlessly. After the initial opening of the prison cells and the cracking open of the additional underground cells known to be almost impossible to access, the search continued for perceived ‘secret prisons’ attached to the Sednaya prison.
Although many detainees have been released since the beginning of the liberation of Syria from the Assad regime, it is believed that still 100,000 forcibly disappeared people are yet to be found in underground or hidden prisons. It is on this basis that the rescue teams continued to search tirelessly, following up any clues they could get from ex-regime military personnel, prison guards, or prisoners.
The search for detainees in Sednaya prison has become totemic for Syrians, and even a source of controversy. Yesterday, Mehdi Kemah made an official statement on Instagram on behalf of the White Helmets, declaring that there were no more rooms left to open in Sednaya, and all the clues they were given had been exhausted, hitting dead ends at every turn. He added that efforts to find other hidden prisons should be directed elsewhere. Community news channels on WhatsApp and Telegram have also reported the presence of hidden prisons elsewhere and requested that any member of the general public that can provide information about these hidden prisons would be rewarded.
The amount of information coming out now with regards to the whereabouts of the forcibly disappeared is terrifying and daunting. It is and will continue to be one of, if not the most painful, things that Syrians continue to endure. Because it is not just about releasing the detainees, it is about locating where the disappeared are held, whether they are alive, identifying them after years of torture, and bringing them back to their families. In the best cases, still alive; in others, reuniting their remains with their families.
These words are so difficult to write down without visible emotions. I ask that the Syrian people never be forgotten. I ask that those who risked their lives to call for freedom or those who just wanted to live their lives be forever remembered. I ask the reader of this article to care and inform themselves of all the crimes that Assad committed, if you have not already.
I ask that we all work together to hold Assad accountable, and to never let him get away with the worst possible crimes. Crimes with so many dimensions you could never write about their full extent. Crimes involving torture, not only of the detainees but of detainee’s families as well; deprivation of liberty, arbitrary detention, no adequate trial, degrading treatment, murder. The crime of enforced disappearance. Crimes that hundreds of thousands of Syrians are still suffering from.
Beginnings are a delicate time, and much remains uncertain, but as Syrians we now have an opportunity to rebuild a nation with equal rights for all of Syria’s communities.
On this year’s International Human Rights Day, we call for accountability and justice for those who abuse the human rights of others. We call on all governments and conflict parties to respect human rights and release those who have been forcibly detained. As Syrians, we know that human rights must be for all, or they are for none.
