Gathering evidence of Syria war crimes in ‘The Assad Files’
PBS Newshour, April 11, 2016
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/gathering-evidence-of-syria-war-crimes-in-the-assad-files/
Transcript
Five years of brutal civil war in Syria have killed hundreds of thousands
and displaced millions more. Now, a new journalistic project aims to
document President Bashar al-Assad’s principal role in the systematic
campaign of detention, torture and murder that has left his nation in the
throes of chaos. Hari Sreenivasan sits down with Ben Taub of The New Yorker
to discuss "The Assad Files."
JUDY WOODRUFF: But, first, we turn to the effort to catalog war crimes in
real time during the ongoing Syrian civil war.
Hari Sreenivasan has that story.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Five years of war have killed hundreds of thousands of
people in Syria in this many-sided and brutal conflict. But there’s now a
project under way that’s trying to document the principal role of the Bashar
al-Assad regime in the killing and its systematic campaign of detention,
torture and murder.
The story of this remarkable forensic effort and the appalling acts it
catalogs is told in this week’s "New Yorker" by reporter Ben Taub in his
piece called "The Assad Files."
Ben Taub joins me now.
So, what is this organization? It’s not the United Nations. It’s not the
International Criminal Court. But it seems almost more effective in the
amount of evidence that it’s gathered on what’s happening in Syria.
BEN TAUB, Contributing Writer, The New Yorker:
BEN TAUB: Right.
So, it’s an independent agency called the Commission for International
Justice and Accountability. And because they’re independent, they don’t--they
have a--they can operate with a very high risk tolerance and outside of the
geopolitics that usually govern permissions for such AN investigation.
HARI SREENIVASAN: But what’s the type of evidence that they have now and how
do we know that Assad is responsible for some of these acts?
BEN TAUB: So, they have collected documentation evidence from all over the
country. They have smuggled about 600,000 pages out of Syria at very high
risk. They have had--one courier was killed, two have been wounded, and--but
in recent years, they have gotten much better with operational security.
And they have also...
HARI SREENIVASAN: These are basically people who are deciding to leak
documents and somehow get it in the hands of the CIJA.
BEN TAUB: So there is a leaker from Damascus. He was--he worked within Assad’s
innermost security committee as a--as a mole essentially. He was hired
basically to process all of the paperwork for Assad’s innermost security
committee.
And he was a member of the opposition from the beginning. And so it’s from
his testimony that we know a lot of how that committee worked. And he
basically saw that, every single night, Assad’s crisis cell which he formed
in response to the Syrian crisis in 2011, and they would demand security
reports from all over the country.
And this young man named Abdelmajid Barakat would collect all of the
reports, read them and draft a summary for them to look at as they had the
meeting. Now, after their meetings, when they have decided how to handle
each security issue, they would send a list of recommendations to Assad
through a courier, and he would then review them, sometimes cross things
out, sometimes add...
HARI SREENIVASAN: President Assad would actually read these reports?
BEN TAUB: Absolutely.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Edit them, sign them?
BEN TAUB: And then return them to the crisis cell.
And once they had clear instructions, they would then send them through
their individual chains of command to the distant provinces, where the
security agents on the ground were actually implementing them to put down
the revolution.
In practice, the policy itself, while repressive, is not inherently
criminal, necessarily. But in the course of its implantation, tens of
thousands of Syrians were detained for months or even years, tortured into
false confessions.
HARI SREENIVASAN: So tell me the story of Mazen al-Hamada, a character that
you use to do detail some of the atrocities that are happening in Syria.
BEN TAUB: Yes, so Hamada, he was an activist in Deir el-Zour, came from a
middle-class family, worked for an oil company. So when he was arrested in
early 2012, he was dragged into the air force intelligence branch in
al-Mezzeh Military Airport.
And he was after a couple of months in detention, with no idea where he was
at this point, he was taken into an interrogation room and he was first
tortured by--they burned out cigarettes on his body. They beat him. They
strung him up by his wrists, so that his feet were off the ground, and he
felt his wrists were going to get cut off.
All the while, they were interrogating him over the same questions that the
crisis cell had devised in its plan to put down the revolution.
HARI SREENIVASAN: At one point, he’s so injured from this process that they
move him to what they call a hospital.
BEN TAUB: So, Mazen was sent to Hospital 601, which is a military hospital.
And this turned out to be the place where they would process the bodies of
detainees who had been killed in security branches.
He was brought there. And on his first night, he had to go to the bathroom.
And a guard dragged him to the bathroom door and let him in. And when he
opened the first bathroom stall, he saw a pile of bodies. And he started to
feel like this was--he was in a nightmare.
And he went to the second stall and opened that, and there were two more
bodies with their eyes gouged out. And there was another body by the sink.
And he felt like he was losing his grip on reality. He walked out to the
guard and said, you know, where am I supposed to pee? And the guard told him
to pee on top of the bodies.
HARI SREENIVASAN: How do we verify his version of events is true?
BEN TAUB: So, after he was released, he spoke to a group of activists and
gave his full testimony in detail with a published dateline back in October
2013 in Arabic.
A few months after that, a military police photographer who had defected, he
spoke to investigators and forensic analysts, and a report was leaked. And
he had this collection of 55,000 pictures with 11,000 bodies in it. And he
was photographing them at the hospital where Mazen was staying, and Mazen’s
testimony came out first.
And so his account lines up with--it was later corroborated by a huge
quantity of material.
HARI SREENIVASAN: It seems like they have all the necessary ammunition to
prosecute Assad if he ever gets into a court.
BEN TAUB: Exactly.
So, they have the chain of command. And their thought is that, eventually,
when the international community catches up and there is a resolution to the
crisis in Syria, that, some way or another, they will be able to hand over
their evidence to a court that can prosecute it.
HARI SREENIVASAN: The report is called "The Assad Files" by Ben Taub in this
week’s "New Yorker."
Thanks so much for joining us.
BEN TAUB: Thank you.
