Archive for the ‘Prisons Museum’ Category
Documenting the Means of Murder
The Syria Prisons Museum has now launched with an event in the National Museum in Damascus, and as a website here. The first in-depth investigation, complete with 3D virtual tour, witness testimonies, and more, is on Sednaya Prison.
I wrote the following article for Time magazine about the purpose and methodology of the Syria Prisons Museum, and some of its findings.
In Sednaya Prison, the names of those sentenced to death were called once a week. These men were removed from the group cells and chained together. They were usually held in designated cells for their last three days of life, during which time they were deprived of food and water. Apparently this made them die more easily, less messily. The killing itself was done on the ground floor, in the reception hall, using a gallows constructed of metal pipes which was large enough to dispatch several victims at once.
The victims were not criminals but political prisoners arrested for protesting, organizing or fighting against Syria’s Bashar al-Assad regime, which finally collapsed last December after 14 years of revolution and counter-revolutionary war. Sednaya Prison – otherwise known as ‘the human slaughterhouse’ – was the most notorious of the dozens of prisons run by the regime. Prisons had always been central to Assadist rule. From 1970 – when Bashar al-Assad’s father Hafez seized power in a military coup – a comprehensive system of surveillance, detention and torture terrified Syrians and turned the country into a “kingdom of silence”.
Syrians found their voices in 2011 when, in the context of the regional ‘Arab Spring’, they rose up against the regime. But they paid an enormous price. Assad responded by declaring war on the people. Iran and Russia sent troops and war planes to help him, while Turkey and Gulf states backed rebel militias. And as the cities burned, the prisons were transformed into death camps. The Syrian Network for Human Rights reported in August that at least 160,000 men and women remain unaccounted for after being forcibly disappeared by the Assad regime. Many of their corpses fill the mass graves which are still being uncovered today.
The result is the mass traumatisation of Syrian society. Recovery from such terrible crimes requires transparency, understanding, and at least a degree of justice. And the first step towards these aims is to clearly establish the facts of what happened. A Syrian-led organisation called the Prisons Museum is at the forefront of this effort. It brings together investigative journalism, human rights advocacy and cutting-edge technology to shed light on horrors which the perpetrators would prefer remain hidden. (I am the Museum’s English-language editor.)
The surviving prisoners in Sednaya Prison were liberated by rebel fighters and local civilians in the early hours of December 8 last year, as Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow. A few days later, a Prisons Museum team entered the facility and began to document every room and object.
Read the rest of this entry »The Wounds of the Past, and Transitional Justice
This essay was first published at New Lines Magazine.
In dry hills half an hour’s drive outside Damascus, Sednaya Prison comes into view. A squat three stories covering a good deal of land, it imposes on the vision as we approach from below. Repeated rings of barbed wire and mine fields surround the main building. The Assad regime’s organized graffiti praising the leader and describing the (non-existent) struggle against Israeli occupation still covers the outer buildings which housed the guards and their workshops until the regime collapsed on December 8 2024.
The whirlwind of revolutionary change has hit the place. Rubble and rubbish litter the entrance. I and the photographers climb a few steps into the reception room where prisoners were previously pushed into narrow caged corridors and stripped of their clothes. It isn’t hard to imagine the screams and thuds as new arrivals received their ‘reception party’ beatings. Although on second thoughts, my imagination may be overdoing it. Absolute silence was often enforced on the victims, even during torture.
Amongst the detritus here on the filthy tiled floor, a couple of artificial legs lie marooned. They are made of very basic plastic, one to fit beneath a knee, one to replace an entire limb from the hip down. I can’t understand why they’re still here. Surely their owners didn’t discard them when they fled? Later, however, I read the transcript of an interview with a survivor of the prison. He described the reception room process: “If you have a prosthetic leg, they throw it away. If you have glasses, they get rid of them.”
At the center of the prison is a spiral staircase made of metal and surrounded by metal bars. This connects (or for the prisoners, separated) the three stories and the three wings fanning out from the center. Nine cells recede down each corridor. These are the group cells, in which dozens of men were crammed. Very thin, dark brown blankets cover the floor. There is a bad odour or the memory of one, a discomforting sweet staleness.
Down the stairs are the solitary cells, so-called because they aren’t big enough to fit more than one man, though in fact three, four or five men were often forced inside. Each cell contains a dirty squat toilet, from which the men also had to drink. Food was delivered through a slot at the bottom of the heavy metal door. There is no light inside. The prisoners existed in absolute darkness. Sightlessness as well as soundlessness contributed to the deprivation. There is writing on some of the walls nevertheless, apparently etched by fingernails. A name of a man and his city, Tartous. A date in 2014. A count of days, though in the dark the days could only have been guessed at.
The smell is stronger here. One of the photographers explains that in the first days after the liberation streams of human waste flowed from the cells into the hallway. We’re stepping now on blankets put down to absorb the filth. They have hardened in the dry air in the months since, but the smell persists. This is despite the thick clouds of incense currently being burnt upstairs, where the group cells are. That sweetness covers but doesn’t hide the deeper, more disturbing sweetness of persistent degradation.
If this works as a symbol – and we are in need of symbols, of any tools we come across to help us comprehend – it serves to embody the need for a deep cleaning of Syrian society. Superficial treatment won’t do, for the crimes committed in the Assad prisons system can be rightly described as radically evil. Of the at least 130,000 people missing in Assad’s dungeons, only about 30,000 were released in the hours following the fall of the regime. That means at least 100,000 victims were murdered in Sednaya and other prisons, by torture or starvation or medical neglect. Their corpses pack the mass graves found at Qutayfa and many other sites. The victims were not criminals, but people who had spoken, protested, organized, or in some cases fought against the regime.
Read the rest of this entry »
Qunfuz 