Syrians emerge from an Arab Spring turned nightmarish winter

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With Western journalists now reporting freely in Syria — and more profoundly, with Syrians now freely able to talk with them — the horrors of the homicidal Hafez and Bashar al-Assad era are in the news.

But knowledge of the dynastic despotism isn’t itself new. Indeed, international institutions, including the Minnesota-based Center for Victims of Torture, having long chronicled the chronic human-rights abuses, alerted the world as early as 2011 to their intensification, including at an archipelago of detention centers — especially Sednaya Military Prison, described by Amnesty International as a “human slaughterhouse.”

The center has treated about 6,500 Syrian torture victims or traumatized refugees in Jordan, Turkey and elsewhere, said Simon Adams, CVT’s president and CEO. Before joining the organization, Adams was the executive director for the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, where he often advocated with the United Nations Security Council on behalf of Syria, whose 2011 version of the Arab Spring soon turned to a nightmarish winter that only ended last week when Bashar al-Assad fled to his main enabler, Russia.

“Some of my lowest moments as a professional over the last decade,” Adams said, “have been connected to Syria — seeing friends ‘disappear’ and seeing all kinds of atrocities.” Friends, he said, have been sent to Sednaya, and “I think you can’t help but have your heart sing when you saw those really emotional videos of people being liberated from their cells.”

Among those stirring accounts have been reports from Leila Molana-Allen and Simona Foltyn of the “PBS NewsHour,” as well as a “60 Minutes” report from Scott Pelley, often focused on the desperate relatives of those never heard from again.

“There’s a tremendous soreness in people’s hearts” for former detainees “and all the people who were tortured to death and executed,” said Adams, referencing an unimaginable toll that human-rights organizations calculate could be in the tens of thousands.

“There’s lots of states that use torture, but the Assad regime did it on an industrial scale,” said Adams. Assad, he said, was “a world leader in institutional cruelty and widespread and systematic use of torture.”

And torture, Adams emphasized, “is never about information and intelligence.” Instead, it’s “about submission and control. Torture is about terror. Sednaya was primarily an institution of terror. It was to cow people. It was to not only break the will of the prisoners, but more important was to send a message to society at large that ‘This is what happens if you challenge, this is what happens if you question, this is what happens if you march on the streets. You will disappear, and what will happen to you is beyond your worst fears, and it’s beyond your imagination of the cruelty that human beings can inflict on each other.’ ”

Fortunately for Syrians seeking justice, the crimes don’t have to be imagined: There are facts to confirm them. And the “thirst for justice is tremendous,” said Adams, who added that “when it comes to building a better society in Syria, being able to demonstrate to people that there is justice for these crimes against humanity is going to be absolutely essential.”

Adjudication will be aided by “overwhelming” evidence, said Adams. “This is going to be the most documented catalogue of widespread atrocities and human rights abuses of the 21st century.”

Documented by dissidents, international institutions, journalists — and the regime itself, which left behind many meticulous records of its depravity.

While the record is more complete today, it was quite comprehensive in 2017, when Tulsi Gabbard, then a Democratic representative from Hawaii, took a “fact-finding mission” to “see and hear directly from the Syrian people.”

Among the Syrian people she met with — twice — was Assad. And she should have known — especially for someone who’s now the nominee to be director of national intelligence in the impending Trump administration — that any Syrian even whispering the truth risked “disappearance” in Sednaya.

Assad’s atrocities then “weren’t a secret,” Adams stated. In fact, they were unflinchingly detailed, including in the State Department’s annual human-rights report.

“When Assad and his acolytes were rounding up people and disappearing them and forcing them into places like Sednaya Prison, to go sit with that man and cozy up to him is something that she should be ashamed of for the rest of her life,” said Adams. “And I think it should be a moment of reflection for people who think that she’s worthy of public office.”

Assad’s assault on his country was as open as Syria’s future rulers’ plans are opaque. But clarity can apply to how this country conducts itself.

When running for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president, Gabbard was asked whether Assad was an enemy.

He “is not the enemy of the United States,” she responded, “because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States.”

While Assad was indeed not in a position to invade, the inversion of what the U.S. stands for is its own peril.

It’s “a threat to the principles and the morals and the laws and the norms to which the U.S. has long said it ascribes to,” said Adams, adding with wisdom that should be requisite for a director of national intelligence, that impunity “encourages other perpetrators, and I think that’s the threat that it poses to the world.”

It “makes the world less safe for all of us when human rights are eroded like that.”