Syria: in the footsteps of "Caesar"

Geneva-2 opened new facts of Assad regime crimes

The first round of negotiations at the Geneva-2 conference in Syria did not bring breakthroughs or sensations. In addition to one: new shocking facts of crimes of the regime Bashar al -Assad are made public

One of the issues discussed at the Geneva-2 conference is the need to withdraw women and children from the city of Homs, besieged by the regular Syrian army exactly a year ago-February 3, 2012 in the picture-the streets of Khoms, hung with sheets covering residents from snipers. September 3, 2013

One day of the conference in the Luxurious Montreo Palace Hotel, where Vladimir Nabokov spent its last 16 years, representatives of the opposition National Coalition of Syria arranged a closed show of slides in the small hall-only foreign participants in Geneva-2 were invited to him. At the same time, Syrian oppositionists set a tough condition: there should not be journalists in the hall. Nevertheless, the hall was stuffed with a bit: politicians, diplomats and experts of countries - a conference participant. After an hour and a half, many of them came out shocked, literally losing the gift of speech. On the screen, one after another, images of mutilated naked bodies with traces of beatings and torture appeared. Hundreds, thousands of killed and tortured. Initially, the show of slides was not included in the Geneva-2 program: the plan of the project was born only in mid-January, after the delegation of the Syrian opposition collected in Switzerland received significant evidence: collected photographic materials are not a fake.

Photoshoot in the hangar

The shocking facts of atrocities would have remained a mystery if it were not for the personal courage of a person who organized the leakage of information. His name, like the place of residence, is not revealed - his relatives are still in Syria, and he himself is afraid of revenge on the regime. Only his code name is known - Caesar. He was given to him by an international expert group consisting of world -famous lawyers and pathologists - it was she who studied the facts of crimes provided by him.

Before the start of the Syrian war, Caesar worked as a forensic expert in the military police of Damascus for more than 10 years. His duties included photographing the crime and preparation of materials with further transfer to investigators. However, the war cut off a peaceful, albeit difficult work: Caesar, together with other colleagues, was determined to a military hospital, where the bodies of people who died for one reason or another in prison, including during interrogations were brought. The work here, in general, was not dusty: it was necessary to go to the Damassian military hospitals Meszech and Tashrin every day daily, accompanied by a doctor and investigator, and photograph the bodies. About 50 bodies a day, each went from 15 minutes to half an hour: each corpse had to be photographed several times, in good light, so that it could be easily identified by the murdered. All this was done in order, firstly, to prove to the leadership that the master’s shoulder affairs do their work well and not a single enemy of the regime left their hands. And secondly, having taken pictures, each time it was necessary to find relatives of the dead and inform them that their brother, father or son died of a heart attack or as a result of “problems with the respiratory tract”.

A fighter of a free Syrian army endures an unexploded shell. Aleppo, December 21, 2013

Each body was twice numbered - sometimes with the help of cardboard tags fingered on the toes, and sometimes the numbers simply brought a felt -tip pen on the chest. One figure indicated a unit of the Syrian special services responsible for interrogation and, therefore, for the death of the arrested, the second - the accounting data of the hospitals in which a person allegedly died. When there were no empty seats in the hospital’s morgue, the bodies were folded in the hangar next to the StatePal, and after the photo shoot they were thrown out of deserted places and cremated.

In September 2011, one of his wife's relatives, who left Syria in March of the same year, five days after the start of clashes in Homs, began to cooperate with international human rights organizations, in touch with Caesar. According to him, rumors about mass murders and disappearance of people in Assad's dungeons have been going on for a long time, but since there were no witnesses, and the bodies were not given to relatives, it was almost impossible to prove anything. “We began to look for some source inside the regime that would sympathize with us,” this person later explained to the international group of experts. According to him, despite the risk of life, Caesar agreed to cooperate with him.

In a year and a half, he handed over tens of thousands of photographs abroad, until in mid -2013 he did not understand: it was time to escape himself.

Then the international group planned the flight of Caesar from Syria. The implementation of the plan took about four months. Following Caesar, a little later, his family left the country. In total, 55 thousand photographs-documents were at the disposal of the experts, 26,948 of them were provided by Caesar, the rest-by other sources in Syria. If we take into account that each body was photographed on average 4-5 times, it is about 11 thousand corpses.

A fighter of the opposition free army of Syria has been captured by the Shiite group, sympathizing with Bashar al -Assad. Damascus, November 22, 2011

Prosecutors in the case

What is this international group in question? Before presenting the materials received from Caesar to the general public, they needed to carefully study what the money was needed for. The work undertook to finance Qatar. At the same time, in order to protect himself from possible accusations of bias or falsification of evidence, the London law firm Carter-Rook was involved in the process. The British, in turn, attracted three prominent international lawyers, two of them were prosecutors of the international tribunal for crimes during the war in Sierra Leone, and the third on the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

The final report of the expert group, together with the photographs of Caesar, was presented at a “closed show” during “Geneva-2” at the end of January. The official Damascus immediately accused the authors of the report of bias. The representative of the Syrian Ministry of Information Bassa Abu Abdullah said in an interview with the BBC that it was not clear from the materials shown where photographs of the tortured oppositionists were taken-in Syria or beyond. According to Abdullah, he was “extremely surprised” with the figure of 11 thousand victims, which appears in the “group of three”: “This report provides great doubts to me. You need to check all these photos. Who are these people? What is their name? What prisons were they kept in? Who was the person who had access to these pictures? And then, if Qatar financed all this work, she should never be trusted. Qatar is one of those who finance international terrorism and sends the killers to Syria, from which we have to defend ourselves. ”

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When there were no free places in the hospital’s morgue, the bodies were folded into the hangar next to the state -picol

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In an interview with the same BBC, the head of the group of Sir Desmond de Silva, who immediately wrote out the arrest warrant of Liberia President Charles Taylor*, confirmed the fact of Qatar's interest in the speedy expert analysis. But it does not follow from this that the report itself is a fake: “We were extremely pedantic in our research,” the lawyer said.

Three times - on January 12, 13 and 18, 2014 - prosecutors and other members of the expert commission interviewed Caesar according to its materials. And they finally convinced that there was no talk of a fake. “You know, Caesar could have lie down, saying that he was a witness to torture and murders, but he did not do this, he honestly admitted that he had not seen anything but corpses,” said de Silva.

Experts studied 5,500 photos that depict the bodies of 1300 people, and only 835 bodies were subjected to detailed study. Experts confirmed: the pictures were not subjected to processing, but the nature of the injuries received by people indicates that not one of them died during a clash. Most bodies belong to young men from 20 to 40 years old, there are several corpses of older people, not a single child, and only one woman. 42% of the bodies wore signs of extreme exhaustion: if people did not die of hunger, they were unequivocally subjected to long torture. However, it was obvious that before death they were tortured: on the bodies, traces of beatings, burns, many corpses have no eyes. In general, the bodies in the photographs resemble the remains of prisoners of Nazi camps. At 20% of the bodies - distinct traces of injuries, 30% of the cause of death could not be determined. In 16% of the bodies, traces of strangulation are visible on the neck, sometimes we are talking about something narrow, apparently, a wire, sometimes about a belt. In any case, the authors of the report, the victims were most likely not hanged, because then the traces would remain in the upper part of the neck, and then strangulation was used as one of the types of torture, as a result of which death often occurred.

"The large -scale and systematic extermination of people was carried out under the control of the government"

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Crime without punishment

Many bodies in the photographs in the report on murders and torture organized by Syrian special services are traces of extreme exhaustion.
In 16% of the bodies, traces of strangulation are visible, which was used as one of the types of torture.

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The most important conclusion made by the authors of the report: torture and murders were carried out by order from above, the likelihood that the country's leadership did not know about them is close to zero. Jeffrey Nys, one of the authors of the investigation, the former chief prosecutor in the process in the Hague tribunal against Slobodan Milosevich, is sure: the International Criminal Court (MUS) should begin an investigation of committed crimes. “It is impossible to talk with one hundred percent confidence about the personal fault of the head of state (Assad President. - The New Times),” Nis explains. - But on the other hand, the total number of evidence makes us conclude that the repressive technique itself was approved at the highest level. And in any case, we can say that the large -scale and systematic extermination of people was carried out under the control of the government. ”

Damond de Silva, who said that the destruction of his own people was organized by the regime in Damascus on an industrial scale, agrees with Nais. “These evidence can undoubtedly be the basis for official accusations of crimes against humanity,” the prosecutor said. - So far, unfortunately, we do not have the opportunity to make such a decision. The only thing we can do is to evaluate the materials and confirm that they are suitable for consideration in court. ”

Indeed, the likelihood that Assad will be on the bench of the defendants is still small. Syria is not a participant in the statute of the Mus, but the UN Security Council of the Security Council, which is necessary to start the investigation, will most likely be blocked by Russia. Yes, and at a conference in Switzerland, the official Syrian delegation managed to move a discussion of the issue of mass murders into the background: according to the sources of The New Times, this topic will not rise as part of the second round of negotiations, which should start on February 10. So the question of who will eventually bear responsibility for thousands of innocently tortured people remains open.

Photos: Andrey Stenin/RIA Novosti, Saad Abobrahim/Reuters, Stringer/Reuters