Oppress, torture, kill. Bashar Al-Assad’s regime knows how to deal with this with an efficiency that has not been proven since the beginning of the revolution in March 2011. But killing is not enough, we also need to get rid of the bodies. Corpses are always a problem for totalitarian regimes, at least a logistical problem. Two stories collected and cross-checked by Le Monde allow us to understand how the Syrian regime secretly buried the bodies of tens of thousands of victims who were killed in prisons and interrogation centers, during demonstrations or fighting, or who died from their injuries in hospital . They are essentially civilians — not rebel fighters — caught up in the death machine unleashed in 2011 to prevent and crush the insurgency that demanded liberalization of the regime.
These two stories are the work of Syrian refugees who have settled in Germany in the Berlin region. The first, whom we call “the gravedigger” for security reasons, came across the Rhine in 2018: His job was to lead a small team of about fifteen local government undertakers in Damascus to oversee clandestine burials in mass graves. He practiced from 2011 to late 2017. Tens of thousands of corpses paraded before his eyes.
The second, who came to Berlin with the large wave of refugees in 2016, drove a bulldozer. He was responsible for digging the mass graves and sometimes poking the corpses in with his blade. He practiced from the summer of 2011 to the summer of 2012 before being imprisoned for just over a year. This will be “the driver”. The two men knew each other by sight in Damascus, where they worked at the same location, but have not seen each other since moving to Germany. However, their stories match and complement each other perfectly.
“The gravedigger” points on a map to the places where mass graves have been dug in Syria, in Berlin, July 8, 2022. LENA KUNZ FOR “DIE WELT”
The gravedigger testified at the trial in Koblenz (West Germany). In January, at the end of a historic trial, the German judiciary sentenced former state security colonel Anwar Raslan to life imprisonment for “crimes against humanity” and junior officer Eyad Al-Gharib to four and a half years in prison. The two men, who had moved to Germany, were arrested after being recognized by former inmates at Ward 251, one of the regime’s darkest detention and torture centers.
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The gravedigger’s testimony was never refuted by defense attorneys, who only disputed the fact that he testified on condition of anonymity. “For the court [de Coblence] and for the international community this testimony is very important, explains Antonia Klein, in charge of the international crimes and accountability file at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. The court was able to observe that the number of victims continued to increase in the first year of the revolution, and the witness was able to testify to the suffering inflicted on them, describing the condition of the bodies and their large number. Equally important, it confirms the elements of the César file [les photographies de plus de 6 000 personnes tuées en détention qui ont été sorties clandestinement de Syrie par un photographe des services secrets] whose images have been cleared by the court and analyzed by medical experts. »
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