“Crimes against humanity” accuses the General Attorney General of Raslan, torture in at least 4,000 cases, murder in at least 58 cases, densely supported by two dozen testimonies, which are listed in the indictment.
They report beatings with fists and heavy cables, electric shocks, and cells that are so crowded that they couldn’t even sit down to sleep. And again and again: from the screams from other cells, from the corridors, day and night.
Passing hell on earth
The Khatib Detention Center in SyriaColonel Raslan was subordinate to September 2012 and was a transit hell on earth. According to the indictment, there was no evidence of “personal torture”, but as the person responsible, he had the “crime mastery”.
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The fact that the two accused now come to court in Germany is due to the principle of world law to which Germany joined in 2002. According to this, crimes against humanity can be punished by the German judiciary even if they were committed elsewhere, and neither perpetrators nor victims are Germans.
This process, it says in many comments at the start of the process, marks the beginning of someday also making the heads of the Syrian dictatorship legally responsible for their crimes: Assad’s minions should no longer feel safe from now on.
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That was the only reason why they could be arrested at their German registration addresses so easily in February of last year. That doesn’t change their actions. However, there are some things about the political message of the process for the members of the Syrian power apparatus.
He should have brought people to confessions where there was nothing to confess
When rebels smuggled the now 57-year-old Raslan and his family to Jordan via detours in December 2012, he was seen as a win by the rapidly growing exile scene there: the higher-ranking a defector, the greater the chance that Assad’s dictatorship will collapse, according to the calculation . What someone had done before was of secondary importance then and for years to come – as long as the hope of overthrowing the regime lasted.
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In April 2013 the SPIEGEL met Raslan in Amman. Quite accurately, as far as it could be checked, he spoke about the inner workings of the Syrian power apparatus: the lies, the paranoia, how the secret services had already staged and built up that jihadist terror from 2005, the fight against which would disguise their terror. He exposed a self-image about himself that is disturbing to outsiders, but that many of the defectors from the army, party and secret services shared.
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They had all participated, had had careers in the dictatorship. But then, from the beginning of 2012, it was no longer about investigations against actual opponents, according to Raslan at the time, but about “massively killing civilians who had absolutely nothing to do with armed opposition or terrorist groups”.
He should have brought people to confessions where there was nothing to confess. “You ridiculed my job,” he said of the generals. It sounded like a mixture of horror and offended professional honor. It hadn’t bothered him that peaceful opposition figures, writers, lawyers had been arbitrarily ill-treated and incarcerated before.
“Active and visible role within the Syrian opposition”
Other exiles accused him less of his origin than the late date of his escape: not until the end of 2012, months after most others. At that time he was considered an opportunist to some. Which was apparently not an obstacle to playing a prominent role in the exile opposition over two years. He traveled to Istanbul and even flew to Geneva in 2014 as a delegation member for the UN Ambassador’s talks.
In the same year he came to Germany with his family on a visa from the Embassy in Amman. He also told the BND in detail about the inner workings of the secret services. The Federal Foreign Office confirmed that he had “an active and visible role within the Syrian opposition”.
But times changed. Assad was not overthrown, but conquered more and more territories with Iranian and Russian aid, and today it reigns over a partially destroyed, impoverished country. But he rules.
“Changing sides does not erase past crimes”
Anwar Raslan felt threatened in Berlin in 2015. Not from his former victims, but from the Assad regime minions who were after him. At least that’s what he told the police, filing charges against strangers who would have been watching him. He also told the police about his previous job, his escape, which Assad’s regime interpreted as a treason worthy of death.
His statements ended up with the General Attorney General in Karlsruhe. The latter finally initiated proceedings: not against the unknown, but against the complainant himself. Anwar Raslan was nowhere to be found, accused by no one, but stumbled upon the mistake that his change of sides had undone the previous acts.
In the days after his arrest in February 2019, the debate about the pros and cons began among Syrian refugees: “A change of sides does not erase the crimes of the past,” argued one of the supporters. “Attacking defectors means playing the regime’s game,” said another.
“Not revenge, but respect”
Raslan’s personal guilt will now be negotiated in Koblenz. But he sits on the dock on behalf of the regime, for the disappearance of at least 128,000 Syrians without a trace, the documented torture murder of more than 14,000, for all the injustice never atoned for, which is now being tried in court for the first time.
“This is why this process is so important, no matter how it ends,” explains human rights lawyer Joumana Seif, who exiled from Damascus in 2012 and researched international crimes for the “European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights”, ECCHR: “We had a fall of the regime, hoping for political changes. But everything that remains for the survivors, the relatives of the victims, is this legal process. It does not mean revenge, but respect for what they have suffered. “
Other organizations that have also been involved in the preparation of the process hope that the process will provide an opportunity to extend the chain of command up to Bashar al-Assad to document yourself. Because that’s what it’s all about in the end: to hold the masterminds accountable.
“Of course the worst of those are still in Syria and will stay there”
But that would also require the political will of the West. An international arrest warrant has been issued against Jamil Hassan, once the head of the most formidable death squad under the misleading name “Air Force Secret Service”, obtained from Germany and France. What did not prevent Hassan from getting medical treatment at least twice to go to Lebanon. In February 2019, the Attorney General sent another extradition request to Beirut. When Hassan was again taken to the American University Hospital, the country’s best hospital, for weeks in June 2019, no attempt was made to have him arrested.
A year earlier, according to several reports, Anwar Raslan’s former chief and now the most powerful man in Syrian services, Ali Mamlouk, had flown to Rome unmolested in order to confer with the interior minister and the head of foreign intelligence. All entry bans and sanctions for mockery.
Those who hunt Assad’s torture generals on behalf of the German constitutional state are aware that they are unlikely to ever catch the key figures. “Of course, the worst of those are still in Syria and will stay there,” said a senior investigator. “But what’s the alternative: do nothing?” The only ones you can get hold of are the defectors, the refugees.
“We don’t have torture units. Why should we torture?”
So this case falls into two parts, which are in an irreconcilable contradiction to each other: The restoration of law in the case of the two accused and their victims will not shake the system of injustice, but rather stabilize it.
Because the message to Assad’s minions is clear: don’t try to switch sides! In Damascus, it will be pleasantly followed that the punishment of the “traitors” is now being taken over by the German judiciary – for something that has always been denied to the limit of the absurd.
Asked by “Russia Today” last November about the upcoming Raslan trial, Bashar al-Assad replied, “We have no torture units. Why should we torture? If there are isolated cases, these may be individual acts of revenge.”
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