Gradually, and then suddenly, the regime of Bashar al-Assad has collapsed. This century’s most evil tyrant has fled Syria, and Damascus has fallen to the opponents of the regime. Across the country, a new political reality reigns. In towns and cities across Syria, the regime’s torture chambers are being opened, and the prisons liberated.
Men whose adulthoods have been stolen from them by the tyrant are emerging into the fires of day. Brothers are being united after being separated for 40 years. They were separated when one was 18 and the other younger, because the elder of them fell foul of a regime patrol and was taken away for torture for the remainder of his natural life.
There is a mother who lost her son 15 years ago, because he was accused of daubing some anti-dictator graffiti, or not reciting the right words in school, or conspiring to run a radio station that did not sing the praises of the leader, or demonise his enemies, or was conducted in a banned language, or contained the wrong history, the unapproved history, the things you were not then permitted to say.
The petty criminals, denied a stake in the economy because of their race or faith or region of birth, imprisoned for so long their whole families have died of old age and grief. They’re coming out now, with nothing left to live for.
Into the depths of Syria’s prisons have disappeared more than one generation. The refugees one speaks to, the people still in the country’s north, all have a detainee they know: someone they pray for nightly, someone whose fate is not known, someone they hope against all logic is still alive and might soon be photographed leaving somewhat anti-climactically through a newly sprung prison door.
The prisons are hell on earth. They cannot be described in ordinary language. I could give you estimates of the numbers held and tortured. I could tell you of the hundreds of thousands starved, beaten, and maltreated to death. There are, of course, thanks to the efforts of the defector codenamed Caesar, photographs of thousands of emaciated bodies fresh from the torture chambers.
You still wouldn’t believe me.
A decade ago, this was already said to be the most documented mass-killing in world history. That is still the case.
One day, Syrians told me and each other, for over a decade, we will open up the dungeons of Sednaya, the prison of all prisons, the Lubyanka of our own country, and we will make of it a museum.
Guides will show people the cells that were once filled with bodies in various states of dying and decay. We will read, with melancholy signs attached to translate, the final messages scratched into walls with ripped fingernails.
Now Sednaya has been liberated.
Will it be enough?
Many have died who might have told of what happened to them. They cannot testify. But all of this was recorded. Ba’athist states, of which Syria was one, suffer from bureaucracy like some suffer with a chronic illness. For a decade, foreigners have been told that if the international courts and tribunals decide to turn their hands to Syria, they will have so much evidence to weigh and to adjudicate that the inevitable trials will be difficult to stage-manage.
So many killings, so much torture. So many hands visible in the issuing of the instructions. If any of them are alive and captured, the people at the top will be easy, even a delight, to prosecute. Their indictments, their condemnations, already fill warehouses.
But I will make a prediction. The regime has fallen and its jails are opened. If they are kept, and not burnt down by their liberated inmates, and, temporarily, teary-eyed reporters and their camera crews mill about in these prisons, and document it – and people see all this on their phones and shed hypocritical tears about man’s cruelty to man – we will still, very easily, forget all of this.
Polite society forgot it for a decade. Easily and energetically, they forgot it for a decade.
People live fantasy lives. They make up their reality. Evil is a hard problem. Better to pretend it doesn’t exist. There is no evidence that can convince ordinary people that evil has been done, if peace of mind requires that they disbelieve it.
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