--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today's show features some descriptions of torture in the first half here. You might want to skip past that section once you hear our guest mention the, quote, physical stuff. Here we go. It's really hard to prosecute alleged war criminals. It's even harder to prosecute alleged war criminals from regimes that are still in power, like the one in Syria. And yet, Germany pulled it off this month and they're planning to do it again.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For nearly two years, the court heard of horrors that unfolded thousands of miles away at a Damascus detention facility where former Colonel Anwar Ruslan allegedly oversaw the torture of as many as 4,000 detainees. A documentary filmmaker named Aditya Sambamurti was sitting in court for the trial of Anwar Ruslan. We asked Aditya to tell us how Ruslan, a Sunni Muslim, a different religious denomination from pretty much everyone in Bashar al-Assad's tight inner circle, ended up as a Syrian colonel executing brutal crimes.
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: He's not actually from a family that is part of the inner circle. He comes from quite ordinary, let's say, circumstances and a quite normal sort of background. He studies law. He subsequently joins the police force. He's a cadet in the police force. He is outstanding. He is one of the top graduates in his class and is selected for intelligence work.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: From what we learned in court and what the records show, the Syrian government holds a very tight leash on the population. And it's done by creating essentially security zones all over the country. They're called security branches. And he was in charge of interrogations at Branch 251, which is the Al-Hatib prison. He started in 2008. This is before the wave of the Arab Spring came to Syria. In Syria, it started in March of 2011.
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: They promised Friday was going to be big. It turned out to be huge. This is Banyas on the northeastern coast. all calling for the regime to fall. Ruslan at this point had already been roughly three years at Branch 251. By Ruslan's own account, the situation worsened dramatically. Mass arrests of protesters and dissidents. Posted online, this footage is purportedly from the city of Dera. It shows water cannon being used to disperse a group of demonstrators. One witness claimed three people were shot dead by security forces.
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: So torture was used quite routinely in the Syrian state, even before the Arab Spring. But it no longer became about trying to extract information. It just became about revenge. They kidnapped me from the street in front of my home. They just come past a car and open doors and four guys and cut you, blunt you, cover you, and put you in the car between the... People were simply tortured because it was possible.
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: The prisons were full, I mean, and bursting at the seams. So you start out with a situation where, you know, a cell that is maybe designed for 20 people is holding 10 times that much. There's no access to clean water. There's, you know, people are drinking out of toilets. I mean, we heard witness testimony where that was the situation. There is no access to real food. People are starving.
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: So that's just the beginning. That's the baseline. Then you go on to the physical stuff. Detainees were, they received electroshocks. They were burned. They were beaten. terribly. Some of them were shot, some of them were stabbed. There were other things as well. I mean, there was something called the falaka, which is, and the shab, which are two different, you know, methods where a detainee's, the soles of their feet were beaten to a bloody pulp, which means it was so painful that you can't stand anymore. You can only crawl on your knees.
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: Other things involved hanging people by their ankles upside down for hours, maybe days on end, until they lost consciousness. Rape against men, rape against women, and children as well, minors. Over 17,000 people are estimated to have died inside Syrian state prisons in the last five years. That's an average of 300 people a month.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How long does this go on? What we know is that by December 2012, he had left the country. He fled to Jordan, and he joined the opposition in Jordan. And it's kind of interesting, and it complicates the picture of this man. to know that he defected and that he did join the opposition. And at the time, members of the Syrian opposition in exile embraced him because he was a high-ranking defector who people believed had information about the inner workings of the regime.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Can you tell me a little bit more about how he goes from being someone who you know instigating torture brutal torture for the sake of revenge to defecting That just feels like such a big jump cut
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: He did not agree with any of it, he says. He says that he had no power to stop these abuses because they were happening at a very systemic level. And that he tried to do what he could to help civilians in any way that were there under his watch. And the defense did find witnesses that came to court and attested to the fact that he treated them respectfully, whatever that means.
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: But that being said, there were other witnesses and certainly joint plaintiffs in this case. Wassim was incarcerated, interrogated in the notorious Al-Khatib prison in Damascus. It's like hell, really. Some of whom had direct interactions with Anwar Ruslan, who says that he was very much involved in ordering their torture if he didn't like the answers that he was being given.
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: He told me directly, lay on your stomach and raise your feet in the air, so in the stress position. And I should answer the questions. And whenever he didn't like the answers I gave, he ordered somebody next to me to start to hit me. What ended up happening is that the Syrian state became ever more ruthless. And there was a massacre in the village where his family, his extended family is from.
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: It's worth mentioning here, you know, Syria, like many countries, is a multicultural, multi-religious society. And there are lots of different Muslim denominations there. So there are Sunnis, there are Shias, there are Alevis. And the Alevis are the religious denomination from which the Assad family comes from. And many Alevis hold positions of power in the Syrian state.
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: So, you know, Anwar Ruslan comes from a Sunni Muslim family whose ancestral village also joined the uprising against the government. And many of his extended family members were massacred in the process. And that was, according to him, that was the final straw.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And how does he go from there to standing trial in Germany? Germany is a country that has, for decades now, has had very progressive asylum laws, political asylum laws, and is a country of choice for many Syrians, especially in 2015 after the government essentially allowed any Syrian who was fleeing the war, if they could come to Germany, gave them a chance to apply for asylum.
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: So Rassan doesn't come in 2015, he comes in 2014. But through his contacts in the Syrian opposition, he's able to get letters of support that allow him to get a visa to come to Germany and then filed for political asylum there as a defector who basically, you know, is afraid for his life now because he ran away.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So Germany essentially takes him in, saves his life, but not much time later, they're trying him for war crimes?
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: He was recognized by former detainees, or by a former detainee, certainly, who was living in the same home for refugees as he was and also recognized him while shopping at a nearby, the equivalent of a Home Depot. And so this man alerted the German authorities and there appeared to be other people who, during their asylum depositions, mentioned a Colonel Anwar Ruslan as someone who was in charge and someone who should be investigated.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so when the German equivalent of the FBI got involved after he went to the police and gave the statement and asked for protection, they started looking into his case. And they started to find these complaints that had been filed or his name started popping up in other interviews that were done with former detainees who were also living in Germany.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So that's how this case came to be. He was arrested in the summer of 2019. They're charging him with at least 4,000 counts of torture, killings, bodily harm, acts of sexual violence, all of which are acts committed as part of crimes against humanity.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, so this is a defector. This is an asylum seeker. This is someone who, I guess, by his own accounts, objected to what he was seeing done in these prisons. What's his defense when he's charged in Germany?
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: I think his defense in general has been that he didn't have any power as a Sunni in the Syrian state. He was not in the upper echelons of the Syrian state. He was never going to be. That he was a career officer who did his duty. and that ultimately things got out of control when the Arab Spring started and the regime got more and more repressive, but that he was trying to contain the damage, essentially.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But his defense doesn't work. He's convicted on a host of charges.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do you get the sense that Ruslan's conviction and this trial could be the first of many?
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: I do think that there will be more of these trials. Whether they will actually involve the people really responsible, like at the very highest levels of the government, I think it's an open question and it will take a long time to answer that one.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for today's show comes from Adio. What is Adio?
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: My name is Amina Salwan. I'm the Justice and Accountability Campaigner at the Syria Campaign, supporting activists, Syrian civil society, and survivors and families of detainees. After 2011, my father was detained, my brother, I have three cousins who have been disappeared by the Syrian regime. We just shift between hope and despair, and it's very difficult.
--:-- Amina Salwan: Like, the only thing that these families have, after 11 years of the Syrian uprising is this trial of this intelligence figure in Germany. We enter the courtroom and then they bring him actually and he's cuffed and then they remove the cuffs. I felt like goosebumps. It's just, I felt like I'm panicking. I have anxiety and I'm looking at him and just, I feel like I'm really annoyed by his calm, like saying hi or waving to I don't know his lawyer he has a paper a blank paper and a pen and he's writing notes and I wonder if he's just I don't know trying to pretend he's writing or he's actually writing
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There was a moment when the judge she was reading actually the verdict and saying he got a life sentence and he was taking notes and just make me so angry
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: Aditya, help me understand how Germany prosecutes someone who committed a host of crimes in Syria. How exactly does that work?
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: There is a legal doctrine, let's say, called universal jurisdiction, which says that some crimes are just so heinous. It's specifically war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity. That it is the duty of nation states to prosecute those responsible, whether or not they are citizens of that country or whether or not those crimes took place on their soil.
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: Where does this idea of universal jurisdiction come from? It's a matter of debate as to what the real origins are, but I think it's probably useful just to say that in Germany, the embrace of universal jurisdiction really kind of grows out of the Nuremberg trials that come out of the Second World War.
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: Attention, the International Military Tribunal will now enter. So, you know, the Nuremberg trials, a series of military tribunals where allied judges are trying Nazis, high-ranking Nazis, for... Crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Committed throughout Europe.
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: It is not the same as universal jurisdiction, but the idea of universal jurisdiction kind of comes out of it. This inquest represents the practical effort of four of the most mighty of nations, with the support of 15 more, to utilize international law to meet the greatest menace of our times, aggressive war.
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: So you basically have allied judges trying, you know, citizens of another country, which was Nazi Germany, for crimes committed all over Europe. The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untied.
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: I think in the last 20 years, certainly since the early 2000s, the German state and German jurisprudence has tried to position itself as a pioneer and using universal jurisdiction to prosecute, you know, genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: How is it used since World War II? I think a famous case is the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a former Nazi who was tried in Jerusalem in 1961. Essentially, an Israeli court is trying a Nazi for his role in perpetuating the Holocaust in Europe.
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: First count, nature of offense, crime against the Jewish people, an offense under section 1A1 of the Nazis and Nazi collaborators punishment law 5710 1950. The accused together with others during the period 1939 to 1945 caused the killing of millions of Jews.
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: So essentially it's a it's a use of the principle of universal jurisdiction to try that case. There the case of Augusto Pinochet in Chile but that case never actually went to trial because he was an old man when the charges were brought and he was actually allowed to live his life peacefully in Chile and die of old age
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: There is also a case of a Rwandan man who was also tried in Germany prior to Anwar Raslan. But Raslan is really, you know, a senior figure. And since Eichmann, there hasn't really been someone like him who's been tried and convicted in this way.
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: Yeah, what about Raslan's conviction is so unprecedented? It's the first time that a, you know, ranking officer, and I think it's fair to call him a high-ranking officer, of a government that is still very much in power and is not going anywhere anytime soon, is convicted of crimes against humanity.
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: That has simply not happened. I think that deep inside, everyone in the room were hoping that he would show us a regretting face face or be apologetic or seem sad but he did not a few weeks ago um he had like a chance to do like a last statement and he did it in writing and i mean it was the only time where he said something close to an apology but he never apologized he never cooperated with the german police and I spoke with one of the survivors who was my friend and the plaintiff in the case and he told me that I might have maybe found a slight amount of forgiveness for him in my heart but he never wanted to cooperate.
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: And Ruslan was sentenced to life in prison. Do you think he'll actually serve out the full sentence?
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: I'm not sure. In Germany, a life sentence allows the opportunity for parole after 15 years. So there is a scenario in which he can be granted parole.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is it fair to say that this conviction was more successful in Germany than it would have been in some international criminal court at The Hague or something?
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: Well, it would never have happened at The Hague because The Hague, so the International Criminal Court does not have jurisdiction for Syria.
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: Essentially, the International Criminal Court only has jurisdiction over countries that are signatories, that are members, essentially, that recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. Many countries, including the biggest and the most powerful, militarily most powerful ones, the United States among them, do not recognize the International Criminal Court as a sovereign body that can try cases involving American citizens.
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: And of course, Syria does not recognize the authority of the ICC, the International Criminal Court. This German court and the use of universal jurisdiction was really an effort to circumvent the gridlock going on for many years now.
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: I mean, the Syrian conflict has been going on for well over a decade. And any attempts to get the ICC, the International Criminal Court, involved have failed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What are the implications for the ongoing war in Syria? Are there any?
--:-- Aditya Sambamurti: I think what the people who have prosecuted this case and who are filing, who are prosecuting the next case, the people who are involved in evidence gathering, the people who have, you know, are pursuing this, what they're hoping for is that as and when there is some sort of ceasefire and as and when the Syrian conflict ends, that they can use these trials and the evidence collected that show that crimes against humanity, which means systemic widespread atrocities were committed against the civilian population, that Assad cannot negotiate himself a golden parachute and live out his days in some third country, that these trials will ultimately build to something that will allow them to hold him accountable down the road, whenever that is.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: To be honest, I hope that this verdict might be able to send a clear message to to criminals within the Syrian regime, you will not escape unpunished. It might take so long, but you're not going to escape it.
--:-- Amina Salwan: On the other hand, it's just very difficult. I keep having these mixed feelings about this. Anwar Rislan is one of the hundreds of officials within the Syrian regime who are guilty of four crimes and crimes against humanity. And he's still the first one. We have a long, long road to go through. And this is the beginning of a wider struggle.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's Amina Salwan. Her brother and father were detained, and three of her cousins were disappeared by the Syrian regime.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Before that, you heard from Aditya Sambamurti. He's a documentary filmmaker based in London. He's working on a feature called The Journalist and The Jailer about the trial of Anwar Ruslan.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our episode today was produced by Haleema Shah, edited by Matt Collette and Noel King, engineered by Paul Mounsey, fact-checked by Laura Bullard. I'm Sean Rameswaram from It's Today Explained. Thank you.
