Home » A Syrian officer convicted in Germany for crimes against humanity – Pierre Haski

A Syrian officer convicted in Germany for crimes against humanity – Pierre Haski

by admin

January 14, 2022 9:58 am

The trial that just ended in Koblenz, Germany, with the life sentence for a former Syrian colonel on January 13 is a truly historic trial. The sentence is historic because, for the first time, a high-ranking torturer faced justice and was sentenced to life in prison in a rule of law.

To understand the extent of the event, it is useful to recall the initially peaceful revolt of the Syrian population against the dictatorship starting in February 2011. Over the years, that conflict has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees and displaced persons, devastating an entire country. In the last eleven years the impunity of those responsible has been total: no one has ever been tried and no one has been indicated as guilty of the Syrian tragedy.

The story, therefore, will remember the name of Colonel Anwar Raslan, a former Syrian intelligence officer found guilty of crimes against humanity for the murder of 27 people, as well as the torture and rape of thousands of other individuals in the detention center. by Al Khatib. The colonel handled the interrogations at this sinister reputed facility, and 80 witnesses (including deserters and victims) came to court to recount the horrors taking place inside.

Universal justice
Why was Raslan convicted in Germany? For two reasons. First of all because the colonel tried to erase his past by emigrating to Germany in 2015 by mixing with refugees. Paradoxically, it was Raslan himself who revealed his identity by filing a complaint in a Berlin police station because he believed he was being followed by some agents of the Damascus regime. In that case he had signed the document with his rank, “colonel”, setting in motion the mechanism that led to his conviction.

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The second reason is the introduction in German law of the principle of “universal jurisdiction” which allows the courts of the country to also judge events that have occurred abroad. It is in the name of this principle that Germany has been able to breach impunity.

Human rights defenders rejoice. On January 13, the director of the NGO Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, lit up his face as he was attending a press conference to present his annual report. On hearing the news of the conviction, Roth interrupted his speech and said: “It is a truly historic fact.”

This first step of justice does not change anything in the immediate future for Syria, a country that has not yet emerged from eleven years of conflict and destruction, but it shows that the idea of ​​justice is not dead, even if circumstances do not allow it to be obtained. within the country’s borders.

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The situation in Syria remains extremely complex. Still firmly in the saddle thanks to Russian support, the Bashar al Assad regime is not the only one to have committed crimes. All the actors of the tragedy will have to answer for their actions. However, the government has a particular responsibility for having closed the door, in blood, to a movement that had taken its first steps in a peaceful way on February 16, 2011 in Daraa, in the south of the country.

At the time there was the euphoria of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and some young Syrians wrote on the walls of their school “Your turn is coming, doctor”, addressing Assad, who is an ophthalmologist. We know how it ended, between bloodshed and impunity. Until, on January 13 in Koblenz, a sentence took the side of all the forgotten victims of this dirty war that is not over yet.

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(Translation by Andrea Sparacino)

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