Today, Explained - A Syrian war criminal is actually going to prison

Episode Date: January 25, 2022

Crimes against humanity are rarely prosecuted successfully, but a Syrian colonel got a life sentence for just that. Documentarian Adithya Sambamurthy explains how Germany is spearheading the effort. This episode was produced by Haleema Shah, edited by Matt Collette and Noel King, engineered by Paul Mounsey, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. 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. For nearly two years, the court heard of horrors that unfolded thousands of miles away at a Damascus detention facility, where former Colonel Anwar Aslan allegedly oversaw the torture of as many as 4,000 detainees. A documentary filmmaker named Aditya Sambamurthy 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. 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. 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-Khatib 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. They promised Friday was going to be big. It turned out to be huge. This is Banias 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. 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 car and open doors and four guys and catch you, blind you, cover you, and put you in the car between the... People were simply tortured because it was possible. 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. 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 detainees, 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. 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. 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. Can you tell me a little bit more about how he goes from being someone who's, you know, instigating torture, brutal torture, for the sake of revenge to defecting? That just feels like such a big jump cut. 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, anyway, 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. But that being said, there were other witnesses and certainly joint plaintiffs in this case.

Wasim 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. 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 the answers 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. It's worth mentioning here, you know, Syria, like many countries, is a multicultural, a 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 states. So, you know, Anwar Raslan 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. 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. 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 file for political asylum there. As a defector who basically is afraid for his life now because he ran away.

So Germany essentially takes him in, saves his life, but notee, 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. 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.

So that's how this case came to be. He was arrested in the summer of 2019. killings, bodily harm, acts of sexual violence, all of which are acts committed as part of crimes against humanity. 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? 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. But he wasn't able to because it was out of his control. So his defense doesn't work. He's convicted on a host of charges. Do you get the sense that Ruslan's conviction and this trial could be the first of many? There's another trial that just started, and then there's another trial that's coming later this year. 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 that's an open question and it will take a long time to answer that one. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained,

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with iGaming Ontario. My name is Amina Sawan. 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. 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 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 of 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 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.

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, help me understand how Germany prosecutes someone who committed a host of crimes in Syria. How exactly does that work? 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 untouched. 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. 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 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. So essentially, it's a use of the principle of universal jurisdiction to try that case. There's 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. There's 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. Yeah, what about Raslan'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. That has simply not happened. I think that deep inside, everyone in the room were hoping that he would show us a regretting face or be apologetic or seem sad, but he did not. A few weeks ago, he had a chance to do 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 and who's 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.

He did not provide any information about detention centers in Syria or anything that could help. And Ruslan was sentenced to life in prison. Do you think he'll actually serve out the full sentence? 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. 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?

Well, it would never have happened at The Hague because The Hague—so the international criminal court does not have jurisdiction for Syria. Why is that? 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. 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. 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. What are the implications for the ongoing war in Syria? Are there any?

I think what the people who have prosecuted this case and who are filing, who are prosecuting the Are there any? 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. To be honest, I hope that this verdict

might be able to send a clear message to criminals within the Syrian regime. You will not escape unpunished. It might take so long, but you're not going to escape it. On the other hand, it's just very difficult. I keep having these mixed feelings about this. Anwar Ruslan 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. That's Amina Sawan. Her brother and father were detained and three of her cousins were disappeared by the Syrian regime. Before that, you heard from Aditya Sambamurthy.

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. Our episode today was produced by Halima Shah, edited by Matthew Collette and Noelle King, engineered by Paul Mounsey, and fact-checked by Laura Bullard. I'm Sean Ramos for M.

It's Today Explained. Thank you.