Bureau Recommends: Syria’s torture machine
Syrians protest against Al-Assad’s regime, Manchester, UK.
‘In besieged Tal Kalakh, a western outpost in the restive governorate of Homs, the Syrian army is once again hard at work, killing its own people’, reports Channel 4 News correspondent Jonathan Miller, writing in today’s Guardian.
The report is timely. On Monday there was a UN announcement that more than 5,000 people have died in the nine-month-long Syrian uprising, including at least 300 children.
Speaking to journalists, UN human rights chief Navi Pillay recommended that the council refer Syria to the International Criminal Court, the permanent war crimes tribunal, for investigation of possible crimes against humanity.
Now, Miller’s feature uncovers further evidence of horrific torture and abuse, and reports of children as young as 10 and old men in their 80s being detained and tortured by Syrian secret police.
A special investigation, to be aired by Channel 4 next Monday, examines upwards of 30,000 grainy videos which purport to show violent acts of repression, of people being tortured and killed by the Syrian regime.
Despite the regime’s insistence that the videos are fake, Channel 4 has found ‘a grotesque compendium of verified video material which we believe to present irrefutable prima facie evidence of crimes against humanity’, says Miller.
Trailer: Syria’s Torture Machine
‘No place for fear’
Spending nine days in the Syrian capital Damascus between late November and early December, Miller travelled through the mountains to a Syrian safe house in Tal Kalakh, where he met a former detainee of the regime.
A weathered former tractor driver in his 50s, the man had been shot twice by pro-al-Assad militia, then held by Al-Assad’s sadistic secret police, the Mukhabarat.
‘In flickering candle-light, he told me in gruesome detail of beatings he’d received with batons and electric cables on the soles of his feet…’ Miller described.
‘He had been hung by his knees, immobilised inside a twisting rubber tyre…shackled hand and foot and hung upside down for hours – the Mukhabarat’s notorious ‘flying carpet’. Then hung up by his wrists, and whipped and tormented with electric cattle prods.’
But Miller also encountered a great sense of defiance, with the former detainee telling him:
‘Although we are suffering from torture, we are not afraid any more. There is no fear. We used to fear the regime, but there is no place for fear now.’
Miller comments: ‘Each act of brutality has served, it seems, to reinforce the growing sense of outrage and injustice and has triggered ever more widespread insurrection.’
However, the Syrian government continues to deny any part in the violence.
Over the course of his visit, Miller interviewed government ministers, an army general and a mayor, hearing ‘nothing but denials that the security forces were shooting, shelling and torturing civilians’. Syrian officials maintain that ‘armed gangs’ and ‘terrorists’ are the source of the violence, and that allegations against the regime are ‘lies’ propagated by the West.
‘Syria has no policy of torture whatsoever’, a senior government minister told Miller.
But Nadim Houry, deputy director of Human Rights Watch for the Middle East and North Africa, says he has evidence that tens of thousands of Syrians have been arbitrarily detained, and that torture of some civilians has resulted in death.
‘We know of at least 105 cases of people who were returned from the custody of security services in body bags to their loved ones…and those are only the ones that we know of’, he said.
Syria’s Torture Machine will be shown on December 19, 11.10pm, Channel 4.
To read Miller’s full report in the Guardian, click here.
