After the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the gates of Syria’s prisons and torture chambers have been opened and mass graves all over Syria discovered. At Saydnaya Prison, where tens of thousands of people have disappeared or been tortured and killed, the vicious cruelty of the regime has been revealed. Commentators discuss the next steps after these discoveries.
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No justice without accountability
Welt presents its concept for what needs to be done now:
“Time is pressing. Firstly, measures must be taken to ensure that important documents are not carelessly destroyed when citizens storm secret service offices or government buildings, for example. The evidence must be preserved. Secondly, missing persons centres must be set up quickly with access to files containing information on prisoners. Thirdly, prisons must be placed under protection. Later on, as the Syrian human rights lawyer Anwar al-Bunni suggests, they can be turned into memorials. Fourthly, the survivors need medical help and psychological counselling. There is no justice without accountability.”
Restoration does not start from scratch
Corriere della Sera is hoping for legal consequences:
“There are people, associations and NGOs who have been waiting for this moment for years. They didn’t know whether it would ever come, but they tirelessly collected witness statements, satellite photos and videos from social media. They catalogued them, put names to the faces, compared the locations, searched for geolocations and created maps. … All from a distance, far away from the henchmen of the Mukhabarat, the Syrian secret service. And now that the moment has come, the regime has collapsed and Assad has fled to Moscow with his billions, they know where to look. … The hope is to be able to convict Assad and his supporters for the crimes they have committed.”
A perfidious regime
Le Soir takes a look into hell:
“The first images from inside the prison show cells in an atrocious state: walls covered in filth, windowless rooms in which dozens of prisoners appear to be crowded together without a single mattress. … Executions took place there by the dozen, with prisoners being hanged next to each other. … Over the years, some prisoners have testified to the existence of ‘salt chambers’ in Saydnaya Prison. The guards kept the bodies there before loading them onto trucks to take them to the mass graves. Sometimes, however, the torturers also brought prisoners there, who found themselves almost up to their knees in salt and surrounded by corpses. Today, as the gates of hell open, many fear to learn the true extent of the torture carried out by the Assad regime.”
Everyday images alongside horrors
De Volkskrant columnist Frank Heinen reflects on the banality of evil in what the photos show and what they don’t show:
“Assad lying on a sofa. Assad in the kitchen in white underpants. Assad on a bicycle. Everyday life, nothing special. No trace of the horrific place that Syria was under Assad’s leadership. … When it comes to photos it’s all about context. A photo from Saydnaya Prison, the human slaughterhouse where tens of thousands of people were detained and tortured, shows pieces of rope on the floor, a dirty floor. … It’s only in connection with the accounts of barbaric torture methods that the pieces of rope become a noose.”
Dictator’s fall could bolster society
The social catharsis offers opportunities, writes foreign policy expert Botond Feledy in Új Szó:
“If the new government doesn’t gain international legitimacy quickly, the country could easily fall back into a new civil war. … At the same time, it is a rare moment in history when a people can walk freely around the prisons, morgues and torture chambers of a recently overthrown dictator. Here in Europe we can hardly imagine this profound level of liberation. … There could be a lot of societal energy for a gentle leadership to channel. World history doesn’t give us much reason for optimism, but we’ll see if Syria can remain intact, and if so, in whose hands.”