At least 60,000 dead in Syria’s prisons, says new report

More than 60,000 people have died in Syrian prisons since 2011 as a result of torture and lack of access to food and medical assistance, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) monitoring group.

"Since March 2011, at least 60,000 people lost their lives to torture or to horrible conditions, notably the lack of medication or food, in regime detention centres,” Rami Abdelrahman, head of the UK-based monitoring group, told AFP last week.

The figure is higher than previous documentation by a range of Syrian activists and monitoring groups, although the SOHR head said the data was compiled through contacts with regime sources in Syrian detention facilities.

The SOHR has itself documented more than 14,450 deaths in detention, including 110 children, since March 2011, when protests against Bashar al-Assad’s government began to spread out from the southern city of Deraa.

The Violations Documentation Centre (VDC), on the other hand, which maintains an extensive, searchable database of those killed, detained or missing in Syria, has documented just over 64,500 cases of detention and 10,411 deaths as a result of torture, according to VDC executive director, Husam al-Katlaby.

Amnesty International previously stated that up to 65,000 people — 58,148 of them civilians — have been forcibly disappeared or detained by the Syrian security services since the beginning of the uprising.

The arrests were “perpetrated as part of an organised attack against the civilian population that has been widespread, as well as systematic, and therefore amounts to crimes against humanity,” Amnesty said.

Many suspect the numbers of deaths in detention are far greater, but due to a total lack of transparency, it is difficult to verify figures.

However, SOHR’s latest statement comes as opposition negotiators attempt to refocus attention on the many thousands of detainees languishing in prisons across Syria run by the Syrian government and military or a range of security branches.

Those efforts may have been given extra impetus following a tense stand-off between Syrian security services and prisoners at Hama Central Prison, located in a city north-east of Damascus.

After a week with the inmates in control of parts of the prison and security forces appearing to prepare for a takeover by force, representatives of the prisoners met with leading Syrian officials and agreed to end the unrest in return for returning amenities to the prison as well as a series of staggered prisoner releases.

In a letter to the International Syria Support Group (ISSG) on 16 May, the president of the Syrian opposition’s National Coalition said that the Hama protest “had restored the issue of detainees to the forefront of media and international attention.”

However, coalition president Anas Abdah added that Hama is just “the tip of the iceberg.”

 

Putting pressure on the Assad government

Negotiators from the opposition’s High Negotiations Committee (HNC), representing a cross-section of armed groups and political forces from the anti-Assad opposition, are calling for more pressure to be put on Assad’s government to allow international inspections of Syrian facilities and to stop executions.

Abdah also said that any future political settlement should include “guarantees to hold accountable those responsible for gross human rights violations and systematic torture and executions.”

The call has been taken up by independent activists, as well. A new initiative set up by Syrian activists, journalists and actors in Europe, #DetaineesFirst (المعتقلون أولاً), recently issued a statement proclaiming the “human and moral duty to help the tens of thousands of detained and kidnapped Syrians who are dispersed among the ever-increasing powers of evil, each violating the freedom and dignity of Syrians according to their capacity.”

Sakher Idrees, a Syrian journalist and activist, helped set up the campaign. “Inside the detention centres you will find all of Syrian society,” he claimed. “There are artists, doctors and journalists, Muslims, Christians, Druze and Alawites…Arabs and Kurds.”

However, Idrees added, so far negotiations have failed to prioritise the detainees issue — partly because of unwillingness by the international community, as well as obstruction by Syria and its allies, because “the detainees file would reveal significant war crimes, through evidence and names, committed by the Syrian regime,” Idrees argued.

Government representatives around the negotiating table have previously rubbished detainee figures provided by the opposition. At the same time, it is not possible to verify the numbers of civilians and pro-regime combatants held in opposition-controlled prisons and detention facilities.

VDC’s Katlaby meanwhile said that the detainees issue is much more than just numbers.

“The problem is not only in the number of detainees,” he said. “It’s about their fate.”

“The vast majority of these detainees are disappeared. Their families haven’t heard any thing about them. It’s just like an open wound that will not heal.”