Mazen Hummada ‘disappeared’ again by Syrian regime underlines why those responsible for crimes against humanity from Assad down must be brought to justice

When I first heard that Mazen Hummada was back in Syria I was shocked and found that news utterly incomprehensible. One of the best known democratic activists who suffered unimaginable torture after the peaceful uprising in 2011, and managed to flee the country after his release and find asylum in the Netherlands, it just beggared belief he would voluntarily return. Anyone who saw the documentary ‘Syria’s Disappeared” in which he featured probably had the same reaction. Seeing him describe the most horrific abuse at the hands of Syrian Airforce Intelligence, and the trauma apparently embedded forever in his face is not something you easily forget.

Apparently he had been tricked into returning and went back thinking he was going to be involved in some kind of reconciliation effort that would allow him to help secure the release of former fellow prisoners. Then his family confirmed he was arrested on his return and is once again in the hands of the notorious Airforce Intelligence who left him scarred physically and mentally after they so brutally tortured him the last time he was in their custody.

Interviewing those who have endured such brutal torture we found, currently filming BRINGING ASSAD TO JUSTICE, they often are not able to talk about it. In fact, you have to be very careful as even attempting such interviews can cause torture victims to be re-traumatised with serious consequences. It is also worth underlining that some who are able to do talk about these horrific, extremely painful and humiliating experiences find themselves almost disbelieving they actually endured what they were forced to go through, as if such experiences were so horrendous they could not have taken place!

Even as I write this it is chilling to think Mazen might once again be enduring the same quite horrific torture he revealed in such detail in his statement to the Syrians Violations Documentation Centre (VDC) which wrote in its introduction to that statement that “the importance of his testimony lies in the fact that he has been subjected to the cruelest torture on one hand, and that he has been an eyewitness to the many atrocities that took place in the “slaughterhouse hospital” as he put it to describe Military Hospital 601 in Mazzeh to which he was transferred from the Air Force Branch, Mazzeh Military Airport.”

Perhaps in that introduction we can speculate that his disappearance at the hands of the Syrian regime once again is a measure of the success of Syrian human rights lawyers like Anwar al-Bunni and Mazan Darwish not least in working with prosecutors in Germany and France and helping to secure international arrest warrants against regime leaders like General Jamil Hassan, who served as head of Airforce Intelligence?

However, if any group in the Syrian regime imagines that the cynical duping of Mazen Humada to return to Syria exploiting his deep emotional desire to try to help rescue others from its hellish torture cells will achieve anything to stop efforts to secure justice and accountability they are mistaken. In fact, unless Mazen is urgently released I have no doubt it will have nothing but a dramatic impact in the opposite direction increasing support and pressure to see Syria’s torture prisons closed and the torturers who run them, and their leaders from President Bashar al-Assad down even more urgently brought to justice.

I can testify to the momentum I have witnessed building up in terms of initiatives to bring those responsible to justice for torture and other crimes against humanity. To underline that fact the first trial worldwide on state torture in Syria will start in Koblenz, Germany, on 23 April 2020. The Higher Regional Court in Koblenz, has charged Anwar R. and Eyad A., two former officials in the Assad regime’s security apparatus, for crimes against humanity. In the course of the German Federal Prosecutor’s investigations, the Federal Criminal Police Office heard testimony from 16 Syrian witnesses, nine of whom will be joint plaintiffs in the case.