Those of us who have been banging on about the scale and imaginative sadism of the Assad regime’s violence have had only to wait for “official” confirmation of claims which activists on the ground in Syria have been all too willing to share with Western journalists for months, typically backed up by documentary evidence such as photographs and mobile phone videos. As against thousands of eyewitness testimonies, we have had a totalitarian regime’s state-mediated propaganda. “So who was right and who was lying?” some talking heads and newspapermen have asked without betraying the ghost of an ironic smile. WikiLeaked State Department cables which found that “SARG [Syrian government] officials lie at every level…They persist in a lie even in the face of evidence to the contrary. They are not embarrassed to be caught in a lie” — were also evidently of little forensic use.
Now comes the UN Human Rights Council’s damning report on the Assad regime’s 10-month-long assault on the Syrian people. It finds the regime guilty of crimes against humanity and outlines some of the methods torture used against detainees, methods which include male and child rape:
Several testimonies reported the practice of sexual torture used on male detainees. Men were routinely made to undress and remain naked. Several former detainees testified reported beatings of genitals, forced oral sex, electroshocks and cigarette burns to the anus in detention facilities, including those of the Air Force Intelligence in Damascus, the Military Intelligence in Jisr Al Shughour, the Military Intelligence and the Political Security in Idlib and Al Ladhiqiyah and the intelligence detention facilities in Tartus. Several of the detainees were repeatedly threatened that they would be raped in front of their family and that their wives and daughters would also be raped.
Testimonies were received from several men who stated they had been anally raped with batons and that they had witnessed the rape of boys. One man stated that he witnessed a 15-year-old boy being raped in front of his father. A 40-year-old man saw the rape of an 11-year-old boy by three security services officers. He stated: “I have never been so afraid in my whole life. And then they turned to me and said; you are next.” The interviewee was unable to continue his testimony. One 20-year-old university student told the commission that he was subjected to sexual violence in detention, adding that “if my father had been present and seen me, I would have had to commit suicide”. Another man confided while crying, “I don’t feel like a man any more”.
Another key finding of this report is the prevalence of summary executions of Syrian soldiers who refused to obey orders and open firm on unarmed protestors. Many regime apologists and dupes of Ba’ath BS have maintained that the army would never resort to murdering its own personnel as this policy would surely be a damper on esprit de corps. Yet here is the UNHRC:
Several defectors witnessed the killing of their comrades who refused to execute orders to fire at civilians. A number of conscripts were allegedly killed by security forces on 25 April in Dar’a during a large-scale military operation. The soldiers in the first row were given orders to aim directly at residential areas, but chose to fire in the air to avoid civilian casualties. Security forces posted behind shot them for refusing orders, thus killing dozens of conscripts.
Some days it’s hard to tell which is worse: the atrocities committed against the Syrian people or the condescension and sham even-handedness with which the Western media and political intelligentsia have responded to credible evidence of those atrocities, some out of sinister sympathy with the regime, others out of stupidity. Czeslaw Milosz wrote in his great poem “The Child of Europe,” “Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself / So the weary travelers may find repose in the lie.” At least the repose now appears to be ended.