AMALS HEALING AND ADVOCACY CENTER
InvestigationWhile it is impossible to obtain reliable information on the actual toll of the Covid-19 epidemic in Syria, many families in exile are concerned about the situation of their loved ones whom they believe to be held in terrible prisons secrets of the regime.
They are Syrians, refugees in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Greece, Germany or the United Kingdom. They suffered war and all its ills: terror and bombs, destruction, tears, stalking, exile. They have seen neighbors, friends, family die. They have left their homes, the places of their childhood; sometimes left behind old parents who could not follow them; suffered in their flight humiliations, harassment, blackmail. Their nights are never quiet; dreams have long since deserted.
Only memories, bitterness, trauma remain. And for all those who wanted to talk to us, an obsession that keeps them alive and prevents them from living: a husband, a father, a son, an uncle, arrested by the police of the Syrian regime and disappeared in his jails without that we don't know anything anymore.
Thousands of unanswered questions
Not a word, not information, not the slightest indictment or the slightest procedure. No way to defend yourself, no address to go to. Thousands of unanswered questions. Just the strong suspicion of imprisonment in torture centers that Amnesty International has described as "Human slaughterhouses". And impossible mourning. Move on, forget, there is nothing to do. Silence. The missing appear to have been wiped from all official records and from the face of the earth. At least 83,000 still today, says Syrian Human Rights Network who documents each case.
Now the coronavirus has revived the anxiety of these families. There are stories circulating inside and outside of Syria, which terrifies them and lets them imagine a massacre in the network of prisons and detention centers of the Assad regime, the official and the clandestine that nobody is only allowed to visit. And then, following the 43 NGOs which, on March 16, urged the Syrian government to release political prisoners in anticipation of the coronavirus, followed by the UN envoy demanding urgent measures to provide medical care. protection in all places of detention, wives, mothers, sisters, nieces of missing persons spontaneously contacted us to express their panic and draw attention to the fate of secret detainees.
" They are the most vulnerable of the vulnerable; if Covid-19 is brought to prison, it will decimate them ", Warns Amal Al-Nasin, lawyer and president of the Amals Healing and Advocacy Center for refugee families, who speaks to us from Antakya, in Turkey, where she has been exiled since 2012. Of course, she never visited the secret service centers where prisoners arrested outside the legal system are crammed. But it is based on reports published by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Syrian Network for Human Rights, as well as on the testimonies of runaway, swapped or released prisoners, which she has collected since the start of the revolution in March. 2011.
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