BERLIN LETTER
At the confluence of the Rhine and the Moselle, the old town of Koblenz looks like a postcard. Monday, May 18, even tourists were back to take advantage of the reopening of the terraces or stroll with an ice cream in this bourgeois city in western Germany. Difficult to imagine a more striking contrast between this nonchalance and what was playing at the same time behind the large windows of the regional court, where a former Syrian intelligence officer, accused of crimes against humanity, took for the first time the speech.
Until then, Anwar Raslan was only a face. The unawares one of a 57-year-old man with a salt and pepper mustache and bushy eyebrows, who has remained mute since the start of his trial on April 23, in his plexiglass box because of the Covid epidemic. 19. A historic trial, in the full sense of the term, since this ex-colonel of the State Security is the first senior Syrian official to appear before the justice for abuses committed by the regime of Bashar Al-Assad since 2011, year of the beginning of the war ravaging the country.
Torture and electroshock
Monday’s hearing, the fifth since the trial began, was eagerly awaited. In the first, the one where the indictment was read, Anwar Raslan refused to speak. That day, it was therefore necessary to be content with the words of the prosecutor to get an idea of the accused, who arrived in Germany as an asylum seeker, in September 2014, and arrested, in February 2019, thanks to one of his ex-victims, who recognized him in a refugee home and then in a department store in Berlin.
What would Anwar Raslan say after hearing the prosecutor accuse him of being responsible for the deaths of 58 people and the torture of 4,000 others in the Al-Khatib detention center in Damascus, which he had charge between April 2011 and September 2012? What was he to say about the abuse, including the use of electroshocks, which he allegedly used his lieutenants to "Extract confessions and information about the opposition" on a diet ? What words would he find to justify the conditions of detention "Inhuman" who reigned "Inside 50m cells2 where 140 prisoners gathered in incredible heat ", without the possibility of sitting down or lying down, as the prosecutor recalled?
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