Featured image: A Syrian man displaying signs of torture (James Lawler Duggan, AFP/Getty Images)
Last week saw the publication of a little-known investigation by the French magazine Revue XXI, into a former-resident of Damascus, a man named Georg Fischer, who had died in 2001. Which would be unremarkable save for the fact that the man was really Alois Brunner, former-SS commander and Eichmann’s right hand, who had fled Germany in 1953 and wound up in Syria the following year, where he lived under the protection of the Syrian government until his death.
His life, however, reveals much about not only the dark inner-workings of the Syrian state but also of Western complicity in it.
Born in 1912 in present-day Rohrbrunn, Austria, Brunner joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and quickly rose through its ranks, becoming director of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration – an innocuous cover for the forced removal of Jews to concentration camps – in 1939. He aided Adolf Eichmann in the deportation of 43,000 Jews from Vienna, and personally signed the order for the deportation of 46,000 from Salonika. He was made commander of the Drancy transit camp in France in 1943, where he oversaw the deportation of a further 23,500 Jews to the concentration camps in Eastern Europe.
Having escaped punishment following the war due to confusion with another SS member of a similar name, Brunner fled West Germany in 1953 on a fake passport. He resurfaced again in Cairo under the false identity of Georg Fischer and, during the period of the United Arab Republic – the short-lived political union between Egypt and Syria from 1958 to 1961 – travelled to Syria, where he advised the state on the torture techniques he had acquired from a long career as an SS officer.
One of these was a variation of the torture wheel, onto which the victim would be strapped and beaten with electric cable, but specifically designed to shoot jets of water through the apparatus and open up old wounds, whereupon the beatings would begin again. Another variant, obtained by the mukhabarat prior to 1984, was the so-called ‘German chair’, which slowly broke the vertebrae of the victim strapped to it.
In exchange, Brunner was offered protection – an armed guard outside his third-storey apartment on Rue George Haddad in Damascus, a quiet, tree-lined street just west of the Old City and the Souq Hamadiyeh, where he would take his weekly walk – accompanied by an armed escort of course.
Yet when Hafez al-Assad came to power in the 1971 coup and ‘inherited’ Alois Brunner, he had evidently outlived his usefulness. But Assad was thus posed with a dilemma – if he gave Brunner up, his own mukhabarat secret service had no assurances that Assad would not do the same to them. And with Syria only just emerging from a period of violent political instability, Assad needed to know he could rely on his men.
So he kept Brunner under guard just as before, his insurance if you will, in the same apartment block in Rue Haddad, where he remained Georg Fischer to his neighbours – the eccentric old man who kept rabbits on his roof, guarded night and day by armed police.
And while he was pursued by the world’s foremost Nazi hunters, including the late Simon Weisenthal, he remained at large and unrepentant until his death sometime in 2001, though investigations disagree over the exact date.
Yet Hafez al-Assad inherited far more than Brunner. While the old SS officer had tutored Syria’s nascent security service in the ways of its delivery, it was under Assad that Syria’s legacy of torture would establish itself as a fixture of his reign.
Prisons that had operated under French Mandate such as Tadmur and Mezzeh – which utilised their own brand of torture against dissident Arabs – were repurposed under the auspices of the Syrian state and filled with its political enemies which, in the 1970s, included Israelis and Lebanese. As far back as 1974, Amnesty International had published its findings of Syria’s use of torture; its agents, the feared mukhabarat, were evidently experts in its application even at this early stage. A cursory reading of this grim literature indicates that their methods, while certainly honed over the years, remain largely the same to this day.
While they were by no means strangers to elaborate contraptions, the vast majority of Syrian torture techniques employed elemental, rudimentary, utilitarian tools – such that reports take on a grim monotony, of flogging with batons, electric cable, steel bars and canes, electric shocks, sexual assault, burning, the removal of fingernails, and the breaking of bones.
Others developed terms, such as dulab, in which the victim is forced into a car tyre and beaten; falaqa, where the victim is flogged on the soles of his or her feet; and shabeh, the ‘stress position’, wherein the prisoner is suspended by the wrists for long periods of time.
Still more were given wry nicknames, such as Bsat al-Reeh, ‘flying carpet’, in which the detainee is tied to a flat board and beaten, or folded by way of a hinge on the device; al-Abd al-Aswad (the black slave), on which the prisoner was forced to sit as a superheated metal rod would penetrate the body; or the aforementioned ‘German chair’, from which was developed a more rudimentary version, named simply the ‘Syrian chair’ – with a horizontal metal pole instead of a back, on which prisoners were forced to sit and pushed back until their vertebrae broke.
Prisoners would frequently die from such torture or from the cramped, diseased conditions under which they were kept, in which case the cause of death was listed as suicide. Their bodies were usually dumped on roadsides outside the cities where they were held or, on rare occasions, returned in a closed casket to their families.
Syria’s use of torture became a mainstay of the regime, a bridle against potential dissidence and an oft-used tool to quell dissent. During the Islamist Uprising in Syria from 1976 to 1982 – a precursor in minima forma to the present civil war, if only for its bloody climax in Hama in which upwards of 20,000 were killed – thousands were rounded up and taken to prisons across the country. Perhaps the most infamous of these lay on the outskirts of Tadmur, where hundreds were later executed in their cells in retribution for an attempt on Hafez’s life.
Hope of a more democratic rule based on equal human rights under Hafez’s son, Bashar al-Assad, was briefly kindled in 2000 when hundreds of prisoners were released as a show of good faith, the abortive ‘Damascus spring’. But this optimism was quickly cut off as the few political freedoms granted were revoked the following year.
So where does the West fit in with this? In early 2002, Assad purportedly told a visiting U.S. delegation that America can ‘benefit from the experience of countries that have successfully fought terrorism, primarily Syria’, citing the 1982 Hama Uprising as a prime example. The story was publicly dismissed by the U.S. at the time, though it seems they may have taken up Assad’s offer as public opinion on the ‘war on terror’ soured when the reality – of Abu Ghraib and accounts of the U.S.’ own use of torture – sank in.
And so we, the West, outsourced torture to, among others, Syria – contrary to reassurances by George Bush to the Times in 2005 that ‘torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture.’ This process, by which suspected terrorists were transferred from one country to another, was known as ‘extraordinary rendition’ – another innocuous cover for what was essentially extrajudicial torture by proxy. Used prominently by the CIA, a total of 54 countries participated in the program according to a report released by the Open Society Foundation in 2013 – including Britain, the U.S., Germany, Sweden and Finland. Between 2001 and 2006, the CIA conducted an estimated 1,556 suspected rendition flights, and while reports have been made public concerning extraordinary rendition, they remain, unsurprisingly, redacted.
Although the use of torture was banned under Barack Obama, it did not repudiate extraordinary rendition, and the CIA retained their right to extradite citizens to countries where the use of torture was well-established if not legal outright.
And so we come to 2012 and the beginning of the Syrian civil war – where details of Syria’s use of torture under Assad were widely publicised, forming a central core of the opposition – and suddenly Bashar al-Assad makes the extraordinary transition from ally in the ‘war on terror’ to violator of human rights in the eyes of the West, a ‘tyrant’ according to Hillary Clinton.
That he may be. But who has the greater sin? The one who crucifies or the one who hands over the criminal and washes his hands of the deed?
‘The Damascus Nazi’ – Revue XXI (In French)
Amnesty International Annual Report, 1975
‘Outsourcing Torture’ – The New Yorker, 14 February, 2005
‘Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition’ – Open Society
‘US rendition: every suspected flight mapped’ – The Guardian, 22 May 2013
Middle East Voice 