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Amnesty Claims
Mass Executions In Syria, Provides Zero Proof
By Moon Of
Alabama
February 07,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Moon
Of Alabama"
-A new
Amnesty International report claims that the Syrian
government hanged between 5,000 and 13,000 prisoners in
a military prison in Syria. The evidence for that claim
is flimsy, based on hearsay of anonymous people outside
of Syria. The numbers themselves are extrapolations that
no scientist or court would ever accept. It is tabloid
reporting and fiction style writing from its title
"Human Slaughterhouse" down to the last paragraph.
But the Amnesty
report is still not propagandish enough for the
anti-Syrian media. Inevitably only the highest number in
the range Amnesty claims is quoted. For some even that
is not yet enough. The Associate Press agency, copied by
many outlets, headlines:
Report: At least 13,000 hanged in Syrian prison since
2011:
BEIRUT (AP) —
Syrian authorities have killed at least 13,000
people since the start of the 2011 uprising in mass
hangings at a prison north of Damascus known to
detainees as "the slaughterhouse," Amnesty
International said in a report Tuesday.
How does "at
least 13,000" conforms to an already questionable report
which claims "13,000" as the top number of a very wide
range?
Here is a
link to the report.
Before we look
into some details this from the "Executive Summary":
From December
2015 to December 2016, Amnesty International
researched the patterns, sequence and scale of
violations carried out at Saydnaya Military Prison (Saydnaya).
In the course of this investigation, the
organization interviewed 31 men who were detained at
Saydnaya, four prison officials or guards who
previously worked at Saydnaya, three former Syrian
judges, three doctors who worked at Tishreen
Military Hospital, four Syrian lawyers, 17
international and national experts on detention in
Syria and 22 family members of people who were or
still are detained at Saydnaya.
...
On the basis of evidence from people who worked
within the prison authorities at Saydnaya and
witness testimony from detainees, Amnesty
International estimates that between 5,000
and 13,000 people were extrajudicially executed
at Saydnaya between September 2011 and December
2015.
There are
several difficulties with this report.
1. Most of the
witnesses are identified as opposition figures and
"former" officials who do not live in Syria. Some are
said to have been remotely interviewed in Syria but it
is not clear if those were living in government or
insurgent held areas. Page 9:
The majority
of these interviews took place in person in southern
Turkey. The remaining interviews were conducted by
telephone or through other remote means with
interviewees still in Syria, or with individuals
based in Lebanon, Jordan, European countries and the
USA.
It is well
known that the Syrian insurgency is financed with
several billion dollars per years from foreign state
governments. It runs sophisticated propaganda
operations. These witnesses all seem to have interests
in condemning the Syrian government. Not once is an
attempt made to provide a possibly divergent view.
Amnesty found the persons it questioned by contacting
international NGOs like itself and known foreign
financed opposition (propaganda) groups:
These groups
include Urnammu for Justice and Human
Rights, the Syrian Network for Human Rights, and the
Syrian Institute for Justice and Accountability.
2. The numbers
Amnesty provides are in a very wide range. None are
documented in lists or similar exhibits. They are solely
based on hearsay and guesstimates of two witnesses:
People who
worked within the prison authorities at Saydnaya
told Amnesty International that extrajudicial
executions related to the crisis in Syria first
began in September 2011. Since that time, the
frequency with which they have been carried out has
varied and increased. For the first four months,
it was usual for between seven and 20
people to be executed every 10-15 days.
For the following 11 months, between 20 and
50 people were executed once a week,
usually on Monday nights. For the subsequent six
months, groups of between 20 and 50 people were
executed once or twice a week,
usually on Monday and/or Wednesday nights. Witness
testimony from detainees suggests that the
executions were conducted at a similar – or even
higher – rate at least until December 2015. Assuming
that the death rate remained the same as the
preceding period, Amnesty International
estimates that between 5,000 and 13,000
people were extrajudicially executed at Saydnaya
between September 2011 and December 2015.
From "between x
and y", "once or twice a week", "suggests" and
"assuming" the headline numbers are simply extrapolated
in footnote 40 in a back-of-the-envelope calculation;
"If A were true then B would be X":
These
estimates were based on the following calculations.
If between seven and 20 were killed
every 10-15 days from September to December 2011,
the total figure would be between
56 people and 240 people for that period. If
between 20 and 50 were killed every week between
January and November 2012, the total figure
would be between 880 and 2,200 for that
period. If between 20 and 50 people
were killed in 222 execution sessions (assuming the
executions were carried out twice a week twice a
month and once a week once a month) between December
2012 and December 2015, the total figure
would be between 4,400 and 11,100 for that
period. These calculations produce a minimum figure
of 5,336, rounded down to the nearest thousand as
5,000, and 13,540, rounded down to the nearest
thousand as 13,000.
2. I will not
go into the details of witness statements on which the
report is build. They seem at least exaggerated and are
not verifiable at all. In the end it is pure hearsay on
which Amnesty sets it conclusions. One example from page
25:
“Hamid”, a
former military officer when he was arrested in
2012, recalled the sounds he heard at night during
an execution:
"There was a sound of something being pulled
out – like a piece of wood, I’m not
sure – and then you would hear the sound of
them being strangled… If you put your ears
on the floor, you could hear the sound of a kind of
gurgling. This would last around 10
minutes… We were sleeping on top of the sound of
people choking to death. This was normal for me
then."
A court might
accept 'sound of "I'm not sure" "kind of gurgling" noise
through concrete' as proof that a shower was running
somewhere. But as proof of executions?
Of all the
witnesses Amnesty says it interviewed only two, a former
prison official and a former judge, who describe actual
executions (page 25). From the wording of their
statements it is unclear if they have witnessed any
hangings themselves or just describe something they have
been told of.
3. The numbers
of people Amnesty claims were executed are - at best - a
wild ass guess. How come that Amnesty can name only very
few of those? On page 30 of its report it says:
Former
detainees from the red building at Saydnaya provided
Amnesty International with the names of 59
individuals who they witnessed being taken from
their cells in the afternoon, being told
that they were being transferred to civilian prisons
in Syria. The evidence contained in this report
strongly suggests that in fact,
these individuals were extrajudicially executed.
and
Former prison
guards and a former prison official from Saydnaya
also provided Amnesty International with the names
of 36 detainees who had been extrajudicially
executed in Saydnaya since 2011.
Those 95, some
of whom may have been "executed" - or not, are the only
ones Amnesty claims to be able to name. That is less
than 1-2% of the reports central claim of 5,000 to
13,000 executed. All those witnesses could provide no
more details of persons allegedly killed?
Amnesty
acknowledges that its numbers are bogus. Under the
headline "Documented Deaths" on page 40 it then adds
additional names and numbers to those above but these
are not from executions:
the exact number of deaths in Saydnaya is impossible
to specify. However,
the Syrian Network for Human Rights has verified and
shared with Amnesty International the names of 375
individuals who have died in Saydnaya as a
result of torture and other ill-treatment
between March 2011 and October 2016. Of these, 317
were civilians at the time of their arrest, 39 were
members of the Syrian military and 19 were members
of non-state armed groups. In the course of the
research for this report, Amnesty International
obtained the names of 36 additional individuals who
died as a result of torture and other ill-treatment
in Saydnaya. These names were provided to Amnesty
International by former detainees who witnessed the
deaths in their cells
The "Syrian
Network for Human Rights" (SNHR)
is a group in the UK probably connected to British
foreign intelligence and with dubious monetary sources.
It only
says:
SNHR funds its
work and activities through unconditional grants and
donations from individuals and institutions.
Now that is
true transparency.
SNHR is
known for rather ridiculous claims about casualties
caused by various sides of the conflict. It is not know
what SNHR qualifies as civilians - do these include
armed civil militia? But note that none of the mostly
civilians SNHR claims to have died in the prison are
said to have been executed. How is it possible that a
organization frequently
quoted in the media as detailed source of casualties
in Syria has no record of the 5,000 to 13,000 Amnesty
claims were executed?
4. The report
is padded up with before/after satellite pictures of
enlarged graveyards in Syria. It claims that these
expansions are a sign of mass graves of government
opponents. But there is zero evidence for that. Many
people have died in Syria throughout the war on all
sides of the conflict. The enlargement, for example, of
the Martyrs Cemetery south of Damascus (p.29/30) is
hardly a sign of mass killing of anti-government
insurgents. Would those be honored as martyrs by the
government side?
5. The report
talks of "extrajudicially executed"
prisoners but then describes (military) court procedures
and a necessary higher up approval of the judgement. One
may not like the laws that govern the Syrian state but
the courts and the procedures Amnesty describes seem to
follow Syrian laws and legal processes. They are thereby
- by definition - not extrajudicial.
6. In its
Executive Summary the Amnesty report says that "Death
sentences are approved by the Grand Mufti of Syria and
...". But there is no evidence provided of "approval" by
the Grand Mufti in the details of the report. On page 19
it claims, based on two former prison and court
officials:
The judgement
is sent by military post to the Grand Mufti of Syria
and to either the Minister of Defence or the Chief
of Staff of the Army, who are deputized to sign for
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and who specify the
date of the execution.
It is very
doubtful that the Syrian government would "deputize" or
even inform the Grand Mufti in cases of military or
criminal legal proceedings. Amnesty International may
dislike the fact but Syria is a secular state. The Grand
Mufti in Syria is a civil legal authority for some
followers of the Sunni Muslim religion in Syria but he
has no official judiciary role. From the 2010 Swiss
dissertation
Models of Religious Freedom: Switzerland, the United
States, and Syria quoted
here:
In Syria a
mufti is a legal and religious expert (faqih and
‘alim) who has the power to give legally
non-binding recommendations (sing. fatwa,
pl. fatawa) in matters of Islamic law.
...
Queries which are either sought by a shari‘a judge
or private individuals regard the personal
status laws of the Muslim community only.
In the Arab Republic fatawa are given
neither to public authorities nor to individual
civil servants, ..
Neither the
Syrian constitution nor any Syrian law I can find
refers to a role of the Grand Mufti in any military or
civil criminal court proceding. The Amnesty claim
"approved by the Grand Mufti of Syria"is not recorded
anywhere else. It is very likely false. The Grand Mufti,
Sheikh Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun, is
a moderate,
recognized and accomplished scholar. He should sue
Amnesty for this slander.
Syrian law
includes a death penalty for certain severe and violent
crimes. Before 2011 actual executions in Syria
were very rare, most death sentences were commuted.
Allegedly the laws were
amended in late 2011, after the war in Syria had
started, to include the death penalty as possible
punishment for directly arming terrorists.
It is quite
likely that the Syrian military and/or civil judiciary
hand out some death penalties against captured foreign
and domestic "rebels" it finds them guilty of very
severe crimes. It is fighting the Islamic State, al
Qaeda and other extreme groups well known for mass
murder and other extreme atrocities. It is likely that
some of those sentences are applied. But the Syrian
government has also provided amnesty to ten-thousands of
"rebels" who fought the government but have laid down
their arms.
The claims in
the Amnesty report are based on spurious and biased
opposition accounts from outside of the country. The
headline numbers of 5,000 to 13,000 are calculated on
the base of unfounded hypotheticals. The report itself
states that only 36 names of allegedly executed persons
are known to Amnesty, less than the number of
"witnesses" Amnesty claims to have interviewed. The high
number of claimed execution together with the very low
number of names is not plausible.
The report does
not even meet the lowest mark of scientific or legal
veracity. It is pure biased propaganda.
Note: An
earlier version of this piece mixed up the Syrian
Network for Human Rights (SNHR) and the Syrian
Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR). Both are registered
in the UK and claim to provide accurate casualty data
from Syria. Only SNHR is referenced in this Amnesty
report.
The views
expressed in this article are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of
Information Clearing House.
Syria carried out mass hangings
at military prison: Amnesty International:
The Syrian government has executed up to 13,000
prisoners in mass hangings and carried out systematic
torture at a military jail near Damascus, rights
watchdog Amnesty International said on Tuesday. |
