Remembering the Tadmur Prison Massacre in Syria, 44 years later | Opinions

I met my maternal uncle, Burhan, for the first time in 2018.

At the time, I lived in Istanbul and he had taken refuge with his family in another Turkish city. After helping him obtain the necessary permits to travel to Istanbul as a refugee, my parents also traveled there to meet him.

My mother hadn’t seen her brother since 1980 – since before she left Syria for good, got married, and raised me and my siblings away from her family, in a foreign country. So when she finally hugged him for the first time in 38 years, having spent half of those years not knowing if he was dead or alive, it was a sight to behold. As they clung to each other to try and make up for the many lost decades, it felt like we were all frozen in time. For a brief second, I could see my mother as the hopeful young woman she once was, before Syria’s brutal regime uprooted her and devastated her family, killing many of her family and scattering the survivors across the world.

My uncle was arrested and sent to Syria’s infamous Tadmur prison in 1980, just weeks after the most horrendous massacre in its history, in which hundreds of political prisoners were executed in a single day.

He remained in that death factory in the city of Palmyra, in the eastern Syrian desert, under the most inhumane conditions and suffering the worst torture imaginable, for 17 long years. Burhan was eventually released in 1997 – abandoned on the side of the road without any explanation – still not completely free. The regime prevented him from traveling outside Syria and reuniting with his family for another 15 years. After the revolution broke out, he was finally able to move his family to Turkey. He, however, never truly healed from the trauma he experienced at Tadmur.

“Death surrounded us in Tadmur,” he told me in one of our first conversations. “Pieces of flesh and blood from the [June 27] massacre were in the cells when we arrived. And they remained there, while our friends died around us, from the torture we suffered and the lack of medical care.

Today marks the 44th anniversary of the Tadmur prison massacre, the immediate aftermath of which my uncle witnessed. Every year, we mark this day to remind the world of the endless brutality and brazen impunity of the Assad regime and renew our calls for justice and accountability. Almost half a century has passed since that fateful day, but no one has faced any responsibility for the June 27 massacre, or for the murders and torture that took place in Tadmur for many decades before and after.

How did the massacre happen?

The massacre in Tadmur prison, on June 27, 1980, was committed in reprisal for an assassination attempt against Hafez al-Assad, then president of Syria and father of current president Bashar al-Assad. The regime blamed the Muslim Brotherhood for the attack and sought to avenge it by targeting the group’s imprisoned members and alleged sympathizers.

That morning, under orders from Rifaat al-Assad, Hafez’s brother, around 100 soldiers from the Defense Brigades descended by helicopters on Tadmur. They separated supposed supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood from other political prisoners and massacred them with machine guns and hand grenades, leaving none of them alive.

The other political prisoners were forced to listen to the carnage in horror.

It is estimated that around 1,000 prisoners were killed within an hour and their bodies were dumped in a mass grave outside the prison. Syrian human rights groups are still working to create a complete list of victims.

This was an atrocity committed in the utmost secrecy. The news only reached the outside world eight months later, when several Syrian soldiers who participated in the massacre were caught in Jordan during an assassination attempt on the Jordanian Prime Minister, and confessed to their crimes.

Jordan went on to publicize his confessionsand register them in an official communication to the president of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, in March 1981.

Today, as we remember this massacre on its 44th anniversary, we remember not only those who were massacred on June 27, 1980, but also those, like my uncle, who suffered the wrath of the Assad regime in Tadmur and other Syrian prisons across the country. next years.

The Syrian Human Rights Committee (SHRC) estimates 17,000 to 25,000 prisoners killed in Tadmur between 1980 and 2001 – the year it was finally deactivated.

Of course, the abuse and torture of political prisoners in Assad’s Syria did not end with Tadmur’s closure.

Since 2011, the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) has estimated that at least 15,383 people, including 199 children, were tortured to death in Syrian prisons. Additionally, at least 157,287 people were victims of enforced disappearance by the Assad regime and other groups involved in Syria’s devastating conflict over the same period. The Syrian regime is believed to be responsible for around 86% of these cases of enforced disappearance.

Waiting for justice

“There are no words to describe what we saw, what happened to us, what was inflicted on us in Tadmur,” my uncle Burhan told me during our first meeting. It became clear that his inability to describe what happened to him was not rooted in lasting shock and trauma, but in a genuine inability to find the words and expressions to accurately describe the absolute horror of his memories. He was simply unable to describe to the world the extent of the atrocities he witnessed and demand accountability from those responsible.

Yet my father, Walid, tried to do just that. A former detainee himself, who was tortured in Assad’s prisons and left with a broken back and visible scars all over his body, he has dedicated his life to exposing the reality of Syria’s prisons and holding the Assad family accountable for what they did to Syrian people.

In the late 1990s, after Rifaat al-Assad fell out with his brother and moved to Europe, my father repeatedly tried to take him to court for his role in the Tadmur massacre and other atrocities. He spent years giving testimony about Rifaat’s many crimes against humanity in courts in Spain and France. However, courts in both countries refused to take action, citing a lack of jurisdiction.

In 2003, SHRC was called to court to testify against Rifaat, in a case he initiated in a Paris court against activist Nizar Nayyouf. Nayyouf, who served nine years in Tadmur, accused Rifaat al-Assad of being responsible for the Tadmur massacre live on Al Jazeera Arabic, prompting Syria’s former vice president to take him to court for defamation.

The court ultimately ruled in Nayyouf’s favor, but al-Assad was not required to pay any significant price for the crimes he committed, or for his blatant attempt to use French judicial power to try to silence his critics.

To this day, neither Rifaat nor any other prominent member of the Assad regime has faced any accountability for the pain and trauma they have inflicted, and continue to inflict, on detainees in Syria’s prisons.

In March 2024, the Swiss Attorney General’s Office loaded Rifaat al-Assad with “ordered murders, acts of torture, cruel treatment and illegal detentions” carried out during the Hama massacre in 1982, as well as the Tadmur prison massacre in 1980.

There is little reason to hope that 86-year-old Rifaat al-Assad, who is believed to be back in Syria, will one day face a judge in Switzerland and pay a real price for the crimes he perpetrated against the Syrian people. However, the indictment provides some relief to the surviving victims and families of those he massacred, demonstrating to us that the world is finally recognizing the damage he and the rest of the regime have inflicted on us over the years.

In 2015, ISIL destroyed Tadmur prison, a major victory for the Assad regime that erased crucial evidence of the June 27 massacre and decades of horrific atrocities.

This dark legacy began with the 1,000 prisoners killed on June 27, 1980, followed by tens of thousands of others over the next 21 years in Tadmur, and continues with hundreds of thousands in Syria’s prisons to this day.

We will never forget what happened in that desert prison, nor what is happening in the present, and we will continue our quest to bring those responsible to justice.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.