Syrian refugees divided on fate of defectors

SHOULD former members of the Syrian security forces who have defected from President Bashar al-Assad’s government be prosecuted for war crimes, or should they serve as key witnesses in an effort to bring senior officials to justice?

The question has divided Syrian refugees and exiles who have fled a civil war in which hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and that has been marked by atrocities since it broke out in 2011.

In Germany, home to 600 000 Syrian refugees, prosecutors have used universal jurisdiction laws that allow them to prosecute crimes against humanity committed anywhere in the world to seek justice for victims of alleged torture and extrajudicial killings by Assad’s forces.

In the first case to be brought to a German court, the trial opened in April of two former Syrian intelligence officers on charges of torture and sexual assault.

The two suspects had defected in 2012 and were granted asylum in Germany. Many of the Syrians now in Germany are asking if the defectors are friends or foes.

“The trial in Germany is wrong, strategically and morally. Defectors risked their lives to join the opposition and discredit the regime,” said Fawaz Tello, a veteran Syrian dissident.

“Who in their right mind is going to defect now when they see that people who had defected in the first months of the revolution are being put on trial?”

The Syrian government has regularly rejected reports of torture and extrajudicial killings documented by international human rights groups. Mahmoud Alabdulah, a former colonel in the Syrian army’s elite 4th Division, is one of hundreds of defectors who have given testimonies to German and French judicial officials collecting evidence of alleged war crimes by the Syrian government during the still unresolved war.

“I saw soldiers being executed for refusing to open fire on protesters, and heavy artillery fired toward civilian areas,” said Alabdulah, a 56-year-old father of five now living in a modest apartment in the eastern German city of Gera.

Campaigners have hailed the process in Germany as a first step toward justice for thousands of Syrians who say they were tortured in government facilities after attempts to establish an international tribunal for Syria failed.

“No one has the right to tell victims they should not seek justice," said Anwar al-Bunni of the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, which is representing victims in the torture trial.“Ignoring suspected war criminals is equivalent to whitewashing the Assad regime.”