00:00This is Apropos. The UN Special Envoy to Syria is calling for free and fair elections following
00:08the ousting of President Bashar al-Assad, adding that the international community was
00:12ready to support the country's new leaders. He also voiced hope that a political solution
00:17would be found for Kurdish-held areas. Years of civil war have left Syria heavily dependent
00:23on aid, deeply fragmented and desperate for justice and peace. Charlotte Hughes has the
00:30latest.
00:31At the notorious Sednaya prison, north of Damascus, Syrians leaf through abandoned records.
00:37They're desperately seeking news of missing loved ones detained under the Assad regime.
00:43Among those calling for truth and justice after witnessing years of human rights violations
00:48is Hassan. His brother was imprisoned in 2019.
00:53I went to Mazar airbase yesterday. I went through the records and couldn't find anything.
00:59I looked in the hospitals and I didn't find anything. I came here to find a string of
01:03hope but I found nothing.
01:06UN investigators have been gathering proof of the regime's crimes for years. After thousands
01:11of photos of tortured detainees surfaced, the UN established the International, Impartial
01:16and Independent Mechanism in 2016. It centralises and shares evidence for use in legal proceedings.
01:24In the words of the organisation's leader, Bashar al-Assad's ouster changes the game
01:28in terms of access to evidence.
01:31There is, however, the potential in this now accessible crime scene, or maybe I should
01:38say interlocking series of crime scenes, there is now the possibility of accessing evidence
01:44of the highest level of regime and allied crimes responsibility.
01:51Preserving this information is not a straightforward task.
01:55We've had reports and we've seen as well, papers strewn all over the floor, people leaving
02:01with computers, hard drives burnt and smashed. We are also aware of reports, some of which
02:09we have confirmed, of individuals who have fled the jurisdiction.
02:13The UN is now calling on Syria's new leaders to not disturb the evidence of crimes by seizing
02:18prisons.
02:19HTS leader, Ahmed al-Shara, who has dropped his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani,
02:25has insisted that torturers will not be granted amnesty.
02:28We're joined now by war crimes investigator Janine DiGiovanni, award-winning writer and
02:35executive director of the Reckoning Project. It's an organisation dedicated to documenting
02:40war crimes and building cases for prosecution. Janine, thank you so much for being with us
02:46on the programme this evening. You have extensive experience in this area. You've investigated
02:52and documented a total of nearly two dozen wars and genocides, investigated abuses on
02:58four different continents and you've spent seven years in Syria. Talk to us about what
03:03you found there.
03:04Well, I think it's a really interesting time right now for international justice. If we
03:09look back at the genocides of the 1990s of Rwanda and Bosnia and where we are now, we're
03:15in a very different place. First of all, the investigations are carried out in a very different
03:20way, largely because we do have things like open source intelligence, which is satellite
03:25imagery, radio interception. So investigations can be much more clear. Now, Syria is, it's,
03:35it was one of the most tragic wars I've covered because the, the level of cruelty of the Assad's
03:42prisons, of the torture, of the cracking down, the repression, the rape, the starvation
03:49used as a tool of war, chemical attacks on his own people, the list is endless. So going
03:55through those crimes and bringing those perpetrators to justice, including Assad, is going to be
04:01a real task. But what is possible is that first of all, we have plenty, plenty of evidence.
04:10Syria was one of the most documented wars, largely because people, civilians had cell
04:17phones, they had iPhones. So in Aleppo, when the barrel bombs were dropping, people could
04:22rush out and take photographs of them. There were a lot of international journalists working
04:28there at the time. Amnesty was there, Human Rights Watch were there, Syrian investigators
04:33themselves were doing incredible jobs, even during the Assad regime. But what we have
04:40now is something similar to what happened in Germany in 1945, or, or Iraq, 2003. I wasn't
04:48born in 1945, but I was in Iraq in 2003, when Saddam fell. And what we had then was this
04:57extraordinary level of evidence of mass graves of going into prisons. But in Syria, we were
05:04doing it all along, even during the Assad regime, and from the other side, from the
05:09opposition side. I also think it's really important for Ahmad al-Sharaa to establish
05:17himself as a leader who believes in the rule of law. And he will need very much to attract
05:24international donors. So this is why I mean, everyone is saying, will he go the way of
05:29ISIS? Will he become a jihadist? I believe no, because I believe he, he's first distanced
05:37himself a dozen years ago from that. But also, he will need to get donors to rebuild Syria.
05:45In order to do that, there must be a strong rule of law within the country. Syrian courts
05:53have been basically under the Baathists for 50 years. They will need help. But there's
05:59many examples of what we could do.
06:02And what about Bashar al-Assad himself? Will he ever face justice? As far as we know, he's
06:06currently in Moscow.
06:08Yes. Look, I went through the Bosnian wars, and everyone said Slobodan Milosevic would
06:14never ever face justice. But what happened? Milosevic, Milosevic's government fell. A
06:22new government came in. They wanted to be part of the EU. And to do that, they made a
06:27deal to hand him over to the Hague. So in the same way, I work in Ukraine now with the
06:33Reckoning Project. We're a team of lawyers, investigators, OSINT data analysts. And
06:41everyone says we'll never get Putin. But we do not know that. There could be a change of
06:46regime. There could be an entirely new government who have completely different views and
06:52want to see Putin in the Hague. In the same way with Assad, anything can happen.
06:58Also, we have to look at the different international justice mechanisms. So what might
07:04happen in Syria, there might be something like what happened in Sierra Leone, which was a
07:09brutal war in West Africa that I also reported back in, it fell in 2000. The court that was
07:18set up at the request of the government of Sierra Leone, because it was a new government that
07:23came in, and the backed by the United Nations, went on for 10 years, going after the
07:29perpetrators that had committed terrible, terrible crimes against the Sierra Leonean
07:34people. Same thing with Cambodia. So there could be a mixture of domestic Syrian courts,
07:40because the Syrian justice system, it has to go to the Syrian people. It should be in Syria, it
07:47should be with the Syrian people. But it needs help, whether that will be the UN, hybrid
07:53courts, or whether even it will be an international court, the International Criminal
07:58Court. But in that case, the new government in Syria would have to call, call for it, because at
08:04the moment, they're not signed up. So there's many, many different avenues. And don't forget
08:11that back in 2022, the very first Syrian war crimes tribunal took place in Germany, against
08:21a man for crimes against humanity, a Syrian individual. And it took place in Germany in a
08:27third party country. So there are, you know, we're looking at this, in a way, overwhelmingly,
08:34because the number, the amount of criminality, 400,000 people died, 200,000 more were in
08:42prisons, 130,000 are still missing. 4000 of the people in prison were kids. So there's a
08:51tremendous amount of work we have to do.
08:55And when it comes to speaking to some of those people who were in those prisons, how do you
08:59record that kind of testimony in such a way that it will be admissible in court? Yes, there
09:04is to be a further trial.
09:05So one of the reasons we founded the Reckoning Project was that when I was a war reporter, I
09:11had witnessed many atrocities. And I had very good notes, but a journalist notes are not the
09:18same as testimonies that prosecutors need to build their cases. There need to be different
09:25standards used. For instance, if you're interviewing victims of sexual violence, you need
09:31to have a very strict protocol, including usually someone, a psychologist or a member of law
09:37enforcement with you. Interviewing children is extremely precarious, you need to be very
09:44careful. We just finished a year-long project actually in Ukraine, tracing the 19,000
09:53Ukrainian children that have been stolen and taken to Russia for forcible adoption. Now,
09:59working on those kind of testimonies is a very different way than how I would have worked as a
10:04journalist years ago. So, I mean, it has to be airtight so that the prosecutors will not throw
10:13them out of court. But having said that, in Syria, there's been a tremendous amount of civil
10:19society that have worked throughout the war, who have been so courageous, including the Caesar
10:25photographs, which came out from an Assad prison official who smuggled some of the most terrible
10:34images I've ever seen of what was happening inside the prison. So we have a lot of evidence to
10:41work with. It's just how will the system be put back together? And as for Assad, again, nothing
10:50is impossible. And he will be judged. He's certainly being judged now in the court of public
10:55opinion, which is very important. And hopefully he will be judged in the courts of law.
11:01And you yourself, you're going back to Syria in the new year.
11:04I am. I was, I don't want to say fortunate, but I, I did work on the Assad side for several long trips,
11:14which was very rare. In those days, no journalists were given visas. The only ones who got them were
11:19journalists who were either Russian or who were clearly on the side of the regime. I was obviously
11:24not. But they did let me in for several trips where I gathered a huge amount of information that I was
11:31thrown out after witnessing a massacre in Darayya, writing about it. And I was told never to come back,
11:39threatened, told I would be put in prison. So then I began going through the other side, which was through
11:45Turkey to Syria, working with the opposition groups, mainly in Aleppo. And one of the things I worked
11:51very strongly and closely on was the bombing of hospitals. This is something that the Russians who
11:58came into the game in Syria in 2015, it was their, their terrible specialty. And it's something that
12:05Vladimir Putin is doing again in Ukraine. It's part of what we call Putin's gruesome playbook. And Syria,
12:14at one point, there were so few hospitals left. There was only, I remember being in one triage. And there
12:22were kids dying of things that they could have been saved from, respiratory illnesses. But because
12:28there was no medical supplies, and because the doctors had mainly been killed, the cruelty of it was just
12:36staggering. Syria, during the Assad reign, was one of the most brutal and cruel and vicious places. So it's
12:45really exhilarating. But also we're looking at it with great euphoria, but also trepidation. Because we want
12:54to go right. We want justice to be served for the Syrian people who endured, endured so much.
13:01Janine, unfortunately, we'll have to leave it there for now. We could speak to you for hours, I feel. Thank you
13:05so much for being with us this evening. It's war crimes investigator Janine DiGiovanni, hopefully I'm
13:12pronouncing your name correctly there. She's also executive director of the Reckoning Project. Well,
13:16that is it from us for now.
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