2023-05-02 19:30:05
The Lost Souls ***
By Stéphane Malterre and Garance Le Caisne,
French film, 1 h 44
Sometimes the horror and pain are enough on their own. Show them up close, without speech or filter, seizes the viewer more than any other effect. It’s a rule that Stéphane Malterre and Garance Le Caisne apply with great skill in The Lost Souls. Thanks to a camera animated by the sole intention of showing, they sign a documentary of overwhelming accuracy and deep empathy on the nightmare of the disappeared of the regime of Bashar Al Assad and their entourage.
Since the start of the war in 2011, more than 110,000 Syrians have never been heard from again after being arrested, most often by government security forces or militias affiliated with it.
An unbearable torture
For the latter but also for their loved ones, it is an unbearable torture whose content, on the edge of the sayable, can be guessed on the faces filmed in close-ups of the lost souls : those of Obeida Dabbagh, a Franco-Syrian engineer haunted by the fate of his brother and his nephew, who have disappeared since their arrest by the regime in 2013, or of the opponent Mazen Al Hamada when, with supporting gestures, he details the range of torture he suffered during his time in a 12-meter-long cell shared with 170 prisoners.
Both belong to the gallery of some ten characters whose The Lost Souls recounts the tireless fight so that, despite the passivity of governments and the International Criminal Court (ICC), Bashar Al Assad’s regime will one day answer for its crimes before the courts. At their side, the lawyer of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) Clémence Bectarte, her Spanish colleague Almudena Bernabeu, or even Amal, a Syrian-Spanish hairdresser who also lost her brother. Victims or relatives of victims, lawyers or human rights activists, they form a small army of vigilantes that the documentary accompanies for almost five years.
A long period allowing room for their doubts and all the nuances of their momentum: the disappointment at the Chinese and Russian vetoes at the referral to the ICC by the UN Security Council, the pain at the discovery of the death of the brother and nephew of Obeida Dabbagh or even hope with the holding of the trial of a regime colonel in Koblenz, Germany.
As in France, the courts were seized there under the “universal jurisdiction”a principle that allows States that have adopted it to prosecute the perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity regardless of the country where they acted, their nationality and that of the victims.
27,000 photos of tortured bodies exfiltrated
The soldiers of this singular army of lost souls do not all know each other and, for some, struggle without crossing paths. But a central character unites them: César, the code name of a former military police photographer who, in 2013, exfiltrated at the risk of his life 27,000 photos representing the bodies of civilians tortured and dead in detention centers of the regime. Shown with silent gravity, as if in tribute to the victims, these chilling photos provide the justice system with irrefutable proof of the development of a formidable death machine by Damascus. No less than 1,500 families say they have recognized relatives in these macabre archives, compiled by officers as a pledge of loyalty to the regime.
In an extremely rare testimony, César, masked face and modified voice, explains by the necessity his mad enterprise of exfiltration. He pays for it today with a protected and hidden existence in a secret place, somewhere in Northern Europe. But, as for Obeida Dabbagh, for the lawyers and for the activists, the quest for justice is essential, however uncertain it may be. It is obvious, in the name of the dignity of the disappeared and of humanity. Unshakeable but never declaimed creeds, always confided with modesty, sometimes even whispered. Which, thus, hit harder than any other effect.
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In Europe, 25 legal proceedings involving the Syrian regime
January 2014. Disclosure of 27,000 photos of dead civilians in Syrian regime detention centres. They were exfiltrated by “Caesar”, a photographer from the military police.
May 2014. Chinese and Russian vetoes to the referral to the International Criminal Court on the situation in Syria.
October 2016. The Franco-Syrian Obeida Dabbagh files a complaint in Paris to denounce the arrest and then the disappearance of his nephew and his brother in Damascus.
29 mars 2023. In France, referral to the assizes of three senior Syrian regime officials for complicity in crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Dabbagh case.
May 2023. As of this date, nearly 25 legal proceedings are underway in Europe involving members of the regime, exiled or still in control in Syria.
#Bashar #Assad #tireless #quest #justice