Dozens of torturers who served Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government have evaded the Dutch immigration authorities’ notice and are walking about freely in the Netherlands, according to a recent investigation.
The matter was brought to light by news outlet Trouw and radio program Argos. Their investigation, published on May 19th, relies on testimony from Syrian refugees who had fled their country due to the Syrian civil war who claim to have encountered their former torturers while in the Netherlands.
Among these is Rehab Abdulftah, who in 2013 was detained for five months in the particularly brutal “Branch 227” in Damascus, which was run by the Syrian military secret service. While walking in Amsterdam, Abdulftah saw one of her former jailers. “Everything that had happened in Syria came back to me, I cried and ran away,” she said, adding that she did not dare go to the police.
Questions about how many of these possible war criminals are hiding in plain sight and how they have been able to remain in the Netherlands have no easy answers. The reality is that the Netherlands witnessed a marked increase in asylum applications during the 2015 refugee crisis, a large proportion of which came from Syrians. Some 125,000 are now residing in the country.
How many of these were engaged in torture under the Assad regime is not entirely clear. However, a group of Syrians who were their victims claim to have tracked down at least 13 torturers.
Professor Ugur Üngör, who works at the Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies, estimates that the number is much higher. “There exist more than rumors about perpetrators of all kinds of crimes, it is no different in the Netherlands,” Üngör told Trouw.
According to him, between 50 and 100 might currently reside in the country, many of whom worked in the Assad government’s prisons.
The Immigration and Naturalization Service (IND) deems the findings “worrisome.” It has revealed that in the last decade, it has denied 50 Syrians entrance to the Netherlands over suspected involvement in war crimes.
Jelle van Buuren, security expert at Leiden University, attributes perpetrators of war crimes slipping through the cracks to the perceived urgency of some asylum applications and the lack of capacity to do proper background research on the applicants. According to van Buuren,
That may mean that the procedures are not careful enough. But there is also another important question: how can the Netherlands obtain all that information that could give an indication of what someone has done in Syria?
The Dutch police’s International Crimes Team is responsible for investigating possible war criminals in the country.
Under universal jurisdiction—which allows national courts to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity regardless of where they occurred—Dutch authorities can launch a legal procedure if either the victim or the perpetrator is living in the country.
Public prosecutor Mirjam Blom, however, told Trouw that the process is not as straightforward as it may sound. For one, Dutch authorities cannot travel to Syria to investigate possible war crimes, and witnesses are often spread out all over the world.
Furthermore, Blom added, “legally speaking the bar to designate someone as suspected of having committed international crimes is set quite high.”
The findings by Trouw and Argos come after last month’s announcement that two Syrian refugees suspected of war crimes were to appear in court.
Last year, one of them was arrested in Kerkrade for allegedly being involved in the violent arrest of a civilian. Later, while in custody, the suspect’s victim was said to have been tortured. The other suspect, arrested in Arkel, was a security chief for the jihadist IS.
In both cases, an important role was attributed to the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM). Having tracked down the suspects, it then tipped off the judiciary as to their identity and whereabouts.
