Embassy of Syria in Prague – Bubeneč, Czechia, Street Českomalínská – 12-4-2008 (Krokodyl/Wikipedia via CC BY 3.0)Political dissidents have been too often stripped of their
civic rights, professional licenses, and personal
properties. Until today, citizens are obliged to pay bribes to
civil servants or risk his or her paperwork being delayed endlessly.
Rula[i]
used to work in the marketing department of one of the largest retail
clothing companies in Syria when Bashar Al-Asad first came to office
in 2000. “My post exposed me to the scale of corruption and fraud
that controlled the country. For example, if a company paid, let’s
say 500,000 SYP [around $10.000 at that time] a year in taxes, it
would be paying 5 million in bribes that end up in the pockets of
state employees. This is the ratio. And you can do anything you want.
Anything, as long as you pay,” Rula told SyriaUntold from Dubai,
where she currently lives.
In recent years, just as political oppression has reached new
heights, including war
crimes and the proliferation of prohibited
weapons, corruption has also increased and is used as a
tool of war against the opposition, and a massive source of
war-generated income at the expense of the population in general.
Life and death
After the uprising began in 2011, the regime began using grimier
tactics to blackmail people. First, for political reasons, then
for financial extortion as well. As the regime opened fire on
demonstrations, killed detainees under torture, or shelled civilian
neighborhoods, the bereaved families faced a double tragedy: In
addition to mourning their loved ones, the regime would withhold
information about the fate of those arrested, possibly killed in its
custody or its hospitals. It would effectively prevent these families
from having any certainty of their death.
But even when security forces did decide to inform the families of
the death, they often withheld the corpses and the official documents
belonging to the victims, until the families signed
statements accusing “armed terrorist gangs” of killing their
relatives. This occurred as early as 2011, two years before the
Islamic State (IS) was formed. As the scale of killing increased,
bribes became a routine procedure in return for such documented
proof, creating a flourishing parallel industry for the security
officials who oversee the systematic killings.
However, since this was occurring extra-judicially, in security
dungeons with civilian mediators that handle the bribe payments and
orally agree on everything, there were also many cases where the
documents provided were manipulated.
The most famous of these cases was that of Zainab
al-Hosni, a young woman from Homs. In late July 2011, Zainab went
missing and her family believed she had been arrested by security
forces. Two months later, the family received a maimed corpse from a
state morgue and were told it was their daughter’s, but they were
only allowed to take her after signing the usual “armed gangs”
accusation. The family was enraged. Opposition and international
media quickly spread
the news as more proof of regime crimes.
A few days later, a video
was aired on Syrian state TV broadcasting an interview with the young
woman, stating that she was alive and in good condition, to discredit
opposition media despite the evidence given to her family. The
identity of the maimed body remains unknown
until today.
The manipulation of documents also has many legal implications
that prevent families from moving on with their lives. ‘Widows’,
for example, don’t know if they are still married or not several
years after the arrest of their husbands. They cannot legally
divorce or remarry until the courts
acknowledge that their husbands went missing,
and this process could take up to four years. Receiving this
official acknowledgement is often dependent on the women’s ability
to fulfill the requests of corrupt judges.
Also, according to Syrian
laws a mother cannot issue official documents, such as passports,
for her children, even if she holds legal custody of them, or is
still married to their father. In the absence of their father, a male
member of the father’s family may be able to issue such documents
if sufficient reason is provided for the absence of the father. The
reason is deemed sufficient by government employees, whose
flexibility is also subject to bribery.
Ghada (57) lost her son to regime shelling during the siege of
Homs (2012-14). He was already wanted by the regime for his activism.
As a result, his family was unable to bury his body in the family
cemetery.
But that was not the only problem. “I only have another son, who
was due to be drafted to military service if we couldn’t issue a
death certificate for his deceased brother,” she explained.
According to Syrian draft law, only sons are exempted
from obligatory service.
“It took months and months of work until we finally managed to
issue a death certificate for him,” a move that cost her several
hundreds of dollars back in 2013. Today, the cost often reaches the
thousands, depending on the necessity of the document and the
financial ability of the blackmailed citizen.
Education
Even school students were not spared from being used as bargaining
chips in this war for official documents.
Although the regime continued
to pay teacher salaries in public schools in opposition-held
territory, it has at times refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of
national examinations. This was particularly damaging to 9th and12th
grade [lower and upper secondary levels] students that sit nationwide
qualifying exams in order to be issued an official graduation
certificate that permits them to continue their studies.
The regime peddled the narrative that they were unable to verify
the proper procedures were indeed followed to prevent cheating and
fraud in opposition-controlled areas. Ironically, such practices are
on the rise even in regime-held areas, along with an unprecedented
demand for forged
academic certificates, which has pushed many countries to reject
academic qualifications issued in Syria after 2011.
In some cases, as the result of successful negotiations with the
parties in control of each area, the tests were accepted or students
were allowed to leave their besieged neighborhoods to sit tests. In
other
cases, however, the students and their teachers had to endure
threats and extra costs to reach the regime-held territories.
Mohammad (32), a 9th grade teacher in besieged Eastern Ghoutah,
spoke of the painful trip on which he took his students in the early
summer of 2015. “It took us 27 hours to cross the endless
checkpoints through the siege into Damascus. This road used to take
me 20 minutes before.”
The trip was even more risky for Mohammad himself, who had lost
two brothers in the past four years, and has become an ‘unofficial’
only child for his elderly parents. The possibility of being taken
away to be drafted is always present.
Where Mohammad has been lucky, Umm Ghyath (50) has not. As a
public high school administrative employee from opposition-controlled
rural Aleppo, she had escorted 9th grade girls to Aleppo city to sit
their exams, but she was searched at a checkpoint on the way back. A
large amount of cash was found on her.
“I explained that these were the retirement salaries of fellow
teachers who could not embark on a risky trip to Aleppo to collect
them. I showed them the legal authorizations I had from them to use
their debit cards, but they said that these retired employees were
wanted for being Free Syrian Army [FSA] members, and they confiscated
the money and arrested me.”
“I told them: How can I know if they are wanted or not? Why do
they still get paid their salaries if they are FSA members? These are
all retired old people.” She remained incommunicado in a security
branch for three weeks, only to be subsequently released without
charges. She never got the money back.
In universities, the situation is not better. Ramia Shami had to
leave Syria after passing her final exams, but before the graduation
attestation was ready to be issued. She gave her mother legal
authorisation to follow up the process on her behalf and left the
country for good. After nine months of attempts, they finally gave up
on obtaining the certificate.
“I couldn’t ask her to keep playing this pointless, tiresome
game with them anymore.” Ramia explained that her mother was asked
to present her high school diploma in order for her Bachelor’s
diploma to be issued, even though she had previously presented it to
enroll at university four years ago.
When the mother explained that the original diploma was missing as
it had been left in Ramia’s house, now inaccessible in a
rebel-controlled area, the Damascus University employees insisted on
refusing to issue her graduation attestation without it. Bribes could
have solved the situation, but they did not want to pay. “Four
years of study wasted just like that!” she lamented.
Legal Authorizations
After almost a third of Syrians have left the country, legal
authorizations by citizens living abroad that allow their legal
mandates to operate on their behalf have become an essential way to
process all their documents and affairs in the country.
As a result, regime corruption seized on this opportunity. A new
security
clearance was introduced as a prerequisite to issuing many
official documents, including legal
authorizations promulgated by Syrian embassies, thus blocking
Syrians’ rights as citizens living abroad if they are deemed
politically unwelcome or they cannot afford (or do not want) to pay
bribes.
Nada (36), who has been in Europe studying for her PhD for the
past three years, told us about her mother’s struggle to save her
house in Homs. Nada had signed up for a public housing project over a
decade ago, and had been paying monthly installments for it since
then. After several years of delay, in 2016 the house was finally
ready.
However, Nada had also been actively involved in speaking publicly
about the regime’s atrocities. “My mother is a regime supporter,
and she has not spoken to me for almost two years over this.”
Still, the irony came when her mother had to confront regime
corruption and embezzlement, blocked from acting on behalf of
Nada to receive her house because of her daughter’s rejected
security clearance.
“We just wanted to make good use of it,” explained the PhD
candidate, “there are many homeless people in Homs now that need
it. Now I cannot rent it out, nor sell it, nor do anything with it.”
She fears the lack of security will lead to regime affiliates seizing
her house and using it themselves.
Citizenship and Mobility
To the rest of the world, the most worrying aspect of this
‘bureaucratic despotism’ is related to passports.
Passports have always been used by the regime as a tool of control
over global mobility. Controlling passports meant controlling who can
leave the country and how, who can travel around abroad and who
cannot, who is forced to request asylum, and who is effectively
stripped off of their citizenship and left stateless.
A large proportion of Syrians that moved to neighboring countries,
like Turkey, Jordan or Lebanon, did so without their passports, or
any form of ID, after they fled their shelled homes where their
documents had most likely been destroyed.
This also meant that these Syrians were stuck in whatever country
accepted them, unable to legally leave it. A situation that proved
very profitable to smugglers, who became these people’s only option
for leaving their host countries.
Attempting to issue new passports at Syrian embassies in refugee
host countries was not possible for several years. Starting in 2011
and throughout 2012, regime
embassies in Jordan, Turkey and many
other countries were not regularly functioning. Additionally,
since 2013, the regime strengthened the security conditions for
issuing passports, implementing checks to verify that applicants are
not “accused” of dissidence or requesting they hand in their old,
often lost, passports.
During this period, many Syrians were forced to seek asylum in
their countries of residence, not for financial reasons or residency
permits, but because the lack of valid identification documents
rendered their, otherwise legal, residency in those countries
impossible.
Black
markets for fake or stolen passports emerged as a result, often
involving corrupt regime officials. To further complicate things,
these markets expanded beyond the needs of Syrians denied their
rightful passports by the regime, to include asylum seekers from
various countries who wanted to benefit from the humanitarian asylum
offered to Syrian citizens.
In Germany, for example, Nader (42) told us of his experience as a
volunteer interpreter at a refugee centre in the summer of 2015:
“Since many arrived without documents, or with fake ones, some of
our German colleagues would ask us to use dialect clues to assess if
the person was indeed Syrian or not.” Nader was not happy with this
task. “The accent of Syrians from Dayr az-Zawr is very similar to
Iraqis,” he explained. Not only was this difficult, but it also
felt ethically challenging for Nader, since people on both sides of
the Syrian-Iraqi border could have been fleeing the same IS
oppression or the air raids of the US-led coalition.
Finally, under international pressure and financial
need for foreign currency, the regime caved in in 2015 and
resumed issuing
passports for Syrian citizens, including those wanted for
activism or conscription. The cost of obtaining an official
travel document doubled, and was priced in USD for those applying
abroad. This week it doubled
once again, to reach $800 for fast track processing, as opposed to
less than $100 before 2011
However, this did not mean the end of blackmail against activists,
as security checks continue to randomly complicate the process on an
individual basis, sometimes causing delays for several months.
Applicants are often required to submit their old passports before
receiving the new ones, leaving them at the regime’s mercy and
forcing them to pay whatever bribes may be demanded in addition to
the official costs.
International Compliance
Most recently, a new method is used by the regime, related to
international compliance: discrediting passports as either stolen or
simply cancelled. This was the case of award-winning journalist and
activist Zaina
Erhaim, who had her passport
confiscated by British authorities at the airport upon arrival in
London in September 2016.
After she demanded an explanation, stranded at the airport with
her newborn baby girl, the Home Office staff vaguely referred to her
passport as “being reported stolen”, with little explanation on
the nature of these “reports”.
This response came as a surprise to the journalist, since she was
not questioned on whether or not she was actually Zaina Erhaim. The
British authorities had accepted the accusation of her stealing her
own passport. Commenting on this episode, a Home Office spokesperson
told
The Guardian: “If a passport is reported as lost or stolen by a
foreign government we have no choice but to confiscate it.”
The United States authorities also appear to comply with the
regime’s control over official documents, as in the case of Khaled
al-Khatib, the cinematographer of the Oscar-winning documentary
short, ‘The
White Helmets‘. Al-Khatib was granted a visitor visa to the US
to attend the Awards ceremony. However, he was denied boarding the
airplane in Turkey, last February, and told by Turkish authorities
that his visa had been “cancelled”.
The US authorities had the option of waiving the passport
requirements to allow him to board the flight, but chose not to do
so, despite being well aware of the regime’s record in persecuting
dissidents.
The Department of Homeland Security’s official explanation for
blocking al-Khatib is that they received “derogatory
information” about him, a broad term that could include
passport irregularities as well as security concerns. Asked for
clarifications, a Syria Desk officer from the Department of State
told SyriaUntold that “in order to travel to the United States,
travelers from Syria must have a valid visa and passport.” This
‘copy-paste’
response has been the only one given to the media by US
authorities.
[i]
Pseudonyms were used for security reasons with the exception Zaina
Erhaim and Khalid al-Khatib.
This article was first published on Syria Untold on March 31, 2017.