THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” − WHY NOT
In 2014, a Syrian informant, a former photographer in the service of the regime’s armies, disclosed tens of thousands of photos showing acts of torture and killings committed by Bashar Al-Assad’s regime during the civil war that started in 2011. With a scale never seen since the Nazi crimes, since there are six hundred thousand dead or missing in Syria since that date. In Europe, relatives of the very many victims who have disappeared or who have been officially declared dead, activists and law firms are joining forces to exploit these files in order to bring to trial for crimes against humanity these assassins protected by the regime which subsidizes them. and the powers that support it.
Of this work, long, thorny, delicate, sometimes desperate, this film directed by the journalist Stéphane Malterre, tries to give an account. The case, meandering at will, is already not simple in itself. Its representation is perhaps even less so, since the imperatives of elementary prudence and strategic discretion oppose the visibility of many actors in this affair. It is not certain that the staging solutions chosen in this regard by the director help to watch this film.
To film fragments of the human body at length (hands, feet, necks), blur the characters at will, fill this void with unfathomable shots of objects (glasses, tables, photocopier, etc.), heavily mask the main informant in a blind room, injecting a high dose of trying dramatic music, doesn’t all this amount, in a word, to circumventing real constraints by overplaying the codes of clandestine reporting?
Three concrete cases
There remains the substance, which is not nothing. To seize, first of all, a sinister aporia: the impossibility of sending the culprits before the international tribunal given that Syria does not recognize it, and that the UN Security Council, which would have the sole power to seize it is prevented from doing so by the Russian and Chinese vetoes. It is therefore necessary to resort to national courts which, depending on the country, can take up crimes against humanity with greater or less ease in the name of universal jurisdiction, or take up cases in which the victims have dual nationality. .
The film presents three concrete cases in this respect, in France, Spain and Germany. To speak only of the first, there is the case of Mazen Dabbagh, guidance counselor at the French high school in Damascus, arrested with his son Patrick in November 2013, the two men having disappeared, before the State announced their death in 2017. With the French nationality of his brother, Obeida, a refugee in France, had quickly brought an action in Paris, which had not saved them. However, the epilogue of his action takes place outside the film, with the announcement, on March 29, of the referral to the Assize Court of three heads of the Syrian intelligence services involved in this case, who will most likely be tried by default. .
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