Global Courant
The UN General Assembly will vote this week on establishing an independent agency for missing persons in Syria.
At the height of the civil war in Syria, Ahmad Helmi, an activist and human rights defender, became one of many victims of “enforced disappearance”.
The term describes arrest, detention, kidnapping or any other form of deprivation of liberty carried out by state agents. Such actions are considered a crime against humanity by the United Nations.
Helmi, who currently lives in the Netherlands and is the founder of Ta’afi, an initiative to support and protect victims of enforced disappearances in Syria, told Al Jazeera that in 2012 he was arrested from the gates of his university by agents of the Syrian government without hearing a reason.
“None of my friends and relatives knew where I was. To the world I was a missing person. But I was held in prisons all over Syria and tortured,” he said, adding that it became customary for President Bashar al-Assad’s officers to arrest and torture people after the civil war began in 2011.
Helmi’s mother began a campaign to find her son, and her search eventually led her to the prison he was in. But she could barely recognize him.
“Because of how much I was tortured, I lost 35 kilos. My eyes were red and my skin was yellow in color. It took my mother a while to realize who I was,” Helmi said.
A photo of Ahmad Helmi after he was released from prison in Syria in 2015 (courtesy of Helmi’s family)
Ultimately, Helmi’s mother spent about $30,000 — much of their family’s savings — on lawyers who secured his release in 2015.
Currently, more than 12 years after the outbreak of the Syrian war, about 100,000 Syrians are still missing.
Since his release from prison, Helmi lived in Turkey for several years before moving to the Netherlands.
Together with other Syrian survivors of enforced disappearances and relatives of those who are still missing, he is trying to raise awareness about the issue.
“It is important to establish an independent institution to find missing persons in Syria and also in other war zones. What we have witnessed is a crime against humanity and our perpetrators must be held accountable,” said Helmi.
He added that survivors in Europe and elsewhere in the West had only received messages of solidarity, which they “got tired of” because such messages do not provide a long-term solution.
“We have decided to take matters into our own hands. We have looked at the case of enforced disappearances in conflicts in other regions, such as Argentina in Latin America, and learned solutions from that,” he said.
“We published one study of our findings in May 2021 and presented it to the United Nations General Assembly,” Helmi said, adding that it was also endorsed by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
Fadwa Mahmoud holds portraits of her son and husband, who disappeared in 2012, as she is surrounded by about 300 landline phones placed by Syrian families in Bebelplatz in central Berlin, Germany (File: Hannibal Hanschke/Reuters)
He also spoke this month in the margins of a Syria conference in Brussels with European diplomats about the difference between enforced disappearances in Syria and similar cases in Ukraine.
“There is a political will in Ukraine to find people missing as a result of the Russian war in the country. But Russia also supports the war in Syria and the Assad government, and there is no political will in Syria to find missing persons,” Helmi said.
In March Guterres marked that “the missing persons crisis in Syria is crushing in its magnitude” and called on the General Assembly to establish an international mechanism to deal with cases of enforced disappearances in Syria.
A vote on the matter is expected to take place at UN headquarters in New York on Thursday
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