Abstract
A new film explores the fate of just two of the many thousands of people who have disappeared in Syria.
Yasmin Fedda, the director of the documentary Ayouni (“Your Eyes”), has not let the coronavirus epidemic put her off, and after eight years of shooting she has released her latest work (“one of the most difficult ones in my life”) online, come what may.
Following the online premiere, the film – produced in the UK by Elhum Shakerifar and Hakawati and supported by, among others, Amnesty International and the Doha Film Institute – is touring festivals in Europe and around the world.
“It’s a very complicated time to release a film,” said Fedda, “but we couldn’t have done otherwise. Although being among the public is the best way to have some feedback, I keep receiving messages from many people who watch the film online and whose stories are very similar to the ones featured in the documentary.”
The stories she refers to are those of more than 100,000 Syrian families who, after nine years of war, are looking for their disappeared relatives. The more places where the documentary is screened, the more Fedda bumps into other families with similar stories.
Ayouni revolves around two main storylines, both of which share a common theme of intense family pain and a search for truth and justice.
“The first case is that of Noura Ghazi Safadi, a human rights lawyer, and Bassel Khartabil, an open-source developer,” said Fedda. “In 2011 and 2012, they had become known as the ‘newlyweds of the Syrian revolution’. The second one is that of the Italian priest Padre Paolo Dall’Oglio. The disappeared are Bassel and Paolo; the documentary’s protagonists are Bassel’s wife Noura and Paolo’s sister Immacolata.”
Noura and Immacolata cross paths in London for the first time after their fates had already become intertwined because of the political choices of their loved ones, the suffering of their wait and their stubborn search for truth. They share their story with the many other Syrian women who joined Families for Freedom, a movement which has been campaigning for justice since 2017.
The two women’s stories seem to have found different endings, for now. Bassel and Noura met at a demonstration in the first two years of the Douma revolt against Bashar al-Assad’s regime. They married while Bassel was held at a prison in Adra, where Noura could still visit him. In 2015, Bassel (the 2013 Index award winner for digital freedom) disappeared from his cell and only after many years, after she moved to London, would Noura find out about his execution by a Syrian army military court, just a few months after his disappearance. But she has not yet been able to find out where the remains of her husband lie.
Bassel Khartabil and his wife Noura Ghazi Safadi. Khartabil disappeared from a prison cell and was executed by a Syrian army military court
CREDIT: Stills from Ayouni
Paolo seems to have been taken prisoner by Isis in Raqqa in 2013 when he went to the militia’s headquarters to negotiate the release of a kidnapped journalist with then-emir Abu Luqman. But according to testimony gathered by Italian journalist Amedeo Ricucci in Raqqa, he likely never got to speak with Luqman. He may not even have entered the Isis headquarters.
(top to bottom) A protest in London against the disappearance of Bassel Khartabil; Immacolata, holding a photograph of her brother; the Families for Freedom bus in London, part of the Families for Freedom march from London to Berlin
CREDIT: Stills from Ayouni
The main witness, Luqman, is still alive but has never made himself available, so there are no certainties about what happened to Paolo after the evening of his disappearance. Speculation abounds: he may have died in prison during the coalition bombing campaign against Isis; or his body may lie among thousands of others in one of the Raqqa’s 26 mass graves for Isis victims. The two theories are two faces of the same coin: forced disappearances and mass imprisonment in Syria, at the hands of both the government and the various Islamist militias.
Fedda thinks the film could boost international calls for accountability.
“Forced disappearances in Syria are a huge issue that has largely remained outside international negotiations, whereas it should be central,” she said. “Obtaining answers should be a priority. These families should be able to know what happened to their loved ones: if they have been killed, where they have been killed and where their bodies lie. Only through these trials could Syria be rebuilt tomorrow.”
Although Noura has been able to find out the truth about what happened to Bassel – although it was a tragic discovery – the relatives of Paolo, who is fondly called “abouna” (“father”) by his Syrian friends, are still in the dark. It was one of the reasons why Immacolata, or Machi, decided to be a protagonist and give a testimony in Fedda’s documentary.
“Yasmin knew my brother for many years and had already started to make a film about his story in the monastery where he lived, in Mar Mousa in Syria,” she said. “Then they met in Paris after al-Assad expelled him from Syria for his support of the revolution. Yasmin interviewed him, then Paolo decided to re-enter Syria with some rebels, and he disappeared in 2013.
“It was then that the idea of the film morphed into something new. Yasmin knew Noura in London and as the idea of telling the story of the disappeared in Syria grew, I thought that, sooner or later, I would have to speak publicly about it.
“I agreed to meet her in 2014 in Suleymania, in northern Iraq, where the community of Jesuits my brother belonged to has another monastery. And I opened up there. Years later, I have to say Yasmin did me a big favour: it really helped me to process the disappearance, to deal with it, although the hope to hug my brother again remains always on my mind.”
Activists in Rome demand the release of Father Paolo Dall’Oglio, a Jesuit priest who was kidnapped in Syria in 2013. Dall’Oglio’s whereabouts remain unknown
CREDIT: Michele Spatari/Getty
On 29 July this year, the Dall’Oglios called a press conference in Italy to take stock of the situation. Even if Paolo’s remains lay in one of Raqqa’s mass graves, Italian authorities never asked their Kurdish counterparts, who currently rule the region, to open an investigation into the matter. Why? Immacolata’s words speak of a personal need but also of a collective one.
“We – I mean Noura and I – are small examples among thousands of people,” she said. “And what has happened is a disgrace for humanity, on which there hasn’t yet been enough attention. If one theory – not just for Paolo – is that there are so many mass graves for so many people whose names we do not have, it should be a collective duty to give these people a name.
“Giving these bodies a name and a surname would tell each story and helps us reconstruct the ways of history: to understand what has happened and who is responsible for it. Because sooner or later, history asks us who is responsible. Sooner or later, there are reckonings in history. And this also applies to what has happened and is still happening in the regime’s prisons. Here, too, sooner or later, history will demand a reckoning.”
This reckoning has not yet happened: the stories of about 100 of the 100,000 victims swallowed in the darkness of this war appear on the side of a London bus that finishes the film Ayouni. Families for Freedom march on, from London to Berlin, to demand justice for their loved ones, coming from every city in Syria. The disappeared are men and women, young and old, students, doctors, teachers, developers, former soldiers.
They are united by one thing – they shared the courage to speak up against the censorship of the regime and the most violent militias because they dreamed of a free, plural, better Syria.
Footnotes
Translated by