On 23 May, Syria for Justice and Accountability (SJAC), an NGO which collaborated in the investigation, made public a very detailed report on these official depredations, entitled ‘With God’s help, nothing will remain. Plundering of civilian possessions under the auspices of the Syrian government.’ It shows that these thefts were orchestrated at the top level of the military hierarchy and served to ensure the economic resources of the régime and its rulers. The verdict qualifies them as ‘violations of the laws of war’. Their guiding principle was ‘Everything must go, the people and their belongings.’
When Mazen Dabbagh was arrested in his home in November 2013, the arresting officers took note of his new car and confiscated his keys before driving him to the Mezzeh prison from which he would never return. Afterwards, the car was frequently seen around the neighbourhood; his wife would even receive a speeding ticket. In 2016, the officers came back and informed her that she was dispossessed of her family home. The seal they showed her came from the Finance Ministry: it was just a plain sheet of A4 foolscap, with a lipstick border around the edges, as Obeida Dabbagh, Mazen’s brother, told the court.
Discovering on the premises that the whole building belonged to the family, the officers also confiscated the keys to the mother’s apartment.
Having been apprised of these events, Obeida Dabbagh tried to understand why Mazen, and his son had been arrested and how the government could seize the whole building when only a quarter of it belonged to his brother. He and his wife Hanane, also a joint plaintiff at the trial, moved heaven and earth to recover their family’s property and to give themselves the best chances of success, hired an Alawite attorney. At the bar, Obeida declared:
"I didn’t know things would go that far. My constant concern was to find out what they were accused of. Nothing is certain, we can only guess. But maybe it was only for the apartment!"
His investigations, plagued with pitfalls, enabled him to find out the apartment now belongs to the State pursuant to ‘the seizure of property belonging to terrorists’. It is now occupied, for an annual rent of 30 dollars, by one Abdel Salam Mahmoud – who at the time was head of the Air Force investigation services in Damascus, directly involved in the disappearance of Mazen and his son Patrick. It was then that the family learned that another part of the building was leased to another of the régime’s dignitaries. This was confirmed by Mazen Darwish, head of the Syrian Media Centre (SMC), another joint plaintiff: ‘The extension of funds and confiscation of property provides the régime with financial and economic resources. This is sometimes the reason for the arrests.’
Another witness to take the stand was N., presently a political refugee in France. With the rest of his family, he is from Al-Moadamiyeh, a district in South-West Damascus, next to the military base in Mezzah airport, nerve centre of the horrific air force and its intelligence service. In this base are also located the prisons where thousands of civilians are held and tortured as well as Hospital 601, known for the photos of tortured corpses taken by forensic photographer Cesar.N. told how 70% of the land in Al-Madmiveha, a district that has become highly strategical, is occupied and shared between the air force, the fourth division, the combat brigades and all the factions that gravitate around the airport: ‘We have the title deeds! I’m 40 years old and I’ve never been able to set foot on those tracts of land. We had the right to sell them but only to the régime.’ At the beginning of the ‘revolution’ the people demonstrated demanding the restitution of their confiscated land in which the airport was built. In 2012, the rebel town was bombed with poison gas and underwent a three-year siege.
N. was arrested and taken to Mezzeh. After three months of daily torture in the airport prisons, he was made to sign a confession with his fingerprints. His hands were tied behind his back and he had a blindfold over his eyes. When the civil court judge asked him about that confession, he told him: ‘I have no idea what they made me sign! I might have sold my own house without knowing it!’And before the Paris magistrates, he explained: ‘I was right, some of my holdings were seized after that, and all my father’s properties were confiscated and turned over to air force intelligence.’
This testimony confirms that of Obeida Dabbagh and documents the fact that arbitrary confiscation is one of the strategies used by a bankrupt régime to secure financial resources by stealing from civilians.
Expropriation has been a common practice with the Baathist Party ever since it took power in 1963. At the time it was part of a process of nationalisation and population control rather than the logic of redistribution, in keeping with the legacies of the Ottoman and French administrations. In 1983, Hafez Al-Assad carried on the use of it with the addition of a criterion of ‘public interest’, with a very vague definition which still benefits the régime. The Kurdish populations have borne the brunt of it.
Since the outbreak of the 2011 revolution, Bashar Al-Assad’s government has passed 35 laws allowing the confiscation, expropriation and seizure of properties. These have been related to the fight against terrorism, to urban planning, to the control of informal settlements, to debt recovery, to the enforcement of military service, to farmland held in common and to property registries, they concern mainly the possessions of displaced persons and alleged political opponents.
Decree 63 encased in 2012 and dealing with the fight against terrorism allows for the confiscation of the property of detainees as soon as a complaint has been lodged against them without due process of any kind. By extension, it authorises the expropriation and occupation of any abandoned home: an expatriation being considered by the régime as an admission of support for the opposition. Thus, any empty home runs the risk of being requisitioned by ordinary pro-régime civilians, encouraged grabbing the property of ‘traitors’, or else by government forces. In 2018 the complex and pernicious law no. 10 was passed, making it possible to expropriate the land belonging to Syrians who have fled the war. This compelled the legal arsenal of dispossession under the pretext of reconstruction. Many urban zones devastated by the war and inhabited by populations largely hostile to the régime are targeted today by new urban development plans.
The law stipulates that when the requalification of a given zone has been announced, its inhabitants have a year to produce evidence of ownership of their land. A hypocritical deadline in a country where, even prior to the war, only half the land was declared; a country which today has millions of displaced persons within its borders and where half the human settlements are informal. When they are informed, can travel and possess a title deed, landowners may, after paying the intelligence services for a costly and hazardous procedure, obtain a ‘share’ of the renovated district, calculated based on the previous real estate value of the area.
In the name of reconstruction, that law no. 10, widely denounced among the diaspora, makes it impossible for displaced persons or exiles to entertain any hope of return. Since then, the régime continually votes amendments and decrees allowing it to confiscate quite legally all the personal property and real estate of a population already bled dry. Thus, in 2019, amendment 39 allows the finance minister to order the confiscation without prior notice of all the property of anyone who has failed to carry out his military service by the age of 43, as well as that of his wife and children.
These three examples out of 35 laws should serve to take the measure of this huge effort to dispossess citizens on a grand scale. Their belongings are then given over to high-ranking civil servants or sold to third parties. A report published in 2016 under the title Instrumentalisation of real estate and other properties in the Syrian civil war: How to facilitate restitution?’ tells how the empty homes are allocated to pro-régime occupants who receive new title deeds. A ‘spatial cleansing’ whose goal is to transform the country’s demographic structure and dissuade civilians from leaving their homes for fear of never being able to come back to them. Sometimes at great personal risk.
Refugees tell how, with the arrival of new residents, especially from Iran, the names of certain streets have been changed. Seemingly a detail, but which means that the information on the title deeds of the legitimate owners is no longer valid, making even more difficult any attempt at recovery or restitution. Tracts of land and whole neighbourhoods are sold to foreign investors, mainly Russian, Chinese or Iranian. The profits to be made from reconstruction entice financiers who give the country’s destruction their blessing the better to speculate on its ruins.
But the régime is not content to confiscate civilians’ possessions. It steals and loots into the bargain. It is this malfeasance that is analysed in detail in the SJAC report. By studying videos, photographs and aerial views taken in Daraya, Harasta, Yarmouk, Homs or Jarjanaz, by interviewing eyewitnesses and former soldiers, or by procuring documents from inside the Syrian bureaucracy, the ONG has arrived at the conclusion that government forces make a systematic practice of stealing houses and shops in the areas over which they regain control. In the 34th brigade, for example, notorious for its looting in Deraa, the loot is shared out in accordance with a well-oiled system. The electronic equipment is taken to the Masmiyah branch of military intelligence. The other possessions are offered to the commanding officer who takes his pick. Whatever is left over (furniture, home appliances, raw materials) is sold off elsewhere, on markets which people call ‘thieves’ markets’ or ‘Sunni markets’, referring to the presumed owners of the stolen goods. And what isn’t sold serves to furnish the ministerial offices or the hospitals under government control. And what is not stolen is destroyed.
This scorched earth policy applies to the towns, the villages, and the houses, depriving civilians of everything that enables them to survive. Because of the theft of electric cables, houses are no longer heated. Because the refrigerators have been stolen, the food goes wrong. In many cases documented by SJAC, at Jarjanaz in particular, soldiers and militiamen remove the roofs of houses which are consequently exposed to the elements and become uninhabitable, and the raw materials are sold off. With no roof, no furniture, no household appliances, civilians are dehumanised, and many choose to leave. This looting is part of a tactic aimed both at chasing away opponents and enriching loyalists.
The report is unequivocal: government forces and pro-Bashar militias are implicated in the entire process, from the looting to the resale. ‘The thieving is not the work of an opportunistic subset of military actors’. Quite the contrary. The evidence shows that the looters are stealing with the approval of their hierarchy if not under its direct supervision. While the report specifies that other warring parties have also carried out looting (of archaeological sites by the Islamic State Organisation, as a broad media coverage had shown), it cannot be compared with that organised by the régime to reinforce its control and crush the population.
The matter of the return of the refugees is at the heart of the negotiations aimed at achieving a lasting peace and a political solution to the conflict based on UN resolution 2,254. However, all the observers are adamant: without a clear procedure for the restitution of the property of the 14 million displaced Syrians, there can be no serene return. The lesson to be learned from history is that property conflicts and continued displacements can only lead to more instability.
Mazen Darwish repeated it at the Paris trial: justice is not revenge. On the contrary, it is a way of preventing it. This is a new challenge which the war in Syria is posing for the world in general and for international law courts in particular.'
