Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I travelled to Jordan. My decision to go to Jordan was influenced by various firsthand accounts of activists and people I had met via Libya, a country where I have done a lot of work.
It so happens that I wrote a book on the rapes committed by the dictator Gaddafi himself and those committed during the revolution. Gaddafi used rape as a weapon of power in Libya for 42 years and as a weapon of war throughout the revolution. It was a big secret, but it has been proven.
The Libyan government acknowledged in a decree passed last month that thousands of rapes had been committed in that country and that the women raped must be considered as war victims.
This is an extremely important point since it concerns a dreadful taboo. Furthermore, the women cannot speak out. I was able to gain access to Syrian women through Libyan women. It was very complicated because we are talking about rape here.
When we talk about a taboo idea in the West, that often means it is a delicate matter, a subject that is hard to discuss. When people talk about a taboo in Arab countries, it is much more serious. This is the most difficult, most inflammatory subject possible, even a matter of life or death in many cases. Rape is a completely taboo notion in the Arab countries. It is a topic that can virtually never be discussed, at least not out loud. Rape is considered the worst possible crime and outrage.
All the women talked to me, for example, about doctors, lawyers, activists and psychologists and told me that rape is worse than death and that it is so much easier to die.
Rape destroys communities. It brings total shame on the family and dishonour to both family and community, even to an entire tribe. Rape is thus considered the supreme offence.
However, the Libyan women with whom I have stayed in touch, and even the women lawyers and doctors, told me that rape, which is a topic that has not been discussed for three years, since the war started in Syria, is a weapon the regime uses every day to destroy the Syrian community, its families and the social fabric.
I contacted lawyers, doctors, psychologists and various people in Lebanon, Turkey and Egypt and reached women lawyers in Syria via Skype. I ultimately decided to travel to Amman, Jordan, and to Zaatari, the largest refugee camp in that country.
Over several days, I met some 30 people, including several women who had been raped. Most had never talked about it. One of the women I interviewed was describing the problem of raped women when she suddenly burst into tears. She said she was also telling me about herself because she had been raped. She told me she had not yet been able to tell anyone, that she would tell no one else about it and that she had obviously not told her husband because he was the last person who should know.
Based on all these firsthand accounts, I wrote a long investigative piece in the paper version of the daily Le Monde and also posted full texts of additional firsthand accounts of raped women to our website.
These are very rare documents. Rape, which is a supreme crime, is abetted by silence; it depends on silence. It appears from all the discussions that it is the perfect crime since no one can report it. Any woman who reported or admitted that she had been raped would be excluded from society, from her family and from the community. She would even risk death since hundreds of honour crimes are committed by members of the families of raped women.
Before going into detail on the subject, I must tell you that the first person I spoke to was Burhan Ghalioun, first chairman of the Syrian National Council, whom I met in Paris. He is one of the most prominent opposition leaders and obviously took part in the Geneva talks. He had just returned from Geneva when I met him, and he was leaving for Russia the next day to meet with the Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Mr. Ghalioun told me it was time this scandal broke and was publicly denounced. In his view, rape is a weapon that turned the peaceful revolution in his country into war. Since I did not really understand what he meant, he explained that the revolution was intended to be peaceful, that the initial demonstrations were entirely peaceful and that no one had weapons. Gradually, however, rapes were committed in the neighbourhoods during the raids at the very start of the revolution. Reports emerged from families whose women had been raped in prison. At that point, the men went crazy. Mr. Ghalioun was still in Paris and men called to tell him that their wives were being raped, that they were unable to react, that it was the most atrocious crime and that they had to arm themselves. They told him that, if any men came into their families and raped their women, they would arm themselves and kill them.
Then Mr. Ghalioun solemnly told me something that so surprised me I asked him to repeat it. He assured me that those women had been used to get at the fathers, brothers and husbands and that that was what had turned the revolution into war. He told me that he had not wanted war and that he knew an armed revolution would increase the number of dead a hundredfold but that the practise of rape had decided the matter. He told me he thought that was what Bashar al-Assad had wanted and that the latter knew that, once the revolutionaries were armed, it would be easy to justify massacres and to say that he had been forced to defend the people from terrorists. Mr. Ghalioun thought it was a cynical calculation on al-Assad's part.
I obviously cannot prove it because it is impossible to verify that hypothesis. There are several reasons why the revolution was transformed into war, into armed revolution, but the fact remains that this is a very important argument to consider.
I also spoke to the president of the Syrian human rights league, who told me he had heard stories about rapes in Egypt every day. Those rapes occurred at checkpoints, during raids, in neighbourhoods and, of course, in the detention centres.
I had read several reports, including those of the International Federation for Human Rights and Amnesty International. Firsthand accounts are very rare. I did not find those reports very specific. However, I read one, that of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network, before I left and was able to speak to the senior investigator, Sima Nassar, via Skype. She gave me very detailed, specific examples and the dates and places where these women had been raped, in detention centres, for example, in neighbourhoods and during raids in Alep, Homs and Daraa.
I also went to Amman, where I met people who gave me specific and utterly incredible accounts of scenes of torture, since rape is torture. According to those accounts, the rapes are almost always committed in the same way. They are committed in houses and neighbourhoods. When they occur in houses, they are committed in front of families, the husbands and often the children. There are terrible scenes in which brothers are told to rape their sisters.
I know of one very specific example. A little brother was told to rape his sister. He refused and was decapitated. The second brother refused and was also decapitated. The third agreed, if I may put it that way, and, while he was on top if the girl, he was killed as well. The girl was then raped in front of her parents.
I heard several specific, hardly bearable accounts from people who had seen and experienced these things. Rapes are committed during house raids. They are always gang rapes. A number of soldiers generally commit them in front of witnesses. People also talked about women who are kidnapped and raped in private houses that are apparently reserved for that purpose. These are guarded houses in neighbourhoods in which women are raped night and day over several days.
Women are also arrested at traffic checkpoints. We know that, when they are stopped at checkpoints, they are blindfolded, hooded and taken to detention centres staffed by secret service personnel. Several of those centres are well known; they have numbers in Damascus. There are also several secret service centres in Homs and near Daraa. Many women even found it hard to determine where they were. I heard several accounts and it appears the story is almost always the same. The detention centres and cells are underground. The women are generally taken down very long stairways, and several described the same scenes to me. It was terrifying. It reminded me of mediaeval paintings depicting hell. There was a long hall along which people were tied up. There were men and women—in this case it was men—but, in the torture rooms, women were tied up or crucified. That was the word my translator used. In other words, they had their arms and legs spread, and they were tied up with rope and tortured.
Only later did I see that Amnesty International had prepared a list of 31 torture methods. I did not see that until afterward and that was consistent with what I had been told. The women are flogged with wire. Their bodies are prodded with electric rods, which are then forced into their vagina, anus and all over their bodies. In some instances, they are suspended by their arms and, in other instances, by their feet, upside down. They are regularly forced into contact with water, with their feet or hands when they are upside down, which amplifies the electric shocks.
Getting back to the rapes, the same kind of process is generally used. When the women arrive, they are immediately stripped naked. You have to understand that these women are very conservative and very religious. They are veiled women. Stripping them when they arrive is absolutely atrocious. Moreover, most refuse to allow it. Their aggressors start by mocking them and then ask them whether they prefer to have the guards do it themselves. The women then manage to undress. Their aggressors gradually mock them, touch them, feel their breasts and so on. They are made to perform gymnastic exercises and these scenes are very often filmed, and the women know it.
Sima Nassar told me that, when a woman is raped in front of television cameras, the video is sent to her uncle, who is a religious leader, for example, or a well-known cleric. I have several examples of videos that were subsequently sent to the families to offend them. Need I say why? Once the women are naked, they are assigned to cells. In some instances, these are minuscule cells in which they can neither stand up nor lie down. They sit curled up. The scenes there are terrible because there are rats on the premises. Sometimes a piece of cardboard is thrown in to attract the rats. The women are in darkness and they can feel the rats.
Others are imprisoned with many other women in cells clearly not designed to hold so many people. They are huddled against each other, touching each other and obviously cannot all lie down at night. They do so by turns. Once again, there are always scenes involving mice and rats.
Then they are raped, sometimes in front of the others. On other occasions, they are taken into a cell where they are raped, always by several individuals. I was told that these are often people who smell of alcohol. Whatever the case may be, it is always under the gaze of a leader, who orders the rapes and directs how the men proceed. I do not know whether I should describe the most horrible scenes to you, but, as you can imagine, these women are terrified. Some of them pass out.
In Amman, I met some doctor psychologists who described to me the women's ravaged, extremely damaged vaginas and tortured bodies. These women also showed me terrible scars. Their bodies are cut using small knives. Cigarette burns are always inflicted to the neck, breasts and elsewhere. One of the essential questions that arises is obviously whether these acts are barbaric, sporadic initiatives attributable to thugs or drunkards acting on their own or whether they constitute a strategic weapon developed and commanded by a hierarchy.
On that point, I questioned leaders such as Abdul-karim Rihawi, president of the Syrian Human Rights League, Burhan Ghalioun, former chairman of the Syrian National Council, and women lawyers whom I reached in Syria. These people are absolutely convinced that this is a general order being carried out in all secret service detention centres. I would point out that this is taking place in the secret service detention centres, not necessarily in the official prisons. Lawyers can gain access to the latter, although that is difficult. Sham trials, farces, are held, but visits are nevertheless allowed. One may speak to prisoners in the official prisons. That is why the rapes are committed in the secret service detention centres. Everybody tells me this is indeed a strategy. I tried to see how it would be possible to prove that. It is extremely complicated.
I would note that the process is always the same: the women are stripped, filmed and raped in front of witnesses. They are always gang rapes and the same words are always used. As several women told me—and one activist who conducted another investigation in Syria told me as well—they are told: "You rebels, you wanted freedom; here it is." They are told that while they are being raped. The process is always the same.
Several women also told me they had been injected with a paralyzing substance so they could not move. I was told a story that I heard only once. I heard it almost by chance one day when I saw once again one of the young girls who had told me some absolutely terrible things. I published her account in full in Le Monde. She had witnessed some horrible things that the women suffer, but this also involved men. You must understand that men are raped too. No one will say so. Once again, this is a secret that must be kept. No man will ever admit it, but enormous numbers of men are also raped. I was told that approximately 80% of prisoners were raped and that that fact was unverifiable. I was also told that the men preferred to die rather than admit such a thing.
However, the men run no risk once they are out of prison. In reality, the fact that they have been tortured makes them heroes, whereas a woman who has been tortured, or who people simply imagine was raped, is banished. Her life is ruined by the fact that she risks being excluded from her family. I said this to a young woman who had agreed to speak to me and whom I saw a second time, "You were raped on numerous occasions, nearly every day at one point. Were you terrified at the idea of getting pregnant?" And she answered me, "Well, no."
She told me that, in the chaos in the prison, amid the horrors she saw every day, in the filth in which they were placed, since it was impossible to take a shower and some of them never washed for several months, a doctor came by with a notebook to ask them on what days they had their periods and later came back to check. He gave them pills. She did not say that word to me, but they had to take a pill every day at a specific time. It was very likely a contraceptive.
She said that her period was three days late at one point and that the doctor, whom the inmates called Dr. Cetamol, gave her a tablet once he knew she was late. That tablet, or drug as she called it, gave her abdominal pains throughout the night. She was very ill. She did not say the name of the drug, but I think we can conclude that it was an abortion pill.
And yet I was also told that babies were born as a result of these gang rapes. The pills are not always supplied at the Damascus centre that I was told about on several occasions. Babies are born and that causes endless tragedy. In the city of Latakia, for example, a young woman committed suicide because she had not managed to abort. Another was thrown off a second story balcony by her father. Newborn babies have been found in laneways in the city of Daraa. This shows just how desperate many of the women to whom I spoke are. Some activists and women lawyers told me that the silence into which these women had withdrawn was terrible because they could not even help them.
The women cannot speak out and are trapped in their silence. It is a real prison. We know that silence is the executioner's best ally. This shows just how depraved this weapon is. Women cannot say what they have experienced and, since they cannot say it, we cannot help them. We cannot intervene and officially denounce this crime since the primary victims are trapped in this silence.
I could also tell you what I was told about these women. After being raped in prison, some can talk about it only with their fellow inmates, to whom it also happened. Their initial panic reaction, in addition to the terrible suffering they experience, is to say that their life is over. Some do not even dare go back to their families once they have been released. They do not dare face their fathers or husbands. Others risk becoming victims of honour crimes. The president of the Syrian Human Rights League told me that hundreds of honour crimes had been committed at Alep, Homs and in the major cities where the rapes have occurred.
Some experience tragedy in their families even if they are not not killed. They are banished or completely rejected by their in-laws. I was told about a young woman who experienced something terrible. When she went home, her belongings and suitcases were sitting in front of her house. She was given to understand that she could not go home. Her husband ultimately reached out to her and wanted to live with her. They went to Jordan and stayed there until someone officially reported that the woman had been raped. The husband became enraged and immediately divorced her. The woman had to go home to the opprobrium and total shame of the rest of her family.
These are very painful situations. This is the most terrible crime because it destroys families. It destroys the social system and turns these women into double victims, women who are guilty of being victims. That is why this is not a crime like any other. It causes despair, for activists and for those who would like to help these women, because it cannot be discussed and no one knows how to help them. In the end, one woman admitted to me that she had not told her husband that she had been raped, that this terrible thing had happened to her, that she wanted to die and that she no longer knew how she could live. This woman already had two children. She said that the entire world worried about chemical weapons, that the UN worried about chemical weapons, but that, for them as Syrian women, rape was worse than death, and it happened every day.
Thank you.
