Ahmad Helmi was standing at the gates of Damascus University on December 12, 2012 when plainclothes security officers swept him off the street and bundled him into a vehicle.
Helmi had spent the past two years as a non-violent activist who’d co-founded the Local Coordination Committee in Darayya, a Damascus suburb that became a symbol of the anti-Assad opposition movement after 2011.
That day outside Damascus University began Helmi’s three-year journey through Syria’s notorious detention system, which has swallowed up some 100,000 people through arbitrary arrests, abductions and enforced disappearances, and likely claimed the lives of many more than the 14,000 people killed in state custody according to the tallies of human rights groups. Although every actor in the Syrian conflict has used arbitrary arrests and enforced disappearances, the UN’s Commission of Inquiry on Syria has stated that the Syrian government’s policy of detention, disappearance and torture “amounts to extermination.” In almost 10 years of conflict, testimonies from inside government detention facilities pointing to horrific abuses including torture, arbitrary executions, rape and starvation have become commonplace.
Helmi was one of the luckier ones. After being transferred through nine different facilities in three years, he managed to get out only because his family paid a $30,000 bribe. It may have saved his life.
After eventually reaching Turkey, Helmi remembers, “I started to think, as a survivor, what kind of support I’d received once I got [there], and there was truly no kind of systematic support for victims or survivors.”
“I didn’t know of any space where I could advocate or fight for my friends whom I left behind in detention,” he remembers.
#ACandleToRemember – Campaign for victims of detention in Syria by Ta’afi
It was friends, and friends-of-friends, who’d helped. One friend, whom Helmi had himself supported inside their overcrowded cell during a particularly bad stint in military prison, then helped Helmi when he was in need. “When I got out, he was the one who supported me. I got a house, job, money through friends…but anyone who didn’t have those great people around them, they would get lost.”
“That’s why I thought I need to create some kind of systematic support—like what I got—from survivors to survivors,” Helmi says.
The idea for Ta’afi was born. Helmi founded the organisation in Gaziantep in 2017 through support from Syrian NGO Kesh Malek with the aim of supporting victims and survivors of torture and enforced disappearance, campaigning for justice and accountability alongside victims and survivors, and advocating for legal changes against these abuses. Ta’afi has supported newly released detainees by finding them job opportunities, and has advocated around the Syrian detainees file at the international level.
Since then, Ta’afi has been responsible for the formation of a solidarity network of 120 survivors of detention in Syria, connecting survivors among themselves and with other stakeholders.
Ta’afi reflects Helmi’s profound belief in the importance of the victim-led pursuit of justice and accountability for serious violations of international law—in Syria but around the world as well.
But why is that so important? Helmi answers by using himself as an example. “I know exactly what kind of food was given out in prison, because I have eaten the food in prison. I know exactly why enforced disappearance shouldn’t happen again, because I’ve been there. My mother knows exactly how a mother should not lose her loved-one and how to help him…because she experienced that,” he says.
“Victims know exactly what happened. So ask them what does ‘justice’ mean to them. Include them, because initially fighting for justice and being involved in justice and accountability processes is recognition for victims themselves.”
For Helmi, INOVAS means community. “For me, it was like finding a family even though we don’t all speak the same language.”
“It really felt like I was part of a bigger movement, a worldwide movement. I share something with all these people, and I feel like them I can continue fighting for another 50 years.”