"The Body Snatchers: Syria Uses Kidnappings as an Iron Fist on Lebanon"
by Deborah Horan
The Houston Chronicle
20 September 1998

BEIRUT, Lebanon - When Syrian soldiers were first deployed to Lebanon 's Bekaa Valley in 1976, at the invitation of then-President Suleiman Franjieh, they brought a shadowy instrument of fear the Lebanese never asked for - the Mukhabarat.
Since the arrival of the Mukhabarat, Syria's intelligence service, a few Lebanese have quietly "disappeared" every year. Usually, they are abducted at roadblocks or taken from homes while dismayed family members look on, according to human rights workers. Some are never seen again.
The spate of kidnappings reached its zenith during Lebanon 's 17-year-civil war, when the abduction of the other side's fighters was a preferred method of warfare among Lebanon 's militias.
But after the war ended, human right workers say, Syrians continued to snatch Lebanese and throw them in prison in Syria. Today, human-rights organizations estimate that at least 200 Lebanese have vanished at the hands of Syrian agents.
While Syria's grip on its weaker neighbor covers everything from foreign policy to security, the kidnappings may be its most effective method of controlling the population.
"It's a way to put pressure on the Lebanese population, to shut them up," said Marie Daunay, an activist with the France-based human rights organization, Solida, or Support for Lebanese Detained Arbitrarily. "It makes them afraid to do anything against the Syrian occupation of Lebanon ."
Earlier this year, Daunay's organization organized mass demonstrations in Paris in an effort to pressure Syrian President Hafez Assad to let the "disappeared" go. In March, the campaign paid off with the release of 120 Lebanese, some of whom had been in Syrian prisons for years.
But the victory, it seems, was calculated to coincide with Assad's visit to Paris in July with French President Jacques Chirac. More Lebanese were abducted after the meeting.
"A lot of people are still detained," said Daunay. "And anyone that has something against Syria, that might say something or do something against them might be arrested by them any time."
In Lebanon , human rights workers paint a picture of a secret police agency that would have rivaled the Soviet KGB. Through informants, they say, Syria keeps tabs on nearly everyone's movements.
"These people pass information to Lebanese secret services or Syrian secret services," said Elia Abou Aoun, a Lebanese with New Human Rights. "Everyone is afraid because of this."
In particular, Syria targets people who sympathize with pro-Iraq Baathist party, the Sunni Muslim Tawhid Party or members of the Christian Lebanese Forces militia. But in a region where sometimes thousands of people have the same name, innocent people are often seized.
"They sometimes take people because it's a mistake," said Daunay. "They beat them and then they notice that that's not the man they are looking for. These people are sometimes very badly injured."
Once arrested, a prisoner may not be released for years. Human rights organizations tell of a particularly nasty Syrian habit of holding people years after their sentences have expired.
Perceived challenges to the authority of the Syrian government are swiftly crushed. In 1982, Assad put down an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood in the Syrian town of Hama by killing about 10,000 people in roughly one month. In Lebanon , the Syrians shattered another Muslim movement, the Tawhid, by imprisoning most party members.
Lebanon 's post-civil war government spends much of its time selling its alliance with Syria to a skeptical public. It argues that the presence of Syrian troops keeps the peace, counterbalances Israel's occupation in the south and strengthens Lebanon 's hand in Middle East peace negotiations.
But few Lebanese seem convinced. Instead, they feel abandoned by the West, which they say opted for Lebanon 's stability at the expense of its sovereignty. And, they say, in trying to nudge Assad toward peace with Israel, U.S. policymakers have turned a blind eye to Syrian human rights abuses.
In Syria, human rights workers say the situation is so bad that the relatives of people who have disappeared are often reluctant to speak and that several Syrian human rights workers who did were sentenced to 10-year jail terms.
"Having a human rights activist sentenced for 10 years is unusual, even for the Middle East," said Virginia Sherry, of Human Rights Watch.
Even with all the problems, the Lebanese enjoy much greater freedom than the Syrians do, rights activists say.
"The newspapers publish more, you can read a lot more about what's going on in Lebanon ," said Sherry.
Even reports issued by Human Rights Watch about Syrian abuses in Lebanon were published in the country, she said.

"But you won't find hard-hitting criticism on the Syrian role" in the stories, she said.

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