What mysteries lie in the ruins of the Scientific Studies and Research Centre in Damascus?
While we believe all Arab dictators regularly lie, we Western folk are supposed to hold our own leaders to account – and ensure that they tell the truth when they claim to act on our behalf
Robert Fisk
26
April, 2018
The
great 10th century Iraqi poet Abu Tayyib al-Mutanabbi once lived, O
fated city, in the Emirate of Aleppo. He even led a revolt in Syria
which was – familiar stuff, this – put down with great
ruthlessness. Al-Mutanabbi actually spent two years in prison before
reconciling himself to his loss and was subsequently released. Most
Arab children in Syria can quote the man by heart and one of their
favourite poems begins with these words:
When
you see the teeth of a lion,
Don’t
think that the lion is smiling at you.
I
was reminded of this lion while clambering through the ruins on the
side of the Scientific Studies and Research Centre in the Damascus
suburb of Barzeh last week. This was the centre – now famous from
so many satellite pictures – destroyed by Donald Trump’s missiles
when they struck at “the heart of Syria’s chemical weapons
programme”. Did they? Anything with a Strangelove name like the
“Department of Pharmaceutical and Civilian Chemical Research” –
the bit of the complex hit by at least 13 missiles – deserves to
have its contents studied closely. I’d been refused permission to
visit this Syrian institution for three days. If it was all in ruins
– which it assuredly is, and on a scale much larger than the
photographs suggest – why the delay?
And
does it matter? Well, yes. I am reminded of the much more famous
Iraqi “baby milk factory” bombed by the Americans in 1991 which
General Colin Powell called “a biological weapons factory, of that
we are sure”. My colleague Patrick
Cockburn wrote of this last week,
recalling his visit to the factory only hours after the bombing.
After the war, it turned out that the building probably had been an
infant formula factory after all – although what can’t you do
with a glass of milk?
The
problem is that while we believe all Arab dictators regularly lie, we
Western folk are supposed to hold our own leaders to account – and
ensure that they tell the truth when they claim to act on our behalf.
That’s why the Douma attack must be fully explained, and that’s
why I wanted to know if this wreckage in Barzeh (the direct response
to Douma, although of course no one was killed in Barzeh) was what we
said it was, or whether it was what the Syrians claimed it to be –
a medical research facility. Was the lion smiling at me? Or was I
misinterpreting the meaning of its face?
Certainly
Dr Said al-Said, head of the centre’s polymers department, was
all smiles, and for what it’s worth, he doesn’t look like Dr
Strangelove. And the rubble of his bombed research centre when I met
him, without “minders” or guards, yielded to me little proof of
the chemical warfare research centre its American destroyers claimed
it to be. It looked, indeed, very much like a site where, according
to the 192-nation Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical
Weapons, during its most recent visit last November, there was no
evidence of chemical or biological weapons being developed,
tested or produced.
The
OPCW is the same institute currently investigating the presumed gas
attack on Douma. “If this was a chemical weapons centre,” he
says, jabbing me in the chest with his finger, “You’d be dead
just standing here today.” Hardly conclusive given the time that
had elapsed, and of course it may have been used merely for research,
rather than storage of chemical weapons, which formed one part of the
Americans’ claim. Same old question. What can’t you do with a
glass of milk?
I
scrambled through the ruins on my own for more than an hour and found
five buildings in this research campus utterly blown apart. I was
free to roam around in the sun, much to 64-year old Al-Said’s
amusement. But it had been four days since the American-Anglo-French
air strikes. Western politicians routinely accuse their enemies of
hoovering up incriminating evidence before opening bomb sites to any
journalists. And I’d been kept waiting for three days.
Yet
when I eventually drove through the gates of the campus, documents
and files were still wedged into the flattened concrete and flapping
in the breeze. The most intriguing papers I could find related to a
desalination project in rural Syria and a published dissertation in
English by Kuwaiti scientists on the use of rubber in sealing
concrete road bridges. While I was there, mechanical diggers began to
haul away vast hunks of masonry – some with yet more papers trapped
in the wreckage – and dumping them in commercial lorries for
disposal. Could this really have been the site of an elaborate
cover-up?
Could
the Syrians remove the evidence in four days? And while I’m no
chemical weapons expert, the OPCW definitely is, and visited Barzeh
several times in 2013. But what happened since then? “They said it
was free of any chemical warfare research,” Al-Said said. The
published reports confirm this but no visit has taken place since
last November. Yet – questions multiply here, rather like they
probably do in a research centre – is it conceivable that the OPCW
would not have made some reference to a change in the
Barzeh complex’s purpose if they suspected this in the past
five months? There was still a strong smell of burning plastic which
he attributed to the smouldering remains of computers and plastic
desks in the ruins.
I
walked deep inside the wreckage and neither the workmen nor the
centre’s portly boss grew nervous or asked me to stop – usually a
tell-tale sign that someone is getting nervous. It happened to me in
Serbia when I discovered military slit-trenches behind a Nato-bombed
hospital – the civilian patients, it turned out, were dead, the
Yugoslav soldiers hiding there against all the laws of war were
unharmed and long departed. Among the undamaged buildings on the
Syrian campus were student lecture rooms and a children’s school
with paintings of animals which had clearly – given the fading
paint – been decorated on the walls many summers ago.
Dr
Al-Said himself trained as an applied chemist, first in Dresden (when
it was still part of eastern Germany) and then at Dusseldorf. He had
worked here for 15 years, he said, but was at home ten miles away
when the missiles struck in the early hours. Did he expect to be the
target, I asked? “I am not an expert in politics,” he replied.
“But with the Americans and British and French, you can expect
anything.”
His
students and lecturers, he insisted, were researching the production
of medicinal chemicals and especially the DNA of scorpions and
snakes, and leukemias and cancers. “We have been producing the
research for medicines for local use but which are sold all over the
Middle East. We were developing rubber particles [sic] for the oil
industry and researching the use of rubber for bridge construction.”
When Al-Said told me this, he was unaware that I had already found
papers on the subject amid the rubble – a point in his favour. “The
OPCW had given us certificates twice,” he added.
I
also noted that this large campus lay less than a mile from the scene
of fierce battles 18 months ago between the government army and
Nusrah (as well as some ‘Free Syrian Army’ rebels). I witnessed
some of this fighting at the time. Would the Syrian regime have
maintained a chemical weapons research centre which could so easily
have fallen into the hands of its enemies – then or later? If the
Americans were correct when they said at the weekend that the Barzeh
centre is used for the research, development, production and testing
of chemical and biological weaponry, then the regime was certainly
taking some grave risks – before or after – the battles. For the
American claims to be correct, then, an awful lot of work must have
gone on to change the nature of this complex in the past five months
– since the OPCW inspectors were last there.
The
infamous Baghdad baby milk factory is now generally accepted to have
been genuine – although the Iraqi regime put a fake sign in English
on the wrecked gates for television cameras after the bombing. The
only sign beside the wrecked Syrian complex is a large portrait of
Bashar al-Assad with the legend “All for you” written upon it. In
Arabic.
But
back to the lion. Poor old Muttanabi was eventually killed by a man
whom he had insulted in a poem. His name – wait for it – was
Dabbah al-Assadi. No relation, of course.
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