For 43 years, the Hama massacre remained a taboo issue in Syria, with authorities prohibiting any official investigation, accountability for the perpetrators, disclosure of the fate of thousands of forcibly disappeared persons, or even any acknowledgment of the suffering of survivors and the victims’ families.
The massacre, which claimed the lives of between 30,000 and 40,000 civilians, constituted a systematically and deliberately planned collective and premeditated crime perpetrated by the Assad regime, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR).
Today, Syrians remember the massacre for the first time since Assad fled to Moscow on December 8, 2024.
With the fall of the Assad family’s 53-year grip on power in Syria, survivors spoke openly about events that were kept as taboo for years.
On February 2, 1982, Assad's father and then leader Hafez launched a 27-day crackdown in Hama in central Syria against an armed Muslim Brotherhood revolt.
The banned movement had tried two years earlier to assassinate Hafez, and his brother Rifaat was tasked with crushing the uprising in its epicenter.
Survivors who witnessed extra-judicial executions told AFP that the crackdown spared no one, with government forces killing men, women and children.
“I had no ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, I was at school,” said Hadid, now in his sixties.
But “my father was always very afraid for me and my brother,” he said.
Hadid's cousin Marwan had been an influential figure in the Fighting Vanguard, an armed offshoot of the Brotherhood.
After days of battles, soldiers turned up in Hadid's neighborhood and arrested around 200 men, taking them to a school.
When night fell, around 40 were called by name and forced into trucks, their hands tied behind their backs, he said.
When the vehicles stopped, he realized they were at a cemetery.
“That means they are going to shoot us',” said the person next to him.
Blinded by the truck lights as he stood among rows of men for execution, Hadid said he felt a bullet zip past his head.
“I dropped to the ground and didn't move... I don't know how, it was an instinctive way to try to escape death,” he said.
“I heard gunfire, dogs barking. It was raining,” said the former steelworker, who now runs the family's dairy shop.
When the soldiers left, he got up and set off, crossing the Orontes River before arriving at his uncle's house.
"My face was white, like someone who'd come back from the dead," he said.
Forty-three years later, Assad's ouster opened the way to gathering testimonies and combing the archives of Syria's security services.
“It is imperative for the new Syrian government to reopen this closed file as a fundamental step in achieving transitional justice” SNHR said in a statement issued Sunday.
Fadel Abdulghany, Executive Director of the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), told Asharq Al-Awsat that the 1982 Hama massacre represents a fundamental failure of the principle of “impunity” in international law.
“This crime was treated in a manner that reflects the fragility of the international justice system in the face of serious violations,” Abdulghany said.
Despite the presence of mass killings, torture, arrests, and enforced disappearances, no effective legal action has been taken to hold the responsible individuals and entities accountable, he noted.
The director added that the international community failed to put an end to this shameful legacy of injustice left by the deposed Assad regime against Hama city and its inhabitants.
This failure, he affirmed, has contributed to encouraging the policy of impunity.
