Berkeley Talks: With white helmets and GoPros, these volunteers risk it all in Syria’s civil war
October 4, 2024
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Courtesy of the White Helmets
In 2011, mass protests erupted in Syria against the four-decade authoritarian rule of the Assad family. The uprising, which became part of the larger pro-democracy Arab Spring that spread through much of the Arab world, was met with a brutal government crackdown.
Soon after, the country descended into a devastating civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians and displaced over 13 million people, more than half of the country’s prewar population.
When the civil war broke out, groups of volunteers formed to provide emergency response to communities across Syria. In 2014, those volunteers voted to form the Syria Civil Defence, a national humanitarian organization widely known as the White Helmets. Since then, the group has expanded to become a nearly 3,000-strong network that has saved more than 128,000 lives in Syria.
In their daring and life-threatening work, the White Helmets provide critical emergency services, including medical care, ambulances and search-and-rescue operations. They also document military attacks and coordinate with NGOs in pursuit of justice and accountability for the Syrian people.
In Berkeley Talks episode 210, we hear from the director of the White Helmets, Raed al-Saleh, and from Farouq Habib, a founding member of the organization who serves as their deputy general manager for external affairs. They were part of a panel discussion, hosted by Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center on Sept. 19, 2024.
“For us, as Syrian people, the most strategic and important work is on justice and accountability, our human rights work,” said al-Saleh, whose remarks were translated by Habib during the event.
The group has become instrumental in exposing human rights violations and atrocities during the war. After they used GoPro cameras to record a double-tap strike in 2015 — when two strikes are launched in quick succession, often targeting civilians or first responders — the White Helmets recognized that the videos could be used to document these war crimes.
“We realized that the footage … is not only important for media awareness and quality assurance, but it’s even more important to document the atrocities and the violations of international human rights law and how to use that in the future to pursue accountability.”
When asked later in the discussion how the White Helmets envision the future of Syria, al-Saleh replied that they want to see “a peaceful Syria, where people can live with dignity and respect to human rights and support human rights everywhere.”
Habib and al-Saleh were joined on the panel by Andrea Richardson, senior legal researcher for investigations at Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center, and emergency physician and medical adviser Rohini Haar, a Berkeley Law lecturer and a research fellow at the Human Rights Center. The discussion was moderated by Andrea Richardson, executive director of the Human Rights Center.
(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)
Intro: This is Berkeley Talks, a Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. New episodes come out every other Friday. Also, we have another podcast, Berkeley Voices, that shares stories of people at UC Berkeley and the work that they do on and off campus.
(Music fades out)
Betsy Popken: Welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us here today for our event with the White Helmets. We are so lucky to have them here to discuss accountability for crimes committed in Syria. My name is Betsy Popken. I’m the executive director of the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley.
When I graduated law school in 2010, I went to work for a small organization called the Public International Law & Policy Group. PILPG helps parties in international peace negotiations, constitution drafting and transitional justice processes. I began working with them to support the Darfur Rebel groups in negotiations against the Sudan regime.
Then 2011 came and the Arab Spring started. I started working extensively with Syrian opposition activists who were committed to bringing peace to Syria. I spent years helping them in UN mediated negotiations in Geneva. I lived two years in Istanbul, Turkey where I worked out of their offices, traveled regularly to Riyadh for trainings before negotiations began and regularly to Doha with meetings with the head of the delegation and others on the team. We helped predominantly with substantive issues, so helping them to understand what constitutes a ceasefire, how do you negotiate a constitution, how do you structure a government? And in Syrian circles, the circles are small and you meet a lot of people. And I was lucky during that time to meet both Raed here and Farouq, and delighted to welcome them here today.
So, that brings me to tonight’s event. I’m thrilled to welcome the White Helmets team as well as two human rights center team members who have devoted a lot of their time to helping on Syria. I’m looking to digging deep on the issue of accountability in Syria with everyone here tonight. I’ll begin by introducing everyone. We’ll begin with Raed right here, Raed al-Saleh is the director of the Syria Civil Defence, widely known as the White Helmets.
Since its establishment, the White Helmets have been dedicated to saving lives, providing emergency response, and assisting communities affected by the Syrian conflict. Under Raed’s leadership, the organization has expanded into a network of nearly 3000 volunteers who have saved over 128,000 lives in Syria, 128,000, and gained broad international recognition for its humanitarian efforts. Today it’s the largest service provider for a population of 4.5 million people in Northwest Syria. In addition to their life-saving work, they document and archive violations of international humanitarian law, coordinating with international mechanisms and NGOs to pursue justice and accountability for the Syrian people. Please join me in welcoming Raed.
Farouq Habib is a founding member of the White Helmets and currently serves as their deputy general manager for external affairs. When the Syrian uprising began, he played a pivotal role in the Civil Society response through advocacy and humanitarian efforts. He was instrumental in the formation and support of numerous local initiatives and grassroots groups. Since the inception of the White Helmets in 2013, Farouq has co-managed their international support. Please join me in welcoming Farouq.
And down at the end, Rohini Haar is an emergency medicine physician and faculty at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. She also sits on the Human Rights Center’s Advisory Board. She leads several projects about human rights, conflict, and health, including a large research project on the impacts of attacks on health in Syria. Please join me in welcoming Rohini.
And last but not least, Andrea Richardson. She is the senior legal researcher for investigations at the Human Rights Center. She’s an Arabic linguist and an alum of Berkeley Law. She was part of HRC’s Investigations Lab first student cohort, where she conducted open source investigations into regime attacks in Syria with the support of the Syrian Archive. She went on to work with International Legal Accountability Organizations to investigate international crimes committed by both Daesh/ISIS and officials within the Syrian regime. Please join me in welcoming Andrea.
We’re first going to watch a video which showcases the incredible work that the White Helmets do. Then Raed will give a keynote presentation. We’ll then move on to a panel discussion with all of our esteemed guests. I’m about to start the video now, but I do want to warn people that there are images of people who have been severely harmed in the video. So if this is something that you think might trigger you, I urge you to close your eyes or leave the room and I’ll give you a few moments to do so.
(Audience watches a video in the Arabic language with subtitles, not included in podcast audio)
Betsy Popken: I hope you can all agree with me that that was truly heartbreaking and incredibly inspiring the work that people like Raed and Farouq do and their team at the White Helmets. I’d now like to invite Raed and Farouq up to the podium for a keynote address.
Raed al-Saleh: Good evening everyone. I’m sorry I’m speak(ing) Arabic. (Arabic language).
Farouq Habib: (Translation) Hi everyone. Good evening everyone. Raed is happy to meet you all and he welcomes you here. He’s honored to speak at the Berkeley University. Thank you.
Raed al-Saleh: (Arabic language, then fades down and translation comes up)
Farouq Habib: (Translating) You have seen in the video a short summary of the activities and programs we are delivering. But for us as Syrian people, the most strategic and important one is the work on justice and accountability, our human rights work.
At the beginning when we first used the GoPro cameras and we filmed our operations, that was for two reasons. First, is to raise awareness and share with the media about what’s happening. And second, is for quality assurance, just to monitor the performance of the volunteers and how the training is improving their skills and to improve our techniques. But then in 2015 when for the first time we published a video from the GoPro camera documents, it showed the double tap strike on our volunteers.
Raed al-Saleh: (Arabic language, then fades down and translation comes up)
Farouq Habib: (Translating) In that incident, our colleague passed out, he was killed in the strike, but the GoPro camera, which was on his helmet documented everything that happened. Numerous other Syrians were killed in Syria and there was no evidence, nobody saw how they died. But with the GoPro cameras, it documented a lot of these incidents.
Raed al-Saleh: (Arabic language)
Farouq Habib: (Translating) After we published that video on our social media accounts in different languages, we received many comments and messages from people advising us that this can be used as an evidence in documenting war crimes.
So we realized that the footage which we get from the cameras are not only important for media awareness and quality assurance, but they are even more important to document the atrocities and the violations of the international human rights law and how to use that in the future to pursue accountability.
Raed al-Saleh: (Arabic language, then fades down and translation comes up)
Farouq Habib: (Translating) Later on, we developed our capacity on how to document operations and violations in Syria. And we trained and equipped a special team, we call it the Hazmat team, to respond and document chemical attacks.
In 2017, we responded to a deadly chemical attack using the sarin gas in Khan Shaykhun, and we were able to fully document it up to the highest standards, and that helped the OPCW and the investigation mission to prove the chemical attack and the perpetrators of that chemical attack who was the regime. And that pushed Russia to use the veto seven times later at the Security Council to counter that work and to dismiss the investigation mechanism itself.
Raed al-Saleh: (Arabic language, then fades down and translation comes up)
Farouq Habib: (Translating) By time and with the lack of hope in progress and the political process, the importance of the evidence collection and documentation have increased remarkably. Because the victims and the families of the victims realized that an absence of a political process, justice and accountability is the main important work and objective to not let their sacrifices go in vain.
By time, the world realized and acknowledged what we reported and expressed for years that the absence of accountability for war crimes in Syria will encourage criminals to go further and continue their crimes beyond Syria. And that was what happened because what Russia did in Syria, what Putin committed in Syria at that time when the international community dealt with them as a peacemaker or a partner to the peace of process, actually in absence of accountability that encouraged Putin to commit later what we saw in Ukraine.
Raed al-Saleh: (Arabic language, then fades down and translation comes up)
Farouq Habib: (Translating) We keep raising awareness and reminding the world that we cannot achieve peace without justice.
Happy to move now to the discussion panel and we’ll be glad to answer any questions you may have at the end of the discussion. Thank you.
(Applause, then fades out)
Betsy Popken: All right, we’re now going to enter a panel discussion and we will have time at the end for questions. So be thinking about what you may want to ask our panelists. Our first question is for you Raed, why do you work for the White Helmets and why is your work important?
Raed al-Saleh: (Arabic language, then fades down and translation comes up)
Farouq Habib: (Translating) In fact, when we started working for the White Helmets, our primary objective was to save lives, to get people alive from under the rubble. Later on, we realized the importance of our work strategically and we started to develop our capacity and techniques. We believe the strategic importance of our work is to give hope to people who lack that hope, in the absence of any process.
Raed al-Saleh: (Arabic language, then fades down and translation comes up)
Farouq Habib: (Translating) The work of the White Helmets today is important, not only because it saves lives, give stability to the communities and stop displacement, but it’s also important because it advanced efforts to achieve justice and accountability and keep hope for the people.
Betsy Popken: Thank you, Raed. Rohini, I’m going to come to you next based on kind of your research working on health attacks in Syria. What work did you do to monitor attacks on hospitals in Syria? Can you talk to us about that?
Rohini Haar: Yeah, so let’s start with, so when I was back in 2011 when uprising started all over the Middle East, I was happily not working anywhere near there in Myanmar, also on attacks on health. And as the conflict escalated, folks on the ground were seeing it, but I don’t think any of us who weren’t heavily involved in Syria were really paying attention until 2014 maybe or 2015 when airstrikes were starting. And we saw a tremendous amount of refugees coming into Europe. And right around that time, the other thing that we were hearing in the news was that the Syrian regime was bombing hospitals. The work we did initially from 2015 onwards was really to try to capture data on what that looks like. Like, how many hospitals, where are those hospitals, what was bombed, what was damaged, and what were sort of the immediate impacts? And I’ll cut to the chase and tell you that there’s been over 900 airstrikes on hospitals in the past 12 years, 900. And I think that number is bigger than any other place I’ve ever seen.
And we’re not talking about the things I deal with in other places like arrests of health workers or looting of a health facility. We’re talking about massive airstrikes. And many times these can be things like double tap attacks where a health facility is bombed, and then when aid workers go to help those who’ve been suffering, they get attacked again or repeated attacks on the same facility over months or years. Our colleagues who I’ve been working with for a while, though not directly on this issue, have been dealing with the sequela of that. And so the first projects we did was really to look at how you document that. But then you look at that 900 and that doesn’t tell the full story. Every time a hospital is bombed, those folks that died, it takes decades to train health workers and to build buildings and to start medical schools and have all the supplies. And so since 2019, 2020, we’ve been really working on the impacts of attacks on health, not just the immediate but over, let’s say the short and medium term.
I’ll just make two points about that. One is the ripple effects of attacks on health are catastrophic for the community, for the hospitals, the time to rebuild when people don’t have any medical care and really create a chilling effect on your ability to live in a community if you can’t get healthcare there. And then the second, because I’m telling you all doom is gloom story right now, is that it really takes a large community of folks to work on an issue like this. It takes health workers of course, and lawyers and advocates and human rights investigators and humanitarian organizations. And I think that’s the more positive side of this is that for me, I’ve been lucky to be able to work with all of these folks and then share it with you. And I think that’s kind of where the hope lies is to continue to work together and have real solidarity. I’ll stop there.
Betsy Popken: Thanks Rohini. Andrea, you’re up next. What digital open source investigation work did you do in Syria with HRC’s Investigations Lab and who did you partner with on that work?
Andrea Richardson: So as you said in my introduction, I worked with the Syrian Archive with Hadi al Khatib, who is … that has grown into an organization called Mnemonic, and they were working very hard on archiving and scraping certain social media channels with communication with people on the ground in terms of what channels do we focus on, what do we need to save and really analyze.
And then beginning to do that work, we were really thinking through … this was 2016 when I started working specifically with the HRC on Syria and they were really thinking through how do we organize this? What is the metadata system for such a large amount of visual information coming out of Syria and what type of digital tools can we use to allow the human rights actors who are trying to analyze this to do this in a way that is possible, that is humane to them, that is consistent with the laws that we know we need to prove in order to go forward for accountability.
So that’s where I started eight years ago. And just to end this, I will say that being part of the HRC gave me this kind of academic support and pipeline, particularly with the protocol coming out. It helped us, we were on the very beginning of knowing what to do with all this visual information, have a system in which we were trying to kind of process that and begin to analyze it. My hope is that those types of protocols, the system, the way we can communicate can go on into the future and make sure now that there is a healthy ecosystem created for frontline workers who are in the best position to do analysis and in the best position to care about accountability going forward.
Betsy Popken: Thank you, Andrea. Farouq, Raed has talked to us a bit how the White Helmets went from just on the ground, saving lives to now doing a number of additional things to support the Syrian people, one of which is documenting crimes. Can you tell us why the White Helmets have shifted to now documenting crimes as well?
Farouq Habib: Well, it’s not shifting. It’s an extension. So we continue to do our rescue work, but as Raed said, we realize that we have another very important responsibility is to document, analyze, and enable the use of evidence we collect in order to pursue justice in the future. The first responders are the first witnesses to atrocities and they collect firsthand evidence through various sources, primarily the GoPro cameras, but also the flights log from the early warning system, the reports from the UXO teams, which documents the remnants of war, what kind of weapon was used, the samples from the chemical hazmat teams, a lot of various sources. And because it’s authentic, because we have a solid chain of custody, it became a very reliable source for the international investigation mechanisms. So we realize that the long term, it’s not only important to save lives now, but it’s important to deter perpetrators from killing more lives and this is what actually could save the lives of our people on the long term.
Betsy Popken: Thank you, Farouq. Back over to you Rohini. How might your efforts monitoring attacks on hospitals in Syria contribute to efforts to achieve justice? And can you talk about the community needed to achieve justice?
Rohini Haar: I know we’re sitting in a law school today, but I would urge you to think of justice beyond legal accountability. It’s a long process, sometimes successful, but not for most crimes that I’ve seen. What I would add from a public health and medical perspective is that there’s different kinds of justice. There’s restorative justice and reparations and legal accountability and in a place that suffered such catastrophic harm on civilians, then maybe there’s reparations that could be involved and also be considered justice. War reparations are not a new idea. I think Rome had them in Carthage and then the French really messed that up in Haiti, and there’s ways to do it very, very wrong. But I think there’s a way that you can use community health as reparations and that that really is a form of justice that can be concrete and valuable and meaningful for people on the ground.
I also think it’s really hard to give money to civilians as reparations, but to really invest in health infrastructure or other infrastructure is a practical way of doing that. Both, I don’t think Assad’s going to be doing that anytime soon, but I think there’s a way that our investment as external stakeholders and colonizers could actually go that way.
Betsy Popken: Thanks, Rohini. And Andrea, over to you now. Kind of going back to your digital open source investigation work, what process or outcome did the evidence you uncovered in your investigations contribute to?
Andrea Richardson: So I definitely worked on some of the chemical weapons work that was looking at Khan Shaykhun. I don’t think it’s important to talk about what my work has exactly contributed to at this point, as much as it’s important to say that when I was doing this work and as I continued to do this work after law school, we relied super heavily on what the White Helmets were doing, on the risks they were taking, on the risks all Syrian civilians were taking when they were documenting and putting stuff online. And we were a community that was as human rights people at Berkeley Law, as very privileged people, we got a lot out of that. We learned a lot from Syria. We had access to evidence and to visual information we would’ve never had without people taking the brave steps that they did on the ground. And I don’t want to see those communities or people not get to be able to continue to do the accountability work they want to do, particularly when they want to turn back to the own visual evidence that they took, that is from their GoPro cameras.
And so again, whatever I did, whatever is going to come about, it’s going to take a long time. I do care about legal accountability. I care about the other stuff Rohini, but come on, I’m the lawyer and I did sit in here as a law school student and I’ve talked to a lot of Syrians who, and I’ve told them, “Hey, do you really want this? It’s going to take a long time. Working with lawyers sucks sometimes. Working with Western institutions can be difficult.” And I have had over and over again, people like Hadi say, “No, I want legal accountability. I want to take this visual information and I want to analyze it in some way long term or short term where we are applying it to the law and we are getting accountability. And I don’t want to give up on us and particularly on the people who have really done it.”
Raed al-Saleh: (Quietly) Thank you.
Betsy Popken: Thank you. Raed, this next question is for you, what is the White Helmets’ vision for the future of Syria?
Raed al-Saleh: (Arabic language, then fades down and translation comes up)
Farouq Habib: (Translating) I can say that our short-term vision now is similar to our short-term vision 10 years ago. For now, on the short term, we focus on building resilience of communities and enable them to survive until the next phase.
After 14 years of the tragedy, we have more than 13 million people displaced, more than half of the Syrian nation. We transitioned from solely focusing on the highest number of people we could save from under the rubble, to save communities and enhance their resilience and ability to survive. So we can in the next stage, rebuild Syria together.
When we talk about our long-term vision for Syria, it’s a democratic peaceful Syria where people can live with dignity and respect to human rights and support human rights everywhere.
Betsy Popken: Thank you. This next question is for all of you and Farouq, I’ll start with you. What needs to happen as a next step to secure some form of justice for Syria in whatever form that takes?
Farouq Habib: Well, first we need awareness. We need people to keep Syria in mind and to remind their politicians that something need to be done. And that means focus and determination to advance the political process and achieve a solution because now we are victims of regional and international war in our country. There are troops from different countries. So, in addition to the regime forces, there are forces from numerous other regional and international powers fighting each other in Syria. So first we need awareness and a political process to end that conflict.
Second, definitely we need support, and this is one of the reasons why we came here in California. We need support not only from governments but also from the private sector, from the tech companies, from individuals, financial and capacity-building support to be able to continue to do our work.
And third, we need all to learn from these lessons and collaborate together in solidarity to prevent this from happening elsewhere in the world. We have a responsibility towards the next generations. We don’t want others to suffer as we did in Syria.
Betsy Popken: Thank you. Rohini?
Rohini Haar: I think sitting here today and listening to folks on the ground, I think solidarity with organizations and the Syrian diaspora is really an important part of it. And knowing the work that the White Helmets do on the ground every day, it’s unimaginably difficult. And I think just understanding that and connecting with folks on the ground for all of us would be a really valuable exercise.
Betsy Popken: Thanks. Andrea?
Andrea Richardson: So I’m going to go back to this idea of an eco-support system for frontline workers and whatever we can do in communities that truly believe in human rights or profess to, what does that look like in reality when it comes to support for frontline workers, and frontline workers who want to turn their frontline work into analysis that will lead to legal accountability? I know that there are a bunch of amazing groups and amazing people who are working on this, so how do we coalesce around those people who are in the best position to lead this forward, which I think the White Helmets is absolutely part of. Thank you.
Betsy Popken: And Raed you next. What do you think needs to happen as a next step to secure justice for Syria?
Raed al-Saleh: (Arabic language, then fades down and translation comes up)
Farouq Habib: (Translating) Well, at some point in 2013 when the people thought that Obama will help to make justice in Syria after the chemical attacks, but then that didn’t happen, that was a very key moment in our life and in the trajectory of the Syrian conflict. Before that date, the number of casualties in Syria was around 100,000 thousand people only.
Raed al-Saleh: (Arabic language, then fades down and translation comes up)
Farouq Habib: (Translating) Today we’re talking about more than 500,000 people killed, more than a hundred thousand people missing or disappeared, more than 200,000 people detained, and more than 13 million people displaced.
That’s an important lesson to the world, that lack of action to support justice lead to further atrocities and lead to more casualties. And this is what we saw not only in Syria, but actually it led to what we saw in Ukraine and what we see in Gaza and elsewhere because of lack of justice.
Raed al-Saleh: (Arabic language, then fades down and translation comes up)
Farouq Habib: (Translating) Justice is the guarantee to live in a safe community. Without justice, we all will feel in danger everywhere. This is the lesson we learned and we paid a heavy price. We hope the world learn it also without paying a price.
Betsy Popken: Thank you. I have one last question before we open up to you all for questions. Farouq, you’re here, your team is here in the San Francisco Bay Area. What can the Bay Area do to support the White Helmets?
Farouq Habib: Well, thanks for the question. As I said, we need support first in raising awareness and reminding the world and particularly the politicians about what’s happening to provide political and financial support. We need partnerships with the companies and universities and schools in the Bay Area to help to build capacity of the field teams and provide technical assistance. And indeed, we need the financial support. Thank you.
Betsy Popken: Thank you. Great. Who has a question for a member on our panel. Over here?
Audience 1: Hi, this is for Farouq and Rohini. You mentioned the brutality of the war that was going on in the troops and the Russians particularly. I think that Syria was the first time I ever heard of the Wagner Group, and I remember how naive I was and how appalled I was that a government would do something like that. At what point did you become aware of them and was it way before it was like in the news or ever?
Rohini Haar: I can share with you that I had never heard of the Wagner Group. If you all haven’t heard, it’s a private, for-hire militia funded by I guess a Russian oligarch who’s since been killed, which has committed atrocities, primarily in West Africa, and is hired often by governments who are trying to keep control of their own ethnic or tribal groups. And then of course in Syria to some extent, but less so I’d say.
And I only became aware of them. I was in a meeting in Geneva, and health ministers were there from different countries. This was 2022, 2023 maybe. And they were all speaking about how complex it was for health ministers from some of these West African countries to function in their own countries. And they were speaking around it, talking about how complex it is and how there’s undermining factors within their own country. And I was happily unaware of what was happening until afterwards. And someone shared with me, they were completely talking about Wagner, but even their own health ministers were so afraid of mentioning the word.
Farouq Habib: Well, honestly, we were too busy dealing with the bombs and destruction and saving lives. We of course realized that there are militias from everywhere fighting our country, including Lebanese, Iraqis, Afghanis, Iranians of course, and then Russians, and then extremist Jihadists from everywhere. But Wagner was the most brutal one actually because they were supported by the Russian Air Forces. So it wasn’t only militias killing and looting, but they were directly backed by an advanced army, one of the strongest armies in the world. And as you said, it’s really appalling how in the 21st centuries, governments, governments are using mercenaries to loot and kill and rape.
Betsy Popken: Thank you for the question. Any other questions? Let’s go here next.
Audience 2: Hi. So a lot of you have touched on the theme of justice and accountability and collecting evidence, and I was just wondering what mechanism you envision that happening through? Would it be an international court or another entity and that’s directed to anybody who might have an answer.
Andrea Richardson: I can start with that.
Betsy Popken: Sure, thanks.
Andrea Richardson: So in reality, there has been a tremendous amount of work that has already been done in terms of archiving and preserving a lot of the visual evidence or the open source evidence that has come out. And there are organizations, most of them are sharing that work at this point. So there is the IIIM has other … sharing a lot of what their evidence is. Since I’ve worked on it many years ago, the problem is not ascertaining a lot of visual or open source evidence. It is how to have the manpower, the human power and the knowledge and the kind of patience and perseverance to be able to really go through and analyze such a large volume of what’s happening.
The IIIM is still doing that. So the UN’s mechanism on Syria is definitely working. There are several other groups including the White Helmet that are now really getting into this space of what do we do with this visual evidence? How do we kind of go through and work on it? I think that I’ll just say one more time, the Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations gives a lot of footing to these organizations who are working on it for how do we start to do it. But the massive amount of criminal acts that have happened in this conflict is something that needs resources and it needs people and it needs people with localized knowledge and understanding of the conflict.
Farouq Habib: If I may add, this is a very important question and actually we and our Syrian people are very much frustrated because we want to move from the stage of documentation, preserving and analysis to the stage of litigation and holding the perpetrators accountable. And it’s very challenging.
There are mechanisms, like the IIIM and others, but they don’t lead by themselves to litigation. And we try in some areas through the national jurisdictions and we also explore avenues under the universal jurisdictions. We call for the establishment of an exceptional tribunal for the use of chemical attacks.
But it’s something the world need to dig into further and do further legal research in order to find the best mechanisms to pursue justice in conflict areas when the so-called national system itself is responsible for the atrocities. So you cannot go to national courts for it. Good. He wanted to say the same thing.
Betsy Popken: Rohini, did you have anything you wanted to say?
Rohini Haar: I think they got it.
Betsy Popken: Next question. Let’s go right here to the center.
Audience 3: Thank you. (Arabic language). Thank you so much for this wonderful presentation. I have a two-pronged question. As you all know, in Syria we have the saying, “The walls have ears.” So operating with increased digitalization and the cameras, how does the White Helmets look to approach preserving the identities of their members and ensuring that the regime of Bashar al-Assad does not utilize what we’ve been using, the mechanisms we’ve been using to increase justice and accountability to in turn suppress them more?
And my second question is, as we’ve mentioned, we’re dealing with the regime that didn’t fall in the Arab world because it was backed by the Russians and the Iranians. And what I see is we have a humanitarian group that is trying its hardest, and then we have a bunch of other proxy splinter groups. So my question is, does the White Helmets work (Arabic language) or the Democratic forces or other groups internally within Syria, I know that there’s a complicated relationship, but how does the White Helmets conduct its operations protected, lacking the military capabilities that it may need considering its combatants? Thank you.
Raed al-Saleh: (Arabic language, then fades down and translation comes up)
Farouq Habib: (Translating) Thank you very much for these two questions. Of course, in Syria, we learned since we were kids that walls have ears, but after the revolution we broke the walls. So there are no ears.
Of course, there is high specific risks on the volunteers and the members of the White Helmets, and that does not only come from the information in the footage and cameras, but there is direct targeting of our centers and our vehicles and our teams.
Farouq Habib: (Translating) That’s why we lost a lot of our colleagues. I don’t believe there is any other humanitarian organization which lost 10% of its personnel who were killed in line of duty.
Raed al-Saleh: (Arabic language, then fades down and translation comes up)
Farouq Habib: It’s because as you all know, the criminal becomes obsessed with the witnesses. After committing the crime they want to eliminate the witnesses and that’s the reason why they target us.
Most of us faced the death threat tens of times, and most of us believed that we lived longer than we should have. But at the end, every person will die when God decides, so we keep doing our work.
Raed al-Saleh: (Arabic language, then fades down and translation comes up)
Farouq Habib: (Translating) In response to your second question, of course the context is complex and there are many armed forces and we believe that actually any affiliation with a specific military group does not provide protection. Our backing comes from the communities better than from a military body.
The White Helmets, or Syria Civil Defence, were built bottom-up, and our bottom is the local communities themselves. And our pledge to neutrality and independence have been an important shield to protect us. We existed before all these armed groups and we continue to exist based on the power of the people.
Over the past decade, we worked in areas under control of different armed groups. And in many of these areas, the power have changed between those armed groups and we remained, we continue to serve our communities, we are from the communities. And as long as we are close to them, we feel safe among them.
Betsy Popken: Farouq, is there anything you’d like to add?
Farouq Habib: Just expressing our gratitude for all of you for being here. It’s really inspiring for us to come here. It’s thousands of kilometers and the first time we’ve come to California and we are grateful to see so many people showing interest and care about Syria and about the White Helmets. So thank you very much and please pass the word to your colleagues. Thank you.
Betsy Popken: Do we have any other questions from the audience. In the back, Mr. Eric Stover, the co-faculty director of the Human Rights Center.
Eric Stover: So my question is, given the incredible work you’ve done both in humanitarian aid, but also in collecting potential evidence for war crimes trials, have you considered developing any guidelines that could be used by other organizations in other countries?
Raed al-Saleh: (Arabic language, then fades down and translation comes up)
Farouq Habib: (Translating) Thank you very much. It’s a very important question. Yeah, doing both humanitarian and human rights work at the same time, it’s not a common thing. It is challenging, and of course we considered working on such guideline to share with other organizations, but honestly under the extreme pressure we live, with the emergencies every year, with the funding cuts, with the military attacks, the earthquake which we faced last year, we did not have the time and the resources to work on it, but we seize every opportunity possible from time to time to share lessons learned with other counterparts.
So for example, we met with the Ukrainian civil society groups, we translated our curriculum and awareness messages on how to deal with the unexploded ordinance and we shared it with them. We had virtual sessions with colleagues from Libya, from Morocco to share these lessons. But we hope in the future we have the resources to have a more robust guideline to share with others.
Betsy Popken: So I will say this is something the Human Rights Center has extensive experience in, is working with organizations to develop overarching guidelines that can then be duplicated across the field. And Andrea’s mentioned a few times the Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations, and that provides the framework that you can use to investigate, identify and verify digital open source information in a way that it can be used later in court. So we’d be happy to work with you moving forward if you’d like.
Raed al-Saleh: (Arabic language, then fades down and translation comes up)
Farouq Habib: (Translating) We will be also more than happy to work on such guidelines, including the documentation and investigation, and we will be happy to discuss this further with you and your team.
Betsy Popken: Great. Any other questions? Over here or are there any back here before I make Alexi move? Yeah, let’s go right back here, Alexi. I don’t want you running all the way around, so I’ll try to group it.
Audience 4: Sorry, I just had a quick question. You alluded to the fact that criminals often will seek out witnesses because of what the implications of documentation are. So I’m just curious what sort of measures are in place to protect the sanctity of your data, both from the group that’s collecting as well as disseminating, and then the group that’s working on analyzing. What kinds of things do you have to think about to make sure that the data is protected?
Rohini Haar: I’ll just share quickly that for research data, this is a major issue globally and especially because organizations are often reluctant to share data with academics or with other groups or even within UN between organizations because of issues around data security. We can overcome that, but it takes a lot of thought into exactly what that data is, who needs it, and then putting in place all kinds of passwords and codes and tricks because it’s all digital these days and we got to be really careful, but I don’t think that should be a limit to do the work and to collaborate and work on it.
Andrea Richardson: There are also ways that people are using new tools and technologies to try to show data in a more public way or show our findings from open source (inaudible) in a more public way that anonymize those victims or survivors. So mapping and using tools to show data in a way that will show anonymized mapping and communicate that particularly to communities that need to continue to care about the conflict. But anonymize human beings is something that certainly I know the HRC is the lab and the investigators in general are thinking through because it is, again, it’s kind of one of the top priorities for us at this point.
Farouq Habib: To tell you the truth, of course, we try to follow some protocols and develop our techniques, but we’re not doing enough and we cannot do enough. We’re not facing a street criminal, it’s a state-backed organized crime. So it needs states to counter that. Governments might have the capacity to protect their own data and protect their own workers, but they are not allocating enough resources to enable civil society groups worldwide to protect themselves from cyber attacks or physical attacks. So the international system should pay more attention to this threat to all human rights workers around the world.
Betsy Popken: Any other questions?
Audience 5: I wanted to say thank you for your incredible speech today. And actually I want to note that it was exactly the news that happened 10 years ago about Syria war that made me to become a law student to study international law in order to bring peace to people here.
And my question for today is actually related to the evidence collected here because evidence has to acquire reliability and credibility in order to bring in a lawsuit. And my question is, how does the White Helmets ensure the credibility of the evidence collected in Syria? Because there has been some criticism from some countries. For example, some mainstream medias from Russia, they question about the credibilities and there might be stages that taken from the videos and also they doubt about the neutrality of those videos. So how do you ensure or how do you respond to such questions? Thank you.
Raed al-Saleh: Yes, thank you. (Arabic language, then fades down and translation comes up)
Farouq Habib: (Translating) Thank you. Yeah, it’s a very important point and especially as Russia backed a huge disinformation campaign against us after 2014 when we documented the chemical attacks. We have robust protocols and we have a very solid control system for our cameras to determine the exact time for each footage. And many of our cameras also give the exact location.
Raed al-Saleh: (Arabic language)
The metadata and the chain of custody is very solid and well-preserved at the White Helmets. One important point that what the world see on social media is only 10% of what we film.
Raed al-Saleh: (Arabic language, then fades down and translation comes up)
Farouq Habib: (Translating) So it’s only 10% of what we film, on social media you may post a short video of one or two minutes, but the GoPro cameras films maybe 30 or 40 minutes of the operation. So it’s easy for the investigators when they see the whole footage to determine if it was staged or not. It’s not only about attacks by Russia or the regime, we worked very hard with the OPCW to document and investigate chemical attacks by ISIS as well.
So there was an attack in Marea using the mustard gas and the OPCW were relying on our evidence and field support. They produced their investigation report. And Russia was present there and they couldn’t object it. And that is an evidence of our impartiality.
Raed al-Saleh: (Arabic language, then fades down and translation comes up)
Farouq Habib: (Translating) In addition, we collaborate with UN bodies and international mechanisms, first to ensure forensic preservation of all the evidence, all the hard drives we have, before we start doing any analysis of investigation. So there are independent bodies which ensure that preservation and make sure that there was no changes or adjustments or anything happened to these footage. And then you start the analysis and investigation phase. And we work with international forensic institutes to do this.
Betsy Popken: I’m going to take the liberty of asking the last question of the evening, and this is for all of you, and that is: What brings you hope about the future of Syria? I will say in my time working with Syrians on the Syrian peace process, what brought me hope was working every day with people who were passionate and committed about bringing peace to Syria and also that they didn’t forget to celebrate the little things in life. That taught me that you can work on the really hard things and still enjoy life when you’re able to. Rohini, I’ll start with you.
Rohini Haar: I was in Gaziantep on the Syria-Turkey border about a year ago, and I was hanging out with a bunch of health workers, we had given some very serious presentations about our research, and then we stopped for a lunch and the lunch turned into something like five hours of hangout. I don’t speak Arabic, but connecting with them and laughing and seeing that folks continue to live their lives and that they’re enjoying and they’re going to get through, it gave me some hope and that we could make funny medical jokes together. And despite the language barriers, we’re all still human and we can connect in all these different ways as mothers, as parents, as humans. And so I think that gave me a lot of hope.
Betsy Popken: Thank you. Andrea?
Andrea Richardson: So I have two examples. One example is that when I started working with Hadi al Khatib at the Syrian Archive in 2017, there were three of them, there was no budget. We were in the tour office in Berlin trying really hard to kind of do impressive work with very little. And now eight years later, they are Mnemonic. They have a really strong vision and idea of how to kind of preserve and go ahead with accountability. And that was happening from a grassroots frontline organization, not from one that is from the nation state or an international NGO that is controlled mostly by Western funding and Western members. That has been really beautiful and it has been really hopeful and I just can’t say how much that means.
The second thing I will say is that it’s a hard moment in a lot of places that I work on in the Middle East and finding that hope can be very difficult, very difficult for me over the past couple of years. I am currently co-teaching the international human rights and war crimes class for undergraduates here with Alexa Koenig and working with that group of students, these 18 to 22 year olds who believe deeply in international accountability, who believe deeply in human rights in a way that I didn’t necessarily get being older and being at Berkeley Law and talking to people has been unbelievably hopeful. I have true hope for young people and true hope that this upcoming generation can convince the United States that international accountability, that cooperation towards human rights and towards working on that outside and across borders is something that is imperative. They made me feel hopeful. So thank you.
Betsy Popken: Great. Farouq, would you like to go next and then we’ll end with Raed. Or whichever way you prefer.
Andrea Richardson: Good luck with that.
Farouq Habib: No worries. But you ask us about hope and hope’s what keeps us alive and we get hope from many sources from our successes, when we see a life saved, when we see other people learn from our experience, as you said, even with the small success stories, we wouldn’t be able to survive and continue our work if we are not hopeful. So despite the tragedy, we are filled with positive energy and we support each other every day.
Betsy Popken: Thank you.
Raed al-Saleh: (Arabic language, then fades down and translation comes up)
Farouq Habib: (Translating) We get hope primarily from saving lives.bI’m really proud that I’m one of 3,000 volunteers. Those 3,000 male and female volunteer who are called the White Helmets, I believe it’s one of the miracles of the 21st century because they are the only ones who responded to an earthquake tragedy without any support from any international team. And that never happened elsewhere in the world. And such examples remind me that we’re doing a great work and we have to survive and keep doing.
When we walk in the streets in Syria, any of us who have the White Helmets uniform feels as if they have diplomatic passports and they can cross everywhere without problems. The support we get from the communities not only gives us hope, but also gives us courage and preparedness to put our lives in danger, to help others.
Raed al-Saleh: (Arabic language, then fades down and translation comes up)
Farouq Habib: (Translating) If you ask any firefighter how they extinguish the fire, if you ask any rescue worker how do they feel after they rescue a life? They can describe the feeling. They can describe the hope and the energy. Just imagine yourself digging in a mountain of rubble until you find a child alive. When we first hear the cry of the child under the rubble, we know we arrived and we feel that we can move mountains.
Betsy Popken: Before we give our esteemed guests a round of applause. I want to say if you were as inspired as I by the work that the White Helmets do, I urge you to take a look at the flyer that you’ve been given. There’s a QR code there that brings you to their website, and if you feel compelled to donate, please do to support their work. As I mentioned at the start, they will continue to be here at the front. If you had questions that you didn’t get answered, please feel free to come up. And now let’s thank everyone for their work.
(Applause)
(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)
Outro: You’ve been listening to Berkeley Talks, a Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.
(Music fades out)