The Word That Changed Sides
By Raji Abdul Salam
In March 2020, in Germany, I sat across a table from a prosecutor. The pandemic had just shut the world down, and everything was rushed. On the table there were only the essential documents, and the questions stayed inside them: this file, this date, this source. Everyone wore a mask. I barely saw the prosecutor’s face, or the faces of the policemen. Guards kept each of us a meter and a half apart and made sure the distance held, so that talking to the people around me was impossible. By any measure it was an ordinary meeting under emergency rules. I sat through it full of dread.
The dread came from how familiar it all was. What I knew about being questioned by the state I had learned in Beirut, in the General Security building, and in the Syria I left behind: rooms where you could not read the faces of the men in front of you, where distance was enforced, where guards controlled every interaction. You did not bring evidence to those rooms. You were brought to them. And here was the same choreography, produced by different commands in a different country. In Germany, the orders existed to protect people from a virus. In Beirut and Syria, they existed to break people and make them vulnerable. The form was identical. The purpose was the reverse. My body recognized the form long before my mind could explain the difference.
By then I had spent years on the other side of documentation. I had reviewed hundreds of testimonies from Syria and Iraq and helped prepare material for accountability cases in European courts. I knew the standards, the chain of custody, the reasons a court must test everything it is given. But knowledge is one thing and the body is another. Mine was braced, that morning, for something that never came.
The questions were about the documents, not about me. No one raised a voice. No one needed anything from me except accuracy. When it ended, everyone hurried out because of the virus, and I stood there understanding something I have carried ever since: the word had changed sides. In Beirut, questions were instruments used against a person. Here, behind the masks and the distance, they were instruments used on behalf of one — the person in the file, who was not in the room.
I think about that meeting whenever a witness sits down with us. They arrive carrying their own old rooms. Memory is not clean, and trauma does strange things to it. Pain can seal a memory shut or set it alight, so that one witness cannot retrieve the event and another relives it in fragments, out of order, for years. Both are telling the truth. This is why we preserve what a witness actually said, confusion and broken chronology included, and do not make a story cleaner than the memory it came from. A court can test a confused account. It cannot test a corrected one.
We are not judges, and we are not prosecutors. We aid justice, which is a more humble job than it sounds. A testimony can open a case; it rarely completes one. It has to hold together with photographs, documents, medical records, the movements of units. If we hand over a weak file, we lose more than one opportunity. We damage the trust that lets a witness’s words survive the distance between the room where they were spoken and the room where they are judged.
Every witness we work with still carries the old meaning of the word. Some learned it in rooms like the ones I knew in Beirut; some in basements in occupied Ukraine. Part of our work — maybe the deepest part — is to make the new meaning worth trusting: to bring them, when the day comes, to a table where the only things that matter are the essential documents, and the only question is what happened. Behind every record is a person who entrusted part of their life to us. The table in Germany taught me what we owe them.