Silence and Screams:

Stadiums Elsewhere Used as Prisons

Raqqa’s stadium was not the first to be used as a prison. Authoritarian regimes have commandeered stadiums and used them to detain their opponents on several occasions, and in different parts of the world. They have done so for practical reasons: stadiums can hold and enclose huge numbers of people, and can easily separate them from the surrounding city and society. In other words, stadiums can be made to serve as ready-made concentration camps.

The Vallecas Stadium, Spain and Franco’s Dictatorship

The Spanish Civil War was fought between 1936 and 1939, at great cost to the country’s social fabric, and ended with the victory of the Nationalists over the Republicans. General Francisco Franco, the leader of the Nationalists, decided to solidify his victory in its first days, and to eliminate sources of potential future opposition, by rounding up thousands of Republicans and concentrating them in at least 300 camps around Spain. The sites of these camps included convents, factories, and bull rings. In Madrid, three sports stadiums were repurposed as concentration camps: the Metropolitano Stadium; the Viejo Chamartín Stadium, where Real Madrid used to play; and the Vallecas Stadium.

The Vallecas Stadium was used for no more than four weeks as a holding facility and execution site. As well as executions of prisoners, witnesses testify that the conditions of detention were so bad that many deaths resulted from cold, hunger, and disease. Once those held here had died, been executed, or been released, football matches were once again played on the field.

General Franco’s dictatorship continued until his death in 1975. During his long rule, nobody talked in public about what had happened at Vallecas Stadium. Even after his death, the stories of the victims remained untold. This was a result of the Pacto del Olvido, or Pact of Forgetting, agreed upon by both leftist and rightist political parties as Spain re-established democracy. The Pact of Forgetting determined that there would be no prosecutions for crimes committed during the Civil War or dictatorship, and it suppressed difficult discussions about the past for fear that they might spark further conflict. Spain’s 1977 Amnesty Law was one concrete manifestation of the Pact. Because international law does not recognize amnesties for those guilty of crimes against humanity, the United Nations repeatedly requested that the Spanish government repeal the law. Nevertheless, the Pact continued to govern the official Spanish relationship with the past for several decades.

This changed in the new millennium. The 2004 Historical Memory Law repealed some Franco-era legislation and removed symbols of Francoism from government buildings. The 2022 Democratic Memory Law went further, setting up a registry of victims, promoting the search for people buried in mass graves, and honoring all those who suffered under the dictatorship. This means that today the estimated 400,000 people who were detained for political reasons under the Franco regime can be remembered and researched.

The Vallecas Stadium, in any case, was rebuilt. The new stadium was completed in 1976, the year of Franco’s death. Today it is known as Campo de Fútbol de Vallecas.^[1]

Vallecas Stadium in Madrid in 1975 (espana estadios)

 

The Chile Stadium/Victor Jara Stadium, Chile

The Chile Stadium, in Santiago, Chile, was inaugurated in 1969. It was the first roofed stadium in Chile, and it had a capacity of 6,500 people. It hosted sports and music events, including the Festival of the New Song. In 1969, popular folk singer Victor Jara won first prize for his performance at the first Festival of the New Song.

In the days following General Augusto Pinochet’s September 11, 1973 coup, however, the stadium was repurposed as a detention and torture camp. As in Spain several decades earlier, leftist opponents of the new regime were rounded up, and many were executed. Once again, it took many years for the truth of what happened to emerge.

General Pinochet’s coup deposed the democratically elected Popular Unity government, headed by President Salvador Allende, and imposed a military regime in its place. Pinochet’s soldiers immediately arrested thousands of supporters of the Allende government and detained them at dozens of sites. The Chile Stadium was the most important of these. An estimated 12,000 to 14,000 detainees passed though the stadium in the first two months after the coup. Men were held on the field and in the stands, women were held in the swimming hall’s changing rooms, and interrogations were conducted in the velodrome. An unknown number of people were killed.

The events at the stadium inspired several films. The Black Pimpernel, a Swedish film, directed by Ulf Hultberg, is based on the life of Harald Edelstam, the Swedish ambassador to Chile, who managed to save over 1,000 people from persecution by Pinochet’s men.

The Oscar-winning Hollywood movie Missing (1982), directed by the Greek filmmaker Costa-Gavras, is based on the stories of the American journalists Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, both of whom were executed in the stadium.

Estadio Nacional (2003), a Chilean documentary directed by Carmen Luz Parot, gathers the testimony of 30 witnesses to examine the events.

The 2019 Netflix documentary Remastered: Massacre at the Stadium, directed by Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt, tells the story of Victor Jara, and of the long and difficult process of achieving some measure of justice for him.

Victor Jara was a theatre director and poet as well as a singer of love songs and protest songs. His song “Venceremos” – or “We will Be Victorious!” – was adopted as the theme song for the Popular Unity’s 1970 electoral campaign. This meant that Jara was closely associated in the public’s mind with leftist President Salvador Allende and his government.

The day after General Pinochet’s coup, Jara was arrested at the Technical University in Santiago, along with hundreds of teachers and students. They were taken to the Chile Stadium, where many other leftists, trades unionists, and civil society activists were held.

The treatment of detainees in the stadium was terrible. Witnesses describe sexual assault, beatings, and the shooting to death of a young boy. Victor Jara was singled out for particularly bad treatment. In between tortures, he scribbled his last poem, “Estadio Chile”:

How hard it is to sing
when I must sing of horror.
Horror which I am living,
horror which I am dying.

… silence and screams

are the end of my song

At some point after that, his hands were broken. Eventually, he was beaten to death, and his corpse was riddled with bullets. He was dumped by Santiago’s main cemetery. An autopsy recorded 56 fractures and 44 bullet wounds. Victor Jara was forty years old.

A witness recounts seeing “20 to 30 corpses” that day, including Victor’s. It is estimated that Pinochet’s junta killed at least 3,000 people between 1973 and 1990. It tortured at least 27,000 (the estimates reach an upper limit of 40,000), and it detained around 250,000 people for political reasons.

As well as the events of Jara’s death, Remastered: Massacre at the Stadium covers the long struggle of his widow, Joan, and the American journalist Charles Horman’s widow, Joyce, to hold the perpetrators to account. Eventually, in 2012, a Chilean court charged Pedro Barrientos, a retired military officer, with the murder of Jara. Barrientos, however, had fled to the United States, married an American, and gained American citizenship. In 2016, a civil court in the United States found Pedro Barrientos liable for the murder, but he was still not extradited. Finally, in 2023 – after the film was made – Barrientos’ American citizenship was revoked, and he was deported to Chile. Today, he remains in preventive detention under the Peñalolén Military Police Battalion. Joan Jara died two weeks before his deportation, at the age of 96.

Justice for the American Charles Horman proved more elusive. Horman was executed at the stadium, and his remains were buried inside one of the stadium walls. The film Missing, which was in turn based on Thomas Hauser’s 1978 book The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice, suggests that Horman was arrested and killed because he had uncovered evidence of American involvement in the coup. Documents declassified in 1999 did indeed confirm American complicity. A report written by three State Department officials states that, in Horman’s case, “US officials did nothing to discourage the logical outcome of GOC [Government of Chile] paranoia.” In other words, the US did nothing to prevent Horman’s murder. In 2011, a Chilean court indicted Ray E. Davis, who had headed the US military group in Chile in 1973, and sought his extradition. Davis wasn’t located, however, until his death in 2013 in Chile, where he had been living in secret. In 2015, two men were finally sentenced for the murders of Horman and Teruggi. These were Pedro Espinoza, a former general, and Rafael Verdugo, a former intelligence operative.

Horman, Teruggi, and Jara are the best known of those murdered in the stadium. The names of most of the victims are not known, and in their cases there has been no justice at all.

Pinochet himself was arrested in London on October 16, 1998, following a warrant issued by a Spanish judge, on charges of “genocide and terrorism that include murder.” It was the first time that a former head of state had been arrested according to the principle of universal jurisdiction. Although the British House of Lords voted to extradite Pinochet to stand trial in Spain, Home Secretary Jack Straw intervened to order his release in March 2000. Pinochet died in Santiago in December 2006, never convicted of a crime.

Chile Stadium has had a varied fate since the bloody events of 1973. In 1991, a festival called “Canto Libre: Days of Purification” was held in the stadium. Participants ritually cleaned the whole area, symbolically washing away the blood once spilt there. But then the stadium fell into disrepair. For a while, homeless people used it as a shelter. Then it was used as an immigrant reception center. In 2003, it was renamed Victor Jara Stadium, and in 2018 and 2019, it hosted a “Festival of Art and Memory” inspired by Jara’s legacy. The festival included concerts, theatre performances, cinema, and a “Fair of Memory and Human Rights.”^[2]

General Pinochet’s soldiers in the Chile Stadium in Santiago after the coup against the government of Salvador Allende in 1973. AP

 

Stade des Martyrs, Democratic Republic of the Congo

First called Stade Kamanyola, this stadium was built in Kinshasha in 1993. It is the largest stadium in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and the fourth-largest in Africa.

It has a difficult history. It was constructed on the spot where four ministers – Évariste Kimba, Jérôme Anany, Emmanuel Bamba, and Alexandre Mahamba – were hanged, before a crowd of 100,000 people, by President Mobutu Sese Seko on the Christian holiday of Pentecost, June 1966. When the rebel leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila deposed Mobutu in 1997, he renamed the stadium Stade des Martyrs in honor of the executed ministers. He was officially sworn in as president in the stadium.

Hopes that Kabila would show more respect for human rights than his predecessor were soon dashed. A Human Rights Watch report of October 1997 demonstrated that Kabila’s government had massacred refugees.^[3] Then, Journaliste en Danger, a Congolese NGO affiliated with Reporters Without Borders, provided evidence that Kabila had used the Stade des Martyrs as a prison camp in which to detain officials and supporters of the former regime. The International Freedom of Expression Exchange backed this up.

The stadium has seen happier days since. Renovation works, ongoing for many years, are now almost complete. Concerts, sports, and cultural events have been held here, including a visit by Pope Francis in February 2023, and the 2023 Jeux de Francophonie.

 

The 2009 Stadium Massacre, Guinea

On September 28, 2009, the opposition in Guinea held a rally in a stadium in Conakry, the capital. Presumably, they did so for the same reason that Pinochet and Franco had used stadiums as prison camps – because the space and structure of a stadium allows many people to gather.

The rally was a protest against the leader of the military junta governing the country, Moussa Dadis Camara, who had seized power in a coup the previous year. Camara had recently reneged on promises to step down.

Once the rally was underway, hundreds of troops loyal to Camara burst into the stadium and opened fire on the people there. They also stabbed, beat, and sexually assaulted their victims. They quickly transformed the stadium into a prison by closing the exits and electrifying part of the perimeter fence. Hundreds were killed, and many more were injured.

Next, security forces engaged in a cover-up, sealing off the stadium and hospital morgues, and moving bodies to mass graves. As they spread through neighborhoods where the victims lived, the soldiers arrested and beat hundreds more people. The military regime then worked out its own narrative of events, claiming the slaughter had been carried out by rogue soldiers, that only 57 people had been killed, and that most of those were crushed in a stampede.

These claims were refuted by both Human Rights Watch and a United Nations Commission of Inquiry. Human Rights Watch determined that “the crimes were premeditated and organized.”^[4] The UN report found the killing was “systematic,” and mentioned “the strong presumption that crimes against humanity were committed.” Its investigation was able to confirm and name at least 156 people killed or missing, at least 109 women and girls raped or subjected to other forms of sexual violence, and hundreds of other cases of torture or of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.^[5]

Thirteen years to the day after the massacre – on September 28, 2022 – the trial began of 11 indicted suspects, including Moussa Dadis Camara. Human Rights Watch called it “a rare current example of domestic accountability involving high-level suspects.”^[6] The groundwork for the trial was prepared by an association of victims and their relatives known by its French acronym AVIPA. The violence had been recorded on hundreds of mobile phones. AVIPA gathered this evidence, as well as witness testimonies.

Interviewed by Pan African Visions, Asmaou Diallou, one of AVIPA’s founders, whose son was killed in the stadium, expressed her hopes for the trial: “The pain is there just as bad. But it helps that I can see the possibility of justice. Everyone will watch and they will know what happened that day. Guinea will be able to breathe again.”^[7]

Moussa Dadis Camara is no longer in power, but others associated with his junta remain influential in Guinea. The trial is ongoing at the time of writing.

Abdoulaye Diallo, who was shot in the stomach during the September 28 massacre, looks

(out over the playing field (Tommy Trenchard/Al Jazeera 

The Yarmouk Stadium, Palestine

The Yarmouk Stadium in Gaza City, Palestine, was built in 1952, when the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian control. In a 2022 interview, retired football player Ismail El Masry recounted the importance of the site to the local population: “Palestinian football evolved from here. We had nothing else. That is why it is so beloved by our people.”^[8]

With a capacity of 10,000 spectators, the Yarmouk Stadium hosted cultural festivals and mass weddings as well as sports events. It was partially destroyed by Israeli bombing in November 2012, but was quickly repaired.

During the war that began on October 7, 2023, images of the stadium being used as a detention camp were circulated in the international media. An Israeli called Yossi Gamzoo Letova, apparently serving in the Israeli Army, uploaded several videos of Palestinian prisoners being humiliated to YouTube. These then went viral on social media. CNN geolocated one video – uploaded on December 24, 2023 – to the Yarmouk Stadium.^[9] It showed dozens of Palestinian men and boys standing and kneeling in lines. The men – including elderly men and at least two boys as young as ten – are stripped to their underwear, with their hands tied behind their backs. Some are blindfolded. Women can also be seen, blindfolded with their hands tied, but fully clothed. Israeli soldiers direct the prisoners, and Israeli military vehicles are present. An Israeli flag is attached to the net of one of the goalposts.

The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor says that the people held in the stadium were some of the hundreds detained by Israeli forces in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City. At that point in the conflict, the NGO estimated that at least 3,000 Palestinians from Gaza had been detained.^[10]

A still shot of a video showing Palestinian men and at least two children detained in their underwear by

Israel Defence Forces (IDF) in the Yarmouk Stadium in northern Gaza. Yossi Gamzoo Letova

 

The Baniyas Stadium, Syria

Even in Syria, ISIS was not the first to use a stadium as a prison. When protests erupted against the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad early in 2011, the dictatorship responded with violent repression. As well as attacking protests as they happened, Assad’s security forces launched mass arrest campaigns in neighborhoods that had protested. Those arrested included children and the elderly, and people who hadn’t participated in protests at all. So many were arrested that Syria’s already enormous prison capacity was overwhelmed. Prisoners were therefore detained in public buildings such as schools, as well as in stadiums. Detention was invariably accompanied by torture.

A witness, who lived at the time in a residential block next to the municipal stadium in Baniyas, a coastal city, describes what she saw and heard: “They pursued the men and youth who took part in the demonstrations, specifically our sect, the vast majority of which resides in southern Baniyas. What I saw were buses full of soldiers and detainees [arriving at the stadium]. There were no civilians on the sports field itself, but soldiers were distributed in the open area. Those arrested were kept in areas that were not visible to the eye. They held our region accountable and did not let anyone who lived in front of the stadium go out onto the balcony to watch, but at night I could hear voices, and screams due to torture … Nobody was able to leave their home due to the curfew and the cutting of communications and electricity.”^[11]

Amnesty International recorded the testimony of a 25-year-old student who was arrested with his 73-year-old father from their home in Baniyas, on May 8, 2011. They and hundreds of other men were taken in buses to the Baniyas Stadium. When they arrived, their hands were tied with plastic cuffs. Some had their hands tied in front of them, others had their hands tied behind their backs. The witness was also blindfolded at this point. He and the other men were made to kneel in the stadium car park.

The witness recounts how he and others were beaten on the bus on the way to the stadium, and then again in the stadium. They were punched, kicked, and beaten with sticks and clubs. They were deprived of water and prevented from going to the toilet. After several hours, they were taken “to the athletes’ dormitory, which consists of a long corridor with large rooms. They packed each room with dozens of us. As I sat on my knees, my body became stuck to those sitting next to me.” The beatings and humiliations continued into the night.

The next morning, many – but not all – of those detained were released. “Many of us were told that we were going to be released, but others remain held there until today. We had to pass by representatives of several security agencies, give our names, and if our name was not on any of the lists, we were allowed to leave.”^[12]

A book published in Lebanon in 2012 gathers witness testimonies concerning the repression.^[13] One witness recounts being arrested in the Qowz neighborhood of Baniyas and then being dragged on the ground to the municipal stadium. He was thrown down on the square in front of the stadium, part of “a field of human bodies.” Security men and shabbiha (irregular security forces, or pro-regime thugs) spent the afternoon jumping on the prisoners’ backs. The violence was accompanied by sectarian insults: “Your god is Allah. Our god is Bashar. … Don’t you know it was Bashar who put Allah in the sky? … You want freedom? We’ll show you freedom in your graves.”

When the sun went down, the detainees were moved inside the stadium and crammed into hallways and other rooms. The witness spent four days and nights with 800 other men in a room large enough to hold only 100. At intervals, security forces burst into the room to beat and swear at the prisoners. One urinated on a pile of bodies. Another used his lighter to set fire to a boy’s hair. They stripped one man in front of the others and forced a stick into his anus, then into his mouth. They fired bullets into the walls, causing shrapnel to fly into the bodies of the nearby prisoners. Men with long beards – accused of being “Islamists” – were targeted in particular. Their beards were plucked out with pincers. The witness says he heard two sets of screams each time – those of the man whose beard was being plucked, and those of the man plucking, who screamed, “You want freedom? Here’s freedom for you!” When one man told his tormentors that he had once been their school teacher, they used the pincers to pull a tooth from his mouth.

When it seized power, ISIS employed very similar abusive tactics. It insulted and tortured its victims, and subjected them to unbearable conditions of detention. And it used the municipal stadium in Raqqa as a prison for the same reason that the regime had used the stadium in Baniyas, and the same reason that Franco and Pinochet had used their respective stadiums as prisons: because the stadium’s structure allowed for the separation of large numbers of prisoners from society, and for their abuse to be hidden from the eyes of the public.

Baniyas Stadium in Syria (Noah Hamami/Flickr)

1. Pattem, Leah, “Three of Madrid’s Football Stadiums Were Once Francoist Concentration Camps.” Madrid No Frills, April 12, 2022. https://madridnofrills.com/three-of-madrids-football-stadiums-were-once-francoist-concentration-camps/ last accessed September 23, 2024; “Spain’s Democratic Memory Bill to Honor Dictatorship Victims.” Reuters, July 20, 2021. www.reuters.com/world/europe/spains-democratic-memory-bill-honour-dictatorship-victims-2021-07-20/ last accessed September 23, 2024. ↑
2. McSherry, J. Patrice, “El Significado del Estadio Víctor Jara (ex Estadio Chile).” Página 19, April 5, 2021. https://pagina19.cl/opinion/el-significado-del-estadio-victor-jara-ex-estadio-chile/ last accessed September 23, 2024; Bartlett, John, “Extradition of Singer’s Alleged Killer Raises Hopes of Justice for Pinochet Era.” The Guardian, December 3, 2023. www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/03/chile-victor-jara-execution-solider-extradited-us-trial last accessed September 23, 2024. ↑
3. “What Kabila Is Hiding: Civilian Killings and Impunity in Congo.” Human Rights Watch, October 1, 1997. www.hrw.org/report/1997/10/01/what-kabila-hiding/civilian-killings-and-impunity-congo last accessed September 23, 2024. ↑
4. “Guinea’s 2009 Stadium Massacre Trial: Questions and Answers.” Human Rights Watch, September 25, 2023. www.hrw.org/news/2023/09/25/guineas-2009-stadium-massacre-trial last accessed September 23, 2024. ↑
5. “Report of the International Commission of Inquiry Mandated to Establish the Facts and Circumstances of the Events of 28 September 2009 in Guinea.” UNHCR, December 18, 2009. www.refworld.org/policy/countryrep/unsc/2009/en/71541 last accessed September 23, 2024. ↑
6. “Guinea: Significant Progress in 2009 Massacre Trial.” Human Rights Watch, September 25, 2023. www.hrw.org/news/2023/09/25/guinea-significant-progress-2009-massacre-trial last accessed September 23, 2024. ↑
7. “Massacre at a Stadium: Guinea Confronts Its Past.” Pan African Visions, September 27, 2016. https://panafricanvisions.com/2016/09/massacre-at-a-stadium-guinea-confronts-its-past/ last accessed September 23, 2024. ↑
8. Zidan, Karim, “‘I Will Never Forgive Them’: Gaza Grieves Atrocities at Historic Football Stadium.” Sports Politika, January 4, 2024. www.sportspolitika.news/p/i-will-never-forgive-them-gaza-grieves last accessed September 23, 2024. ↑
9. Salman, Abeer, Dahman, Ibrahim, Akbarzai, Sahar and McCluskey, Mitch, “Video Appears to Show at Least Two Children Stripped and Detained by IDF in Gaza Stadium among Palestinian Men.” CNN, December 27, 2023. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/27/middleeast/gaza-children-detained-idf-video/index.html last accessed September 23, 2024. ↑
10. “Israel Required by Law to Reveal the Fate of Dozens of Women Arrested in Gaza, Intl. Community Must Investigate Images and Claims of Torture, Harassment.” Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, December 26, 2023. https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/israel-required-law-reveal-fate-dozens-women-arrested-gaza-intl-community-must-investigate-images-and-claims-torture-harassment-enar, last accessed September 23, 2024. ↑
11. Interview conducted by the ISIS Prisons Museum, April 20, 2024. ↑
12. “Syrian Student Tells of Torture Ordeal in Mass Stadium Detention.” Amnesty International, May 24, 2011. www.refworld.org/docid/4ddf3bca2.html last accessed September 23, 2024. ↑
13. Abi Samra, Mohammad, Mowt al-Abd as-Suri: Shahadat Jeel al-Sumt wal-Thawra (The Death of Syrian Eternity: Testimonies of Silence and Revolution). Beirut: Riad El-Rayyes Books, 2012. ↑