U.N. Rights Chief Says Governments Fail to Protect Victims of Syria Conflict

GENEVA — The international community is failing to meet its obligations to victims of Syria’s conflict, the United Nations’ top human rights official said Monday, invoking the responsibility of governments to protect civilians of another country from war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

Syrian Refugees Struggle At Zataari Camp

“Appalling violations of the most basic human rights are occurring in Syria, and I fear that we in the international community are failing to meet our fundamental obligations to the victims,” Navi Pillay, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, said in an address opening a session of the Human Rights Council.

“We have agreed that we have a duty to protect our fellow human beings — even if they are born in other countries; and even when they are being crushed by governments that have a claim to sovereignty over their territory,” Ms. Pillay said, urging states “to make every effort to forge an end to this humanitarian disaster.”

Ms. Pillay stopped short of calling for direct intervention in Syria, instead repeating an appeal she has consistently made for the Security Council to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to prosecute war crimes suspects.

Her statement preceded a special Human Rights Council session on Syria called by Qatar, Turkey and the United States, expected in the next few days. A new report by a commission of inquiry into human right abuses in Syria is expected early next month. Since it was set up in August 2011, the commission has compiled lists of names of units, individuals and government agencies identified as responsible for human rights abuses to assist future prosecution by a national or international tribunal, but only the Security Council or the concerned country can refer the issues to The Hague court.

Ms. Pillay said all parties to Syria’s conflict had shown “flagrant disregard of international law and human life,” citing the government’s indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force and targeting of civilian locations such as schools and hospitals as well as “gruesome crimes” by antigovernment forces, including torture and executions.

Ms. Pillay called for safe passage for civilians trying to escape the embattled town of Qusayr and voiced concern at reports that hundreds of civilians had been killed or injured by indiscriminate shelling and that thousands remained trapped by the fighting in the area.

Ms. Pillay also took the United States to task for its failure to close its detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, citing it as “an example of the struggle against terrorism failing to uphold human rights.”

More than half the 166 detainees still held there have been cleared to return to their home countries or third countries and their continued detention amounted to arbitrary detention in breach of international law, she said. “The injustice embodied in this detention center has become an ideal recruitment tool for terrorists,” she added.

 

Decadence and death inside Damascus city walls

Damascus is a schizophrenic place, writes Ruth Sherlock. It is a city hunkered down in war, blighted by shellfire, blitzed by warplanes - and a thriving capital where business continues and the parties go on.

The waiters passed between tables, carrying silver platters piled with meat, fruits and elaborate desserts. Beneath glittering chandeliers the guests guzzled wine and clapped rhythmically to the music of the singer on the stage.

The party at the Damas Rose hotel in Damascus was in full swing. The ladies had coiffed their hair, applied blusher to their cheeks, and wore corsets and tight, silky, dresses with stiletto heels. At the edges of the grand parlour, groups of friends sat in booths upholstered with red velvet. Lovers wandered out to the poolside and rested on loungers below the starlit sky.

A few streets away Red Crescent volunteers washed the blood from a stretcher and hosed down an ambulance. A sniper's bullet had smashed the taillight. They had just returned to base after delivering the lifeless body of a young man, shrapnel in his brain, back to his parents.

"We have transported a lot corpses of late," one volunteer named Hamza, 23, said: "It is a job no one else will do but it is important. Often the bodies are just left on the front line. This is a city with 6,000 years of heritage and now it is being destroyed by the hands of its own sons".

The Sunday Telegraph's visit to Damascus last week, on a rarely issued government visa, provided a glimpse at schizophrenic place. It is a city hunkered down in war, blighted by shellfire, blitzed by warplanes and regularly shredded by car bombs. It is also a thriving capital, where parties go on, singers still sing, restaurants are lavish and civilians still put on work suits in the mornings and carry their briefcases into the office.

The sounds of heavy fighting that were once so terrifying - and many thought, the beginning of the end for President Bashar al-Assad's reign - have become a backdrop to everyday life. The national army's tanks have been firing relentlessly for months.

Rockets and missiles detonated from the military stronghold of Qasioun Mountain have long flown over the heads of residents in central Damascus before crashing into rebel held districts, sending up plumes of smoke. Planes continue overhead, carrying out bombing runs day and night.

But as the war has come closer, it has not led to a collapse in Mr Assad's support base, as many expected. In fact, it has strengthened the laager around his rule, drawing his constituents in Damascus's elite and new rich classes together in fear at what would come next.

Cafes are abuzz with the chatter of clients swapping stories of the latest rebel atrocity, some real, some invented. Most express fear at the Islamist hue of the opposition and of the jihadist groups, including the al-Qaeda affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra that has claimed responsibility for many of the car bombs that detonate in the capital almost daily.

Many Damascenes told the Sunday Telegraph that at the beginning of the uprising in 2011 they had been against Syrian government. Tired of its authoritarian rule, some had even joined popular protests. But the war now has gone beyond the narrative of a popular uprising against a dictator; a rebel takeover would lead to less, not more freedom, they said.

"Those people want to take us back centuries," said one mother of two children. "My daughter won't be able to go to school. I will have to cover my head in a black veil. I don't like this government, but does the West really think that this opposition would be any better?"

In the old Damascene Christian quarter of Bab Touma last Sunday residents made their way to church under the rattle of gunfire from a front line less than one mile away in Jobar district. A slightly quickened pace as they passed the local police station, now surrounded by a fortress of sandbags and a clear target for a car bomb, was their only sign of discomfort.

Mortars fired by rebel groups regularly fall on these narrow cobbled alleyways. But market stalls and shops selling everything from handbags to jewels remain stubbornly open. Two female art students, both in their early twenties, walked casually down the street chatting and carrying wooden easels that displayed their half finished paintings.

"We walk to university now because it is faster than trying to drive through the checkpoints," said one of the girls, who preferred not to give her name. "Apart from that life is OK. At night-time we drink in bars with friends. The shelling wakes us up sometimes when it is particularly loud, but we are mostly used to it now".

Disappearances, kidnappings and assassinations are a new reality in the city, and locals fear that anyone known to support President Assad, or with relatives in the government is a potential target. The owner of one Damascus radio station showed The Sunday Telegraph the burned out remains of his car that is still parked outside his office. More

The international community stand by and does nothing helpful for Syria. How long is this goind to be allowed to continue? Over seventy thousand people have been killed and nothing substantial is done. As Gareth Evans said in his book The Responsability to Protect - Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once And For All, "Never again!" the world has vowed time and again since the Holocaust. Yet genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other mass atrocity crimes continue to shock our consciences - from the killing fields of Cambodia to the machetes of Rwanda to the agony of Darfur. He goes on to say 'The Responsibility to Protect captures a simple and powerful idea. The primary responsibility for protecting its own people from mass atrocity crimes lies with the state itself. State sovereignty implies responsibility, not a license to kill. But when a state is unwilling or unable to halt or avert such crimes, the wider international community then has a collective responsibility to take whatever action is necessary. R2P emphasizes preventive action above all. That includes assistance for states struggling to contain potential crises and for effective rebuilding after a crisis or conflict to tackle its underlying causes. R2P's primary tools are persuasion and support, not military or other coercion. But sometimes it is right to fight: faced with another Rwanda, the world cannot just stand by'.

In Libya the total number of people killed includes protesters, armed belligerents, and civilians ranges between 2000 and 25000 between February 15 and October 02 2011. On 17 March, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution which authorized member states "to take all necessary measures … to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamhariya, including Benghazi, while excluding an occupation force".^[3] This began a new phase in the conflict.

Therefore, within one month of the start of the conflict the United Nations Security Council has passed resolution 1973 authorizing intervention.

The Syrian conflict could be deemed to have started on June 15 2011 when the United Nations urged investigation of Syrian abuses. This conflict has been ongoing for two years and no resolution has been passed by the United Nations and the killing continues. Seventy thousand have now died and the international community has obviously forgotten The Responsability to Protect.

What is the difference? Are regional and other states using the conflict for their own objectives? But what of the Syrian people? Are they worth less than the Libyians? And what of The Responsability to Protect? Editor

 

The meaning of Halabja - Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

The meaning of Halabja - Article Highlights 25 MARCH 2013

• A chemical weapons attack by Saddam Hussein's forces 25 years ago killed thousands of Kurds in the Iraqi town of Halabja, making it an international symbol and hastening negotiations on the Chemical Weapons Convention.
• But the international community failed to acknowledge repeated Iraqi chemical attacks that Iran suffered during the Iran-Iraq war, including an especially indiscriminate gassing of the Iranian town of Sardasht.
• The international denial of Iraq's chemical attacks is central to Iran's defiance in regard to its nuclear enrichment program.

Halabja is a name etched in the history of chemical warfare. There are few documented instances of deliberate chemical weapons attacks against civilian communities; the one that Saddam Hussein's forces made against the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja 25 years ago is the largest. Human Rights Watch recorded more than 3,200 immediate fatalities, with many more Kurdish citizens exposed to clouds of poisonous gas. Since the March 16, 1988 assault, thousands of people have succumbed to injuries suffered then, as well as to exposure-related health problems, including secondary infections that overwhelm compromised immune systems. Children are born with genetic defects or die prematurely because genetic damage is being passed down the generations.

In two years, the world will commemorate the centennial of modern chemical warfare. Just as the Belgian city of Ieper -- where the German Imperial Army introduced the first gas attacks during World War I -- is indelibly linked to its chemical past, Halabja stands as an international symbol for the many chemical attacks during the 1980 to 1988 Iran–Iraq war and the genocidal campaigns that Iraq conducted then against its Kurdish minority. In the immediate aftermath, Iran went to great lengths to publicize the bombing of Halabja, so the world would finally take notice Iraq's violations of humanitarian law.

Despite the powerful pictures of mothers and elderly men having dropped dead in their tracks, still clutching infants, and of the discolored, bloated bodies of children, Iran has had difficulty accepting Halabja -- located some 15 kilometers inside Iraq -- as a symbol of the pain it suffered from chemical weapons attacks.

From the end of 1983 onward, Iran's soldiers were regularly exposed to Iraqi chemical attack. Unprotected and ill-prepared for chemical warfare until the war's final year, they suffered many casualties from mustard gas, tabun, and sarin; many died prolonged, painful deaths. Iran still must tend to tens of thousands of people exposed to toxic chemicalsduring the war.

One attack was especially indiscriminate. On June 28, 1987, Saddam's air force struck the northern Iranian town of Sardasht. Almost three quarters of the 12,000 inhabitants were exposed to mustard gas; half of those exposed required medical treatment. Some 130 people, overwhelmingly civilians, died. Iran has since pressed for Sardasht to be internationally recognized as a memorial to the victims of chemical warfare, just as Halabja has been.

The story of Halabja is a tale of two cities and a struggle over symbols.

The legacy of Halabja. At the end of the 1980s, negotiations on the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) were sputtering. The United States had just started production of then-new binary artillery shells that would, when fired, deliver the nerve gas sarin. Revelation of the Halabja attack injected impetus and urgency into the treaty negotiations and forced nations across the world to focus on terminating chemical weapons programs. Despite Western concerns about the size of the Soviet chemical arsenal and its purpose in Warsaw Pact military doctrine, almost all European NATO members vehemently opposed any plans to have binary munitions or their components pre-positioned on their territory. National political debates forced the US Army to withdraw its forward-deployed chemical munitions from West Germany in 1990.

In 1989, because Iraq had so blatantly violated international law, French President François Mitterrand convened an international conference in Paris to restore the authority of the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Western complicity in Iraq's chemical warfare -- through the sale of chemical precursors and relevant equipment, arms shipments, and political and intelligence support of Iraqi war operations -- had seriously undermined the protocol, the only legal instrument banning chemical weapons use then in existence.

The meeting was eventful. While Iraq was given all the consideration of a party to the Geneva Protocol, Kurdish representatives were denied a platform to address the delegates. Iran was furious about the continuing refusal to hold Iraq responsible PDF for six years of chemical warfare, claiming a moral high ground for having never retaliated in kind, despite its right to do so under then-existing international law. More

 

Eyewitness Account—Syria: A Report From the Field

This is a rare, personal report of a trip into Syria’s beleaguered provinces. Koert Debeuf, a Belgian working for the European Parliament, travelled with commanders of the rebel Free Syrian Army into the Aleppo region. Back from “the hell called Syria,” to use Debeuf’s own words, he describes his impressions and conclusions from talks with soldiers, civilians and refugees.

From January 18 to 23, I visited Turkey and the Aleppo region of northern Syria. In the city of Antakya in southern Turkey—known in ancient times as Antioch—I met commanders of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and people responsible for distributing humanitarian aid in those regions. They gave us a very good overview of the situation on the ground.

On January 21, we went into Syria with General Abdel Nasser Farzat, the FSA commander for the Aleppo region. As the Bab al-Salam border crossing was temporarily closed, we were smuggled into the country. Using minor roads to avoid shelling and regime soldiers who still occupy a few strongholds in the Aleppo region, we arrived at about 8 p.m. in Azaz at the house of an FSA officer who offered us a meal. After dinner we headed to the headquarters where we met Ahmed Abeit, the commander of the revolutionary High Council of the Military Council.

It was clear from the beginning of our trip that nobody really knows who has exactly which function in the military opposition. There are two overlapping structures: the FSA—dominated by former generals from the Syrian regime army—and the revolutionary forces. Both have commanders; they work together but the hierarchy is unclear. Ahmed Abeit told us that he had been elected general commander of the revolutionary structure for the whole of Syria. The next day, when we visited the battlefield at Quweris airport, we saw Abeit again and realized he really was in charge.

A DEEP DISTRUST OF THE WEST

It was not easy talking to the senior commanders. They are deeply suspicious about anything European or American. Every one of them kept repeating how they have seen nothing at all materialize from the many promises that were made by the international community. We—the international community—promised them support if they organized themselves militarily. Nothing came. We asked them to organize civilian councils. Nothing came. We promised them humanitarian aid. Nothing came. We promised weapons. Nothing came. Every single one of these commanders is convinced that the West is on the side of President Bashar al-Assad, and it is very difficult to disprove these accusations.

Despite the distrust, they really did appreciate that I had come. Because of security concerns—mainly a fear of kidnapping—only the most senior officers knew that I work at the European Parliament. They were glad that at least one European official made the effort to come to the region and was trying to help (without promising anything). After a conversation of about two hours, we went back to the officer’s house in Azaz, where the four of us and the general slept on the living room floor. That night we heard bombs being dropped from planes on a neighboring town. The officer said it was most likely the bombing would reach Azaz by morning. Luckily that didn’t happen. More

 

 

Tourists and Terrorists

RIF DIMASHQ — If you go to Damascus and ask a taxi driver to take you to the suburb of Harasta, you will not find it. Nor will you find Jobar. You will not find al-Hajar al-Aswad, either. Nor Qaddam. You will find half of Douma, three quarters of Daraya. Zamalka you will not find.

What you will find in place of these villages in the Damascus countryside, which the Syrian army reclaimed from the rebels in August and September, is the rubble of war. Rows of four- and five- and six-story buildings razed to their foundations. Symmetrical heaps of broken masonry, neatly setting off the original real estate lots -- and then whole oceans of stone, with jagged waves. Electricity poles shattered at the trunk like felled trees, their tangle of wires branching in the dirt. Cars flattened as at the junk yard. Buses riddled with bullets. Apartment buildings with their fronts sheared off, so that you get an axial view of the floors, furniture and tenants gone missing.

The Damascus outskirts are not entirely unpeopled, however. I'm in the cab with Khalid, driving from Douma, the half-destroyed district northeast of the capital city, south along the smooth, deserted Hafez al-Assad highway. "Jobar," Khalid points left across the highway to hulks of buildings heavily shelled yet erect amid the ruins. "We cannot go in. If we go in, they will kill us."

"Who?"

"Both sides, the jaysh al-suri and the jaysh al-hur," the Syrian government army and the Free Syrian Army (FSA), a collection of anti-government fighters and army defectors. "They are in there" -- I peer down the narrow, empty streets as we drive slowly past -- "but they fight at night."

Night-fighting goes on among the alleyways and rooftops and oblique angles of Zamalka and Ain Terma, too. But not in Jaramana, a town southeast of Damascus that appears entirely unscathed, where people fill the streets and merchants hawk their wares. Even the drabness remains undisturbed. The only sign that something is rotten is the garbage that remains uncollected by the curbs. "Why no damages?" I ask.

"They support Assad."

"Why do they support Assad and their neighbors don't?"

"Bee-khafuu," They are scared. That they are mostly Christian and Druze might also have something to do with it. The Assads are Alawites, a Shiite Muslim offshoot, and the minorities have largely stuck together, fearful of a takeover by the Sunni majority.

Returning north, we see a white-haired man trudging across the grassless median. He tells us he is going home. Where is home? "Zamalka." How are you? "Mneeh," fine. How is everything? "Kil shee mneeh," everything is fine. Are they any problems? "Maa fee mashakil," there are no problems. We say our goodbyes.

"Kil shee mneeh," Khalid repeats, as we drive off. He points to one of Zamalka's leveled buildings, lifts his hands, palms to the ground, and brings them down. "Bee-khaf," He is afraid.

He has good reason to be afraid. Within minutes, we see a security officer leading a man in handcuffs across the highway. The officer turns to us with the snarl of a carnivore who has caught his prey. The detained has the look of one upon whom the reason why his wrists are hurting is slowly dawning. "Harasta," Khalid points to the ghost town -- once the scene of thousands-strong protests -- on the right. "Jaysh," he looks out the window at the army quarters on our left. A giant billboard image of President Bashar al-Assad looms over the sandbagged gate. More

 

The Syrian army would like to appear squeaky clean. It isn't - The Independent

Every day, a new massacre is reported in Syria. Yesterday, it was Daraya. Slaughter by Syrian troops, according to those opposed to Bashar al-Assad. Slaughter by Bashar’s “terrorist” opponents, the Syrian army said, producing the wife of a soldier whom they said had been shot and left for dead in a Daraya graveyard.

Of course, all armies want to stay clean. All that gold braid, all those battle honours, all that parade-ground semper fi. Thank God for Our Boys. Trouble is that when they go to war, armies ally themselves to the most unsavoury militias, gunmen, reservists, killers and mass murderers, often local vigilante groups who invariably contaminate the men in smart uniforms and high falutin’ traditions, until the generals and colonels have to re-invent themselves and their history.

Take the Syrian army. It kills civilians but claims to take every care to avoid “collateral damage”. The Israelis say the same. The Brits say the same, the Americans and French. And of course, when an insurgent group – the Free Syrian Army or Salafists – set up positions in the cities and towns of Syria, government forces open fire on them, kill civilians, thousands of refugees cross the border and CNN reports – as it did on Friday night – that refugees cursed Bashar al-Assad as they fled their homes.

And I cannot forget how Al Jazeera, loathed by Bashar now as it was once hated by Saddam, came back from Basra in 2003 with terrifying footage of dead and wounded Iraqi women and children who had been shredded by British artillery firing at the Iraqi army. And we don’t need to mention all those Afghan wedding parties and innocent tribal villages pulverised by US gunfire and jets and drones.

The Syrian military, whether it admits it or not – and I’m not happy with the replies I got from Syrian officers on the subject last week – work with the shabiha (or “village defenders” as one soldier called them), who are a murderous, largely Alawite rabble who have slaughtered hundreds of Sunni civilians. Maybe the International Court in the Hague will one day name Syrian soldiers responsible for such crimes – be sure they won’t touch the West’s warriors – but it will be impossible for the Syrian army to write the shabiha out of the history of their war against the “terrorists”, “armed groups”, Free Syria Army and al-Qa’ida. More