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Damascus responsible for crimes against humanity in Ghouta: UN
GENEVA, June 20, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Forces loyal to Syria’s government
committed what amounted to crimes against humanity, including deliberately
starving civilians, during the siege of Eastern Ghouta, UN investigators said
Wednesday.
The five-year siege, on the outskirts of the capital, ended in April when
Damascus regained control of the rebel enclave.
“Following the end of the longest running siege in modern history… the
UN Commission of Inquiry (for human rights in Syria) has condemned this
method of warfare in Syria as barbaric,” the UN investigators said in a
statement.
The COI, tasked by the UN Human Rights Council in March to urgently
investigate recent events in Eastern Ghouta, released a 23-page report filled
with horrific details of civilian suffering.
“It is completely abhorrent that besieged civilians were indiscriminately
attacked, and systematically denied food and medicine,” commission head Paulo
Pinheiro said in the statement.
As pro-government forces dramatically escalated their campaign to
recapture the besieged enclave between February and April this year, they
used tactics that were “largely unlawful in nature,” the report said.
The tactics, it said, “aimed at punishing the inhabitants of eastern
Ghouta and forcing the population, collectively, to surrender or starve.”
It described thousands of desperate people holed up for months in
squalid basements with dwindling food rations and few if any sanitation
facilities, as bombs and missiles rained down.
– ‘Deliberate starvation’ –
The report concluded that “certain acts perpetrated by pro-Government
forces during the siege laid to Eastern Ghouta, including the deliberate
starvation of the civilian population as a method of warfare, amount to the
crime against humanity of inhumane acts causing serious mental and physical
suffering.”
The investigators slammed the widespread use of sieges throughout Syria’s
seven-year conflict, which has killed more than 350,000 people.
“Hundreds of thousands of Syrian women, men and children countrywide have
suffered for too long the perverse and long-lasting effects of this medieval
form of warfare,” the report said.
The UN’s Syria commission, set up in 2011 shortly after the civil war
began, has repeatedly accused the warring parties of crimes.
In Wednesday’s report, the commission also faulted armed opposition
groups like Jaysh al-Islam, Ahrar al-Sham and Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham for
committing “war crimes” by launching “indiscriminate attacks” on Damascus,
and killing and maiming hundreds of civilians.
“Through the entire duration of the siege, armed groups also regularly
arbitrarily arrested and tortured civilians in Douma, including members of
religious minority groups, repeatedly committing the war crimes of cruel
treatment and torture, and outrages upon personal dignity,” the report said.
The investigators, who have never been granted access to Syria, said they
based their findings for their latest report on some 140 interviews conducted
in person in the region and from Geneva.
They also said they analysed photographs, video recordings, satellite
imagery, and medical records, as well as reports from government and non-
government sources.
The report noted that by the time government forces declared Eastern
Ghouta recaptured on April 14, around 140,000 people had been displaced from
their homes.
Tens of thousands of them are still being unlawfully interned by
government forces in managed sites throughout the Damascus region, the report
said.
Following local “evacuation agreements”, up to 50,000 civilians from
Eastern Ghouta were displaced to Idlib and Aleppo governorates, it said.
BSS/AFP/RY/1848 hrs