It is a lament left by the director of the Syrian Human Rights Network in TSF: The new international institution proposed last week by António Guterres to find the whereabouts of more than a hundred people in Syria is welcome, but unlikely to succeed.
The problem, says Fadel Abdul Ghany, is not new. The creation of a body to investigate disappearances in the country is an old demand from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and a recommendation from the United Nations itself.
“Syrians have been suffering from these disappearances for 12 years and the first report of the UN Commission of Inquiry declared that the disappearances committed by the Bashar al-Assad regime were crimes against humanity. That was in November 2011.” After so much time, the person in charge still does not believe that it is possible to locate all the people.
For that, “the Assad regime and the other parties need to collaborate. But he has never collaborated with any of the UN institutions, nor with the commission of inquiry, nor with the high commissioner. Nothing.”
And it is precisely this past positioning that leads Ghany to not believe that nothing will change now. In any case, the organization “will be an instrument of pressure against the Assad regime.”
Official United Nations figures point to 100,000 missing persons. Fadel Abdul Ghany believes that there will actually be 110,000 and he trusts the material he works with.
“This is not just a number, this is data. We only work with data, names and many details of each person”, and many have already died without their families knowing.
With 12 years of war in Syria that have already caused almost six million refugees, the leader of the human rights network does not spare criticism of the United Nations Secretary General. They start with Guterres’ “last speech”, which “was weak” and “never mentioned the main criminal”.
“For 12 years, the conflict in Syria has been neglected. The Syrian file has not been well managed by the United Nations and that is their responsibility”. Since the start of the war, almost 500,000 people have died.
Source: TSF
