UN ignores Assad’s monstrous crimes

LOCAL newspapers have, to their credit, criticised the Assad regime’s murderous excesses and use of sarin gas against its own people. However, this unlawful use of gas against populations has been going on for years.

Amonth has passed since Syria gassed to death hundreds of its own men, women, and children – and still the UN closes its eyes, refusing to call an emergency session.

The world deserves to know. Are innocent civilians attacked by their own government with chemical weapons not human rights victims?

Is the most horrific crime of the 21st century not an urgent situation?

And why, when the Human Rights Commission mentions Syria, does it avoid any condemnation of its murderous regime?

Why is this monstrous crime being treated with such apathy by the media, the BDS movement, and the Russell Tribunal, among others? Where is everyone’s moral outrage?

Can any human rights body that ignores this atrocity be deemed credible, effective, or in any way relevant?

At the very least they must ask themselves:

Why the silence when the killers of Damascus were time and again promoted by the UN to key positions and awarded a legitimacy they never deserved?

When Hafez al-Assad murdered 20 000 in 1982, and then more than 100 000 were killed over the past three years, why was Syria sitting as an elected member of the Human Rights Commission, and then re-elected? What message did that send?

Finally, why is it that at every session of the Human Rights Commission only one country is listed on the agenda: Israel – whose hospitals, as you read this, are quietly treating dozens of Syria’s injured victims?

If BDS allocated just one-hundredth of the moral outrage it uses against the only democracy in the Middle East, murderous dictators like Assad might have been shamed, isolated and weakened, instead of elevated, celebrated and strengthened.

Camps Bay