Syrians from all walks of life took to the streets of France’s capital on Saturday in solidarity with the Syrians who remain detained in Assad regime’s security chambers until today.
The march, under the slogan “Detainees First” and organized by Survivors of Detention in Syria Initiative, was intended to highlight the daily agony faced by the prisoners of conscience who are still trapped underneath the ground inside the cells of the Assad regime.
The demonstrators carried a thousand photos of hundreds of thousands of political prisoners in Assad regime’s detention centers and other places of terror in Syria.
Actor and organizer of the demonstration Fares al-Hilou told Zaman al-Wasel: “We are the Syrians who survived detention by accident. We refuse making the refugees a cause and the detainees a file. Our aim is to make the detainees’ file an international cause. We believe that resolving the Syrian issue will not happen before the detainees’ issue is resolved.”
More activities and other sit-ins took place at the same time in other French and European cities as the campaign is intended to continue in the near future and expand to other cities.
The plight of the detainees is a matter of extreme devastation. They are exposed to beatings, torture and humiliation on a daily basis, while international investigators have said that several thousand prisoners have been executed, beaten to death or otherwise left to die since the start of the Syrian revolution, in policies that appear to amount to “extermination” under international law.
Head of UN-backed Commission of Inquiry on Syria Paulo Pinheiro stated that the mass scale of deaths of detainees suggests that the Assad regime is “responsible for acts that amount to extermination as a crime against humanity,” referring to a 25-page report presented by the commission on February 8, 2016 on killings of detainees by Assad’s regime.
Amnesty International reported on November 5, 2015 that more than 65,000 people, most of them civilians including women and children, were forcibly disappeared between March 2011 and August 2015 and remain missing. However, the main opposition negotiating group, the High Negotiations Committee, placed the number at a much higher toll, presenting a list of 150,000 detainees, its spokesman, Salim al-Muslat, told Reuters in April.
Rights watchdogs say that the detainees were squeezed into overcrowded, dirty cells where disease was rampant and medical treatment unavailable. Many suffered torture through a variety of inhumane methods, such as electric shocks, whipping, suspension, burning and rape.
As they remain trapped and unaware of their fate, it is the duty of the people outside to shed light on their agony. Saturday’s march in Paris was eye-awakening for many people. Which city will be next in line to take on this duty?
