Montreux, an idyllic resort town in Switzerland, was where world leaders began a long-awaited meeting on Syria last Wednesday to show that, well, finally they are taking action after nearly three years of bloodshed, 130,000 dead Syrians and the flight of well over two million refugees to the neighboring countries.
However, new revelations about horrific crimes committed by Bashar Assad’s regime, universally recognized as war crimes or crimes against humanity have overshadowed the talks and made it impossible to imagine how the West, the Syrian opposition and the international community could possibly entertain a political accommodation with such a regime.
The revelations, in the form of photos smuggled out of Syria by a defector, suggest that in Assad’s secret jails tens of thousands of political prisoners have been subjected to torture, starvation and execution. The photos, catalogued, numbered and cross-indexed, much in the manner of the meticulous records kept by the Nazis, are said to be gruesome. Consider here the lead sentence about them by the New York Times correspondent filing from Beirut last Wednesday: “Emaciated corpses lie in the sand, their ribs protruding over sunken bellies, their thighs as thin as wrists. Several show signs of strangulation. The images conjure memories of history’s worst atrocities.”
To be sure, since the winter of 2011, Assad’s forces have committed numerous atrocities, including the killing of hundreds of civilians by poison gas, that have made us turn away in nauseated disbelief at the cruelty of it all. But these photos depict crimes against humanity beyond all rational understanding. They are reminiscent, in context of recent times, of the massacre of Srebrenica, when in July 1995 Serbian troops and militias assaulted the predominantly Muslim town during the Bosnian war and slaughtered 8,000 civilian Bosnian Muslims in cold blood, mostly men and boys.
At the time, then UN Secretary-General, expressing the international community’s outrage, described the killings as “the worst crime on European soil since the Second World War and NATO was moved to launch air strikes. But, wait, over the last three years, the Syrian regime has murdered, exterminated, imprisoned and tortured 8,000 Syrians on a slow weekend.
So when is the US, leader of “the free world” and promoter of the Jeffersonian principles, going to do something meaningful and effective to put a stop to all this? Alas, not any time real soon. As the Brookings Institution scholar and nationally respected political commentator, Robert Kagan, said soon after the photos were released: “I feel like we’ve had at least one or two Srebrenica moments in Syria already. The White House has completely hardened itself to whatever horrendous news might come out of Syria because the president doesn’t want to get involved.”
In way, these atrocities mock America’s moral resolve, just as they shock the conscience of the world. A team of international lawyers, forensic experts and war crimes prosecutors have already interviewed the defector and determined that his photos are authentic, constituting credible and sufficient evidence to indict Assad and his regime on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes. Yet, perversely, the man continues to be pampered and his regime tolerated by Washington. The fact of the matter is that, when it comes to Syria at least, President Obama, sadly, has been weak-kneed and indecisive. Consider, as a case in point, how following the emergence of videos showing vivid images of that chemical weapons attack launched by the Syrian regime that killed hundreds of civilians, he threatened missile attacks — then backtracked.
What will Obama do this time? Perhaps he should recall the words of his own Secretary of State John Kerry who in a speech at the time called Assad a “thug” and warned against inaction, indifference and silence. And let’s add to this the fact that we are all complicit in that, which leaves us inert, indifferent or silent.
