UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. Security Council fell silent Tuesday after ambassadors viewed a series of ghastly photographs of dead Syrian civil war victims, France’s ambassador said.
The pictures showed people who were emaciated, with their bones protruding, and some bearing the marks of strangulation and repeated beatings, and eyes having been gouged out.
French Ambassador Gerard Araud said the pall of silence lingered, and then questions slowly began about the credibility of the slides of the dead, who would offer mute testimony to the savagery of a Syrian civil war in which more than 150,000 have died.
The council members saw more than the 10 photos publicly released in January on the eve of the “Geneva 2” peace talks as part of a forensic investigation funded by the government of Qatar — a major backer of the opposition and one of the nations most deeply involved in the Syrian conflict. France, which hosted the presentation at the Security Council and showed the images afterward at a news conference, said they are evidence of war crimes by the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
The veracity of the photos could not be independently confirmed. Syria’s Justice Ministry has dismissed the photos and accompanying report as “lacking objectiveness and professionalism.”
Araud
and former Sierra Leone Special Court prosecutor David M. Crane said the trove of torture photos had come from a man code-named “Caesar” who had been a crime-scene photographer for the Syrian military.
“The gruesome images of corpses bearing marks of starvation, strangulation and beatings and today’s chilling briefing indicate that the Assad regime has carried out systematic, widespread and industrial killing. Nobody who sees these images will ever be the same,” U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power said.
