YouSaid · the spoken record

Katoub

lines on the record
11
first
2023-08-08
most recent
2023-08-08
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1
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un-security-council

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  1. “But we will continue the fight to explore concrete options to reinstate the norm of the prohibition of chemical weapons by finding ways to hold all perpetrators to account, alongside States that believe that the exceptional use of chemical weapons requires exceptional measures to say no — no to impunity.”

    2023-08-08 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9393 (2023) · source

  2. “Doing nothing is undermining the brave work of those investigators, the international institutions and treaties that Member States created, the work of the OPCW that the United Nations built and protected around a norm that was said to be universal. It is undermining the Council, which is supposed to be responsible for peace globally. Ten years have passed since the Ghouta massacre and the adoption of resolution 2118 (2013), which should make everyone think about the message that the Council is sending to the Syrian regime, and the message that the OPCW States members are sending not only to the Syrian regime, but to other perpetrators — and to the investigators who have been working so tirelessly.”

    2023-08-08 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9393 (2023) · source

  3. “It is hard to even remember all of them — the Independent International Commission of Inquiry, the JIM, the IIT, the Fact-Finding Mission, the Declaration Assessment Team, and so forth. Syrian civil society, the families of victims and the rescue and medical teams cooperated with all of them. Those investigative bodies did their jobs, as did the Council. When Russia vetoed the renewal of the mandate of the JIM (see S/PV.8073), there was a way to keep those investigations going. The IIT was established in an unprecedented vote at the OPCW. And the Council can still do its job. There are similar ways to bypass a potential veto of a referral of all perpetrators to the International Criminal Court. There are ways to stop doing nothing.”

    2023-08-08 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9393 (2023) · source

  4. “The father told me once that the pain of the chemical attack itself, the suffering due to being forcibly displaced from his hometown, the panic in the wake of the earthquake, the memories of his two children in the shelter with their neighbours and facing death and the unknown — all of that pales in comparison to the pain he feels when people ask him if it is true that Al-Assad did indeed use chemical weapons. Denial has made us more determined to make our voices heard. It made witnesses sharpen their memories so that they could recall every detail when they testified. It made investigators stricter in their methodologies so that their reports would be more solid before any court. In Syria we are lucky — or perhaps unlucky — to have had all those investigative bodies with all those acronyms.”

    2023-08-08 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9393 (2023) · source

  5. “It has employed a number of tactics, such as manipulating evidence, presenting false witnesses and intimidating survivors, witnesses and their families. It has pressured investigators — whether individuals or institutions — and invested resources in running media disinformation campaigns. Those tactics are being used in other countries as well. Through our research, we have found that some of the same social media accounts have been used in denying war crimes in both Syria and Ukraine, which comes as no surprise. Among the survivors of the Douma attack on 7 April 2018 is a family of four that I know. They were displaced to northern Syria after the attack, as were many other people from Douma. They also witnessed the earthquake in February this year that hit northern Syria and southern Türkiye.”

    2023-08-08 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9393 (2023) · source

  6. “The Council has received heaps of reports from the Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM) established by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and the United Nations and the OPCW Investigation and Identification Team (IIT) confirming the responsibility of the Syrian regime for the chemical attacks. Because of impunity, the Syrian regime put an end to an international norm that had long been agreed on. The risk of the use of chemical weapons remains. The same regime that used them with impunity is still in power and the same Russian allies are still supporting Syria’s war criminals. And other dictators worldwide may get the wrong message if they see that the paths to accountability are blocked. In response to the heaps of evidence collected and investigations conducted, denial has been the Syrian regime’s strategy.”

    2023-08-08 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9393 (2023) · source

  7. “On 4 April 2017, one of the civil defence volunteers was pregnant. She lost her baby while rescuing other people after the chemical attack in Khan Shaykhun. Ten days earlier, Dr. Ali Darwish, who worked at the hospital in Al-Lataminah, died when the hospital was attacked with a chemical bomb dropped by the Al-Assad air forces. Knowing all of that and doing nothing is very hard. Hiding behind a Russian veto that might block an attempt to refer the situation to the International Criminal Court does not make it any easier (see S/PV.7180). And no — sanctions are not enough and do not provide the accountability that victims want.”

    2023-08-08 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9393 (2023) · source

  8. “That was not a message to us, the victims, witnesses and civil-society organizations. It was not a message to us, the people of Ghouta and other towns in Syria attacked by chemical weapons. We were gassed and killed, but we did not write the Chemical Weapons Convention or the Charter of the United Nations. The Member States did. It was therefore a clear message from the Syrian regime that it disregards international institutions and treaties. The response by the international community, including the Council, was limited to further investigations, with no serious action taken towards accountability. It is very hard to do nothing while watching rescue and medical teams risking their lives to save one more life or enter contaminated areas without protective gear to retrieve one more piece of evidence.”

    2023-08-08 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9393 (2023) · source

  9. “A few days after the chemical attack, the investigators of the United Nations Mission to Investigate Allegations of the Use of Chemical Weapons in the Syrian Arab Republic arrived at the locations of the attack in Ghouta. They were already in Syria investigating other attacks. They collected samples and interviewed witnesses. Soon after, the Security Council adopted resolution 2118 (2013), on the use of chemical weapons in Syria. With the resolution’s adoption, and Syria agreeing to abide by the Chemical Weapons Convention — a treaty signed by almost every State in the world — we should have had absolute compliance. Instead, more than 170 chemical attacks have since been reported in Syria. In the past 10 years, more than 1,500 people have been killed and 15,000 injured by the chemical weapons of the Al-Assad regime.”

    2023-08-08 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9393 (2023) · source

  10. “On the morning of that day, I walked out of my office to a nearby school that we had turned into a decontamination centre. I cannot forget the scene in the school halls. Bodies were scattered around, turning a sacred space for children into a vast funeral home. The towns of Ghouta were then under siege by the Al-Assad regime and engulfed in a war where the use of chemical weapons was one of many war crimes occurring simultaneously. We did not have protective gear, or the time and space for each patient who needed care after being suffocated by the chemical weapons, but at the time we had hope that if we exposed those crimes we could prevent future attacks in Syria and elsewhere in the world.”

    2023-08-08 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9393 (2023) · source

  11. “Mr. Katoub: I would like to thank the presidency of the Council for giving the floor to civil-society organizations and witnesses of atrocities. Twelve days from today, the world will mark the tenth anniversary of the largest chemical massacre that the twenty-first century has witnessed, a massacre that took place in eastern Ghouta on 21 August 2013, killing more than 1,200 people and injuring more than 10,000. I witnessed the Ghouta massacre. Through my work as a member of a medical team in Ghouta and later, after I fled Syria, of other civil-society organizations, I have been engaged in the medical response to chemical attacks and the documentation of the use of chemical weapons in Syria. It represents unfortunate experience that I, as a dentist, would not have had to go through had there been any measures of accountability.”

    2023-08-08 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9393 (2023) · source