(Zaman Al Wasl)- A photo exhibition for Syria’s mass torture photos was held for a week in the French city of Limoges due to an initiative by Syrian lawyers and advocates.
The photo selection was of 53,275 torture photographs smuggled out of Syria in August 2013 by a military defector code-named Caesar.
Lawyer Faisal Al-Sharif, co-organizer, said that the idea of the exhibition emerged during discussions among Syrian human rights activists living in France about the need to show the French public the reality of the Syrian revolution, especially the issues of detainees, the forcibly disappeared, as well as the great injustice, the genocide and the forced displacement.
“It is unfortunate that a large percentage of French and European people are unaware of the reality of what is happening in Syria. When the film and the photos were displayed, the audience were deeply affected, and had shown great sympathy for the Syrian people who are subjected to these inhumane criminal acts.”
Lawyer Samer Talass, co-organizer, said other upcoming events were organized by the International Campaign to Free Detainees, which was launched 5 years ago advocating the issue.
Three exhibitions will be held in Dijon, Strasbourg and Nancy, France, in March and April.
Caesar’s photographs show at least 6,786 detainees who died in detention or after being transferred from detention to a military hospital. The remaining photographs are of attack sites or of bodies identified by name as of government soldiers, other armed fighters, or civilians killed in attacks, explosions, or assassination attempts, accoridng to Human Rights Watch.
Most of the 6,786 victims shown in the Caesar photographs were detained by just five intelligence agency branches in Damascus, and their bodies were sent to at least two military hospitals in Damascus between May 2011, when Caesar began copying files and smuggling them out of his workplace, and August 2013, when he fled Syria.
About 1.2 million Syrian citizens have been arrested and detained at some point in the regime’s detention centers, including 130,000 individuals who are still detained or forcibly disappeared by the Syrian regime, since the revolution erupted in March 2011, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights.
The Detainees Association of Sednaya Prison released last November testimonies of torture survivors of the notorious detention facility.
According to the report, 100% of the detainees had been tortured physically and 97.8% had been tortured psychologically.
The nine-year-old war has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands and forced 13 million people from their homes, half of whom have left their shattered homeland.
Zaman Al Wasl
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