| New York Times | - |
In its third report on Syria
commissioned by the United Nations, the Human Rights Data Analysis
Group identified 191,369 deaths from the start of the conflict in March
2011 to April 2014, more than double the 92,901 deaths cited in the
group's last ...
Death Toll In Syria Estimated At 191,000
GENEVA
— The number of dead in Syria’s civil war more than doubled in the past
year to at least 191,000, the United Nations human rights office said
Friday. The agency’s chief, Navi Pillay, bluntly criticized Western
nations, saying their inaction in the face of the slaughter had
“empowered and emboldened” the killers.
In its third report
on Syria commissioned by the United Nations, the Human Rights Data
Analysis Group identified 191,369 deaths from the start of the conflict
in March 2011 to April 2014, more than double the 92,901 deaths cited in
the group’s last report, which covered the first two years of the
conflict.
“Tragically,
it is probably an underestimate of the real total number of people
killed during the first three years of this murderous conflict,” Ms.
Pillay said in a statement that accompanied the report, which observed
that many killings in Syria were undocumented.
The
report was confined to counting individuals who had been identified by
name, along with the date and location of their death, using data from
five organizations that was screened to avoid duplication. It did not
include nearly 52,000 deaths that were recorded but lacked sufficient
detail.
At
a briefing later in the day, Rupert Colville, a spokesman for Ms.
Pillay, said the number of deaths was “indicative” rather than “gospel
truth,” adding, “It’s incredibly important that the world has an idea of
the scale of the killing.”
Men,
including combatants and civilians, accounted for more than 80 percent
of the casualties, according to the report. Most of the documented
deaths did not specify the age of the victims, but where that
information was available, the report identified 8,803 people under the
age of 18, including 2,165 children under 10.
Ms.
Pillay expressed deep regret that “given the onset of so many other
armed conflicts in this period of global destabilization, the fighting
in Syria and its dreadful impact on millions of civilians has dropped
off the international radar.”
Photographs
The Historic Scale of Syria’s Refugee Crisis
Dramatic images from the Syrian refugee crisis, which
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It
is “scandalous,” she said, that the depth of the suffering in Syria no
longer attracts much international attention. The fact that the crisis
has been allowed to continue for so long, with no end in sight, and is
now spilling into neighboring Iraq and Lebanon is “an indictment of the
age we live in,” she said.
With
little more than a week left until she leaves her position as the high
commissioner for human rights, Ms. Pillay reserved some of her harshest
words for the world powers on the United Nations Security Council. “The
killers, destroyers and torturers in Syria have been empowered and
emboldened by the international paralysis,” she said.
Her
statement echoed blunt criticisms of the Security Council that Ms.
Pillay delivered to its members on Monday, venting frustrations
increasingly expressed by the leaders of United Nations agencies and of
international aid groups that are struggling to keep up with the
humanitarian fallout from conflicts around the world.
“There
has not always been a firm and principled decision by members to put an
end to crises. Short-term geopolitical considerations and national
interest, narrowly defined, have repeatedly taken precedence over
intolerable human suffering and grave breaches of — and long-term
threats to — international peace and security,” Ms. Pillay told the
Security Council. “I firmly believe that greater responsiveness by this
Council would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.”
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