Sara Gon: Pretoria’s Syrian blind spot – a record of inaction and hypocrisy - Biznews

Sara Gon

In ‘Pretoria’s support for global monsters exposed in Syrian “Belsen redux”‘ (BizNews Premium 5 January 2025), RW Johnson referred to the opening of former President Bashar al-Assad’s prisons to the public after his overthrow. 

Johnson also mentioned mass graves of Syrians who had “disappeared” under Assad’s regime, particularly the mass grave at al-Qutayfa, 30 miles (48 Kms) north of Damascus. He cites the estimates that over 100,000 people were buried at al-Qutayfa, but notes that it is only one of many mass graves in Syria.

“This suggests that the ultimate reckoning may be of utterly horrific proportions. One foreign observer, surveying one of these mass graves, was quoted as saying that ‘We haven’t seen anything like this since the Nazis. It makes you realise what it was like for Allied troops when they captured Buchenwald and Belsen,’” says Johnson.

Johnson suggests that there should be “great soul-searching” by the ANC over its helping to shield the Assad regime from international censure over the civil war which erupted in 2011 during the Arab Spring.

It achieved this predominantly by using – or rather not using – its vote at the United Nations (UN) to try to prevent the Assad regime from being investigated for human rights violations. 

Initially, the ANC government refused to support those opposed to the regime because it felt that it had been betrayed by Western powers in March 2011 into voting for UN Security Council Resolution 1973 which led to the death of the autocratic Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi. (See Note)

Whether one would agree with the ANC’s opinion or not, Gaddafi’s death does not exonerate the ANC from its repeated failure to support resolutions at the UN against the Assad regime’s prosecution of the civil war. 

This article considers the number of resolutions South Africa abstained from supporting, and the issues that the resolutions attempted to resolve.

The UNHRC’s resolutions – how many and for what
All but one resolution was taken by the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), of which South Africa was a founding member in 2006. South Africa served two terms on the UNHRC: the first from 2006 to 2010, and the second from 2014 to 2019.

The Syrian civil war started in March 2011. By 2014 the war had already been fought for 34 months. Gaddafi was killed on 20 October 2011: South Africa had over 2 years to get over its ‘betrayal by the West’ and to get a substantial sense of the horror unfolding in Syria since 2011.

All the UNHRC’s 18 sessions under review, between 2014 and 2019, voted on a resolution on the Syrian war. 

South Africa abstained from voting for all of them: not once did it vote to condemn Assad’s war crimes.

China and Cuba voted against all 18 resolutions and Russia voted against nine. The other countries which voted against resolutions in this period were Algeria, Bolivia, Burundi, Egypt, Eritrea, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Philippines, Somalia, and Venezuela. 

Issues repeatedly covered in the 18 UNHRC sessions
This is a very brief summary of some of the many issues that were the subject matter of the resolutions. They are drawn from the final session that South Africa attended. Most, if not all, of the issues had been raised repeatedly over the preceding five years.

The ‘Condemnations’, ‘Strong condemnations’, and ‘Demands’ by the UNHRC of Syria covered: 

Continued systematic, widespread and gross violations and abuses of human rights, and violations of international humanitarian law;
The use of “banned munitions, the indiscriminate use of heavy weapons in populated areas, barrel bombs, aerial bombardment, incendiary weapons, ballistic missiles and cluster bombs”; 
The use of starvation and siege; 
Attacks on medical personnel, transport, equipment, hospitals and other medical facilities, patients; 
The negative effects on the rights and welfare of children;
The use of schools for military training, ammunition storage, detention facilities, accommodation or military bases; 
Widespread practices of enforced disappearance and arbitrary detention, “notably widespread in areas where the Syrian authorities retook control in 2018”;
Sexual violence, torture and ill-treatment, particularly in Syrian detention facilities dating back to 2014;
Obstruction of UN-approved convoys of aid “which may result in the starvation”;
Reports of mass executions, the torture of prisoners, and the deaths of individuals detained by the authorities; 
The permanent damage that torture and ill-treatment caused to victims and their families;
The immediate release of the arbitrarily detained including women, children, the elderly, the disabled, human rights defenders and aid providers, medical personnel, the wounded and sick, and journalists;
Violence based on religious or ethnic affiliation;
Damage and destruction of the cultural heritage sites particularly Palmyra and Aleppo, organised looting and trafficking of cultural property, and intentional attacks on historic monuments; and
The repeated use of chemical weapons in violation of the UNSC Convention prohibiting the “Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons”. 
No country, not even its allies, would dispute that the regime of al-Assad was monstrously cruel. The tenor of the regime had been established by the coup d’état carried out by al-Assad’s father Hafez in 1970.

The media reports, after Bashar al-Assad’s overthrow, revealed the extent of the horrors of al-Assad’s prison system as exemplified by Saydnaya, the infamous prison outside Damascus.

The arbitrary detentions, torture, and murders at Saydnaya have been known about for over 50 years. According to Amnesty International as many as 13,000 people were hanged between 2011 and 2015. The extent of the horror, replicated in other prisons in the system, was second to none. The overthrown regime was one of the most hated and feared anywhere in the world. Pretoria said and did nothing.

In ‘UN: SA opposition to holding urgent debate on Syria a ‘worrying example of siding with dictators’Peter Fabricius reported that on 2 March 2018South Africa argued against the holding of an urgent debate on the Syrian crisis in the UNHRC. Pretoria said the UNHRC had not been given enough notice of the debate and said that Syria was due to be discussed later in the session anyway. The session only started on 18 June 2018.

“South Africa joined countries like Syria itself, China, Venezuela, Russia, and Cuba in opposing the debate. The resolution to hold the debate was carried nonetheless by a large majority,” said Fabricius. 

South Africa did not refer Syria to the ICC.

Interestingly, during the debate, former UN Human Rights Commissioner Zeid al-Hussein had called for Syria to be referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

South Africa did not heed that call.

The last attempt to refer Syria to the ICC occurred in 2014 when a UNSC resolution failed due to vetoes by Russia and China. Over 60 nations supported the proposal. This attempt had been preceded by three other failed resolutions.

Shenanigans in the Security Council
South Africa took up its third stint as a non-permanent member of the UNSC on 1 January 2019 for 2019 and 2020. South Africa had been overwhelmingly elected to do so by the UN General Assembly on 8 June 2018.

On 10 July 2020 the UNSC issued a press release about two resolutions voted on by the 15 members of the UNSC. 

Resolution S/2020/667 proposed renewing, for six more months, “the mandate of a mechanism, initiated by resolution 2165 (2014), that has enabled the United Nations and its humanitarian partners to deliver aid into Syria through the Bab al-Salam and Bab al-Hawa crossings in Turkey only, excluding Al Yarubiyah and Al‑Ramtha on Syria’s borders with Iraq and Jordan, through which deliveries had moved from 2014 to early January 2020.”

Thirteen members voted for the resolution, but it was vetoed by China and Russia.

South Africa voted for the resolution. 

The cynical suggestion for South Africa’s vote in support of a resolution would be first, that it was a reaffirmation of a resolution taken originally by the UNSC in 2014 (South Africa wasn’t on the UNSC then). Second, that it only concerned the provision of aid by the UN to Syria. Third, given that it was a relatively harmless resolution, South Africa wouldn’t receive any blowback from China or Russia for supporting it. Fourth, South Africa has repeatedly proposed that Africa have two permanent seats on a restructured UNSC and wouldn’t want be seen by the US, UK, and France (the other permanent members) to be abstaining from a humanitarian, UN-based resolution and thereby harm the campaign for a permanent seat on the UNSC.

The second resolution, S/2020/683, was proposed by Russia to extend the mandate of the first resolution by 12 months, but leaving both of the existing crossings closed, and keeping a third crossing from being opened.  Seven countries voted against the resolution (including the US, UK and France), four countries abstained, and Russia, China, Vietnam and, you guessed it, South Africa supported the resolution.

Could Pretoria have calculated that if it shored up support by the US, UK, and France’s in the first resolution, it could shore up its campaign with Russia and China by supporting the second one. Ensuring that only one crossing was opened would substantially change the effect of the first resolution, if it had been passed.

What about taking Syria to the ICC, the ICJ or both?
An article in The Atlantic in 2024 discussed the route to referring Syrian leadership to the International Criminal Court (ICC), as Syria was not a Member State. 

In 2018, the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber decided that the court had jurisdiction over the deportation of the Rohingya from Myanmar into Bangladesh. 

Syria could only be referred if it was a member state or if the UNSC made a referral. So the ICC held the referral could be made because Bangladesh was a member state and an element of the crime was completed on the territory of a Member State.

In 2021 a number of Syrians who were deported to Jordan, referred Syria to the ICC. Despite having received documents from victims, their counsel, and NGOs, no decision has yet been made by the ICC.

Article 14 of the Statute allows a State Party to refer to the Prosecutor a situation in which one or more crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court appear to have been committed, and may request the Prosecutor to investigate the situation to determine whether any specific persons should be charged with the commission of such crimes.

No referral has been made by South Africa.

In June 2023, the Netherlands and Canada initiated proceedings against Syria in the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Six months later the ICJ ordered that provisional measures be taken.

The ICJ ordered Syria to take all measures within its power to prevent torture and other cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment or punishment. Second, it required Syria to take effective measures to prevent the destruction of property and to preserve evidence linked to allegations of torture. The generalised nature of these measures, however, did not accord with the reality on the ground. The ICJ also failed to pass specific measures concerning enforced disappearances.

No obligation to report progress regularly to the ICJ was included, contrary to the cases ofThe Gambia v. Myanmar (2020), Azerbaijan v. Armenia (2023), and South Africa v. Israel(2024).

The Atlantic said: “The lack of ambition from the Court regarding Syria is quite distressing and leading to a form of general passiveness towards the Syrian conflict that ultimately only favours the Syrian regime’s atrocities.”  

The most recent report by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic (February 2024) confirmed the regime’s ongoing practices of torture, arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance, deaths in government custody, including in Saydnaya.

The Atlantic also said that the South Africa v. Israel case provided lessons about bold steps taken by the ICJ to address Israel’s alleged lack of compliance with its order. “Most importantly, it constantly and immediately responded to changes in the ground that required the ICJ’s attention…” 

Pretoria made two requests, in March and May 2024, for additional provisional measures, in addition to a request to urgently re-assess the initial order given in February 2024. 

Oh, the shame!
Nothing needs to be said here about the vastly different approach South Africa and others took in referring Israel to the ICC a mere 40 days after Hamas’s invasion of Israel on 7 October.

There is also nothing to be said about South Africa’s referral of Israel to the ICJ six days after its referral to the ICC.

As Johnson says: “How did it come about that South Africa has been shouting from the rooftops about the ‘genocide’ in Gaza while actually supporting the next-door regime in Syria which was killing and torturing many times more of its own citizens. The sheer hypocrisy of this stand is breath-taking.” 

Note: The Gaddafi Resolution
In August 2011 Gaddafi fled to Sirte (his home town) from Tripoli. In October, when the opposition forces of the National Transitional Council (NTC) occupied the area Gaddafi attempted to escape in a 75 vehicle convoy. A Royal Air Force reconnaissance  flight spotted the convoy. NATO and French aircraft, and an American drone bombed the convoy, which  the NTC also attacked. 

The convoy then split and when the car in front of Gaddafi’s was destroyed, he and others took shelter in a house. NATO said it was not aware that Gaddafi was in the convoy. The house was shelled by NTC forces, and Gaddafi crawled into a drainage pipe. NTC fighters opened fire, wounding Gaddafi. The NTC allege that one of Gaddafi’s own loyalists also shot him, to avoid his capture.

In 2012 a UN report said that a grenade thrown by one of his own men left him dazed and bleeding from his temple. A senior NTC official said that no order was given to execute Gaddafi. Another NTC source said they captured him alive and while he was taken away, they beat him up and then killed him. The NTC Prime Minister said that Gaddafi’s moving car was caught in the crossfire between NTC and Gaddafi’s forces when a bullet struck his head.

The ANC said that Western planes were not authorised to take military action against Gaddafi; the resolution should only have justified military action to protect the civilian opposition, but Nato-led military forces had abused the resolution to topple Gaddafi.] 

Sara Gon rants professionally to rail against the illiberalism of everything

https://www.biznews.com/rational-perspective/2025/01/14/sara-gon-defending-the-indefensible-sa-support-syria

This article was first published on the Daily Friend.