UN Monitors Survey Aftermath of Qubair Attack

By ⋅ June 8, 2012 ⋅ Post a comment
UN vehicle in Syria (BBC video)

UN vehicle in Syria (BBC video)

UN monitors in Syria encountered appalling scenes Friday after reaching the site where a massacre was reported this week. The monitors had been stopped from entering the village on Thursday.

Anchor Marco Werman speaks with the BBC’s Paul Danahar who is traveling with the UN team.

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Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman. This is The World. United Nations monitors in Syria reached the village of Kubeer today. That’s the site of the latest reported massacre of civillians. Opposition activists say some eighty people were killed, many of them women and children. The BBC’s Paul Danahar is travelling with the UN team. So, UN monitors were stoppped, Paul, entering Kubeer today, they were even fired upon. What happened today?

Paul Danahar: Today they came to the village and they saw some appalling things. It was a small hamlet on the top of a hill in a very rural area. There were two houses, both single-story, both made of frieze block, and both holding appalling terrors. In the first one I came to, the inside of the house had been gutted by fire, but the stench of burnt flesh was still hanging in the air. In the second house it was even worse. A large pool of blood, there were pieces of flesh in amongst discarded possessions. What we didn’t find were bodies of people, they’d all been taken away. What we did find were the bodies of livestock. It seemed the people that went into this village killed everything that moved.

Werman: Now the government maintains it wasn’t their forces who killed the residents of Kubeer, but rather terrorists and that’s been kind of the standard line throughout much of this conflict. Help us understand what international monitors are hoping to determine by investigating these alleged massacres, I mean there have been four in the past two weeks.

Danahar: Yeah, and to be honest, investigation is a bit of a loose term in the sense of what they’re able to do, because frankly all they can do is what we do. They can go to these places. They can document what they see, they can talk to local villagers, and they can write a report, but they don’t have a forensic team to carry out an investigation, they don’t have a police team to carry out an investigation. To be fair to the UN, they are doing a very difficult and dangerous task, unarmed, in areas where they’re not wanted. So the best they can do is basically tell the outside world what they’ve found and leave the outside world and the United Nations Security Council to draw their conclusions and take their action.

Werman: Is there any sort of follow up to these kind of monitoring missions? I mean, to they now talk to Assad, do they brief him?

Danahar: Yes, when we left some people behind when we left to carry on their investigation. They will take their initial conclusions to the authorities. They will ask them to explain what they were doing. What they will be asking them to explain is why there were clearly military tracks on the tarmac outside this village. These were, the UN told me, from the armored personell carriers or tanks. The army were there. And there army are now going to have to explain why they were there, and where the bodies are of the people that were butchered.

Werman: And what about the people, or survivors, in Kubeer? Once the UN monitors leave, what about their safety?

Danahar: Well, that’s the problem isn’t it? The question is, how honest can you be when you know that the UN teams are going to leave? To be fair, the people who spoke to us were very honest. They said that it was villagers from a nearby Alawite community, basically a militia group, who came in and killed these people, and that they had the protection of the army outside. Now we can’t verify that. The army said that’s not true. They said that they went in there after the terrorists killed some people and they then killed the terrorists themselves. But the mere fact that the UN couldn’t get in there for 24 hours, the fact that there are no bodies there to examine, and that there are army tracks on the side of the road leaves the questioning to the Syrian regime. They have to answer where the bodies have gone, why the army were there and what they did.

Werman: The BBC’s Paul Danahar speaking with us after visiting the village of Kubeer, the scene of the latest massacre reported in Syria.

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