On last April 8, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay was quoted as saying in a briefing to the UN Security Council that the actions of the forces of the Syrian government "far outweigh" the crimes by the "opposition" fighters.
Statistics Tell a Different Story
However, scrutiny of the statistics of the death toll and the facts of the humanitarian fallout of the conflict tell a different story. On this May 19, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said it had documented more than 162,000 deaths in the conflict until this May 17, more than 61 thousand of them were government troops, 42,701 rebels and more than 1600 foreign fighters; SOHR believes that both sides of the combat strongly tend to be very conservative about their human casualties. The rest were civilians many of whom were victims of suicide bombing and mortar shells fired by the rebels.
The breakdown of these figures show the government a victim rather than a culprit and indicate that the actions of the rebels "far outweigh" those of the government, contrary to Navi Pillay's conclusion.
"Questioning the Syrian 'Casualty List'" in the Lebanese Alakhbar on February 28, 2012, Sharmine Narwani documented that, "The very first incident of casualties from the Syrian regular army that I could verify dates to 10 April 2011, when gunmen shot up a bus of soldiers travelling through Banyas, in Tartous, killing nine," i.e. few weeks after the first peaceful protests broke out in Syria, a fact which questions the now wrongfully accepted public knowledge that the government was the party who initiated the "violence."
The communique issued by the eleven western and Arab foreign ministers of the core group of the so-called "Friends of Syria" after their meeting in London on this May 15 was the latest example of the political motives behind the blackout, which they have imposed for too long on the insurgents' responsibility.
They called the upcoming presidential elections on next June 3 "illegitimate" and a "parody of democracy," ignoring the fact that any power vacuum in Syria would only create the right environment for the collapse of the central government. The inevitable result would be an exacerbation of the humanitarian crisis in the country, rendering their humanitarian rhetoric a parody of humanity.Worse still, the eleven "Friends of Syria" had "agreed unanimously" to boost their support to what they described as "the moderate opposition National Coalition (SNC), its Supreme Military Council and associated moderate armed groups."
What "moderates" did they refer to? On last September 25 the BBC quoted a recent study published by IHS Jane's analyst Charles Lister, which concluded that, "the core of the Syrian insurgency is composed of Islamist groups of one kind or another." "The armed opposition is all too much a part of the conflict," Red Maistre wrote in The Northern Star four days later.
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