A special United Nations mission has just published a report denouncing the crimes suffered by the Kurds in Syria, in areas controlled by the Kurdish army.
Didier François, specialist in international issues in Europe 1, deciphers on Wednesday the content of this long-term investigation, carried out in the field for nearly six months.
ANALYSIS
The Kurds, eternally forgotten by history, are also its victims.
These are the conclusions of a damning report released Tuesday by the United Nations Human Rights Council *.
He denounces the terrible crimes committed in Syria, in the Kurdish areas occupied by the Turkish army.
This relentless investigation, carried out on the ground for almost six months, yielded terrifying testimonies.
These are simply chilling accounts of survivors who tell in a very clinical way the torture inflicted by the Turkish army's auxiliary militias on Kurdish civilians.
The latter were arrested in a massive and perfectly arbitrary manner in the regions of northern Syria, occupied after the offensives of 2018, then of 2019.
Gang rapes, expropriations ...
We read there pain, isolation, hunger, thirst and daily persecution, without rules and without limits, to the point of madness or death.
Above all, we perceive a desire to humiliate and break down all resistance.
This is what emerges extremely strikingly from these dozens of exceptional testimonies, because the regions of Afrin and Raïs al-Aïn have been practically inaccessible since they came under Turkish control.
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Reading this document, we discover that militiamen trained and supervised by soldiers from a NATO member country, which is demanding membership of the European Union, behave like vulgar jihadists.
The use of rape is systematic, with collective rapes of women, often in front of their husbands and children, in front of their families and their neighbors.
It is a weapon of war.
True ethnic cleansing
Looting, expropriation, confiscation of property, farms, houses and fields are also part of the panoply of militias to impose their law on the Kurds.
All this aims to instill a terror to force the departure and flight of the Kurdish populations from these border areas of Turkey.
You have to call a spade a spade: that's the definition of ethnic cleansing.
The report considers that Turkey's involvement is "total", firstly because Erdogan's country is legally responsible for the treatment of civilians in those areas of which it is the occupying military power, according to the rules of the Convention of Geneva.
Secondly, because Turkish officials are involved in these war crimes in a very direct way, which makes them liable to prosecution before the authorities of international justice.
* This 25-page United Nations report can be found here, in English.