Nora Al-Ameer Observes Hunger Strike in Solidarity with Prisoners in Homs

Nora Al-Ameer, vice president of the Syrian Coalition, has gone on hunger strike in solidarity with inmates of Homs Central Prison who has been observing hunger strike to demand their release. “It is shameful how human rights and international organizations insist on ignoring the appeals of arbitrarily detained prisoners in Assad’s jails. My hunger strike is not observed in solidarity with the prisoners in Homs only, but also to protest against the big prison in which all Syrians have become imprisoned in,” Al Ameer stresses. She earlier called on human rights organizations to take action and listen to the voices of hundreds of prisoners held in Homs as they went on a hunger strike in protest over the horrible treatment from regime’s security forces. Sources from inside the prison told the Media Office that prisoners declared disobedience warning of a very violent reaction from the prison guards. Al Ameer calls for putting an end to the Assad regime’s gross violations against detainees, imposition of health control over detention centers and allowing the Red Cross teams to enter prisons and detention centers. She pointed out that the number of women in Assad’s prisons is continuously growing, and that all the promises made to the detainees by the prison administration are still largely not fulfilled. Last August, the ‏‎Syrian Commission for Transitional Justice‎‏ released a report in cooperation with the Syrian Coalition to highlight the crimes of enforced disappearance towards the Syrian people. Ammar Tabbab, director of the Syrian Commission for Transitional Justice and director of the file of enforced disappearances, said that “the commission recorded more than 60,000 cases of forced disappearances in Syria, among them 6,722 people who were taken including, 1348 children and 1511 women. He also said that “while Syria is not the first country where forced disappearance is recorded, it is the only country where entire communities are forcibly disappeared,” citing the regime forces’ closing off of whole areas near Wadi al-Daif army base in Idlib province. Survivors who managed to flee these areas do not know the fate of their beloved ones. Examples of enforced disappearances have been corroborated by the 55,000 photos leaked by Caesar, leaving no room for doubt about the regime’s responsibility. However, the world choses to remain silent with a complete disregard for human lives. In contrast, the international community loses no time to declare war on ISIS, showing its double standards as it condones Assad’s crimes and choses to counter ISIS whose crimes are only an extension and reflection of those of the Assad regime. Ironically, the international community and the Assad regime are trying to find an excuse through enforced disappearance to extend the scope of the implementation of the UN resolution to Syria, namely the case of the American journalist James Foley, who was executed by ISIS after he went missing in the end of 2012, even before ISIS began to exist. The world’s silence over the photos of 11,000 detainees, leaked by Caesar, proves that in our world the decision to apply justice is determined by the victim’s nationality, as the 11,000 Syrian detainees were not a match to one U.S. national.” (Source: Syrian Coalition)