Il aura donc fallu deux ans pour que quelqu’un nous explique que sur les 53.275 photos de « César », 24.568 sont des photos de soldats de l’armée syrienne et des services de sécurité, et de gens tués (on ne se demande curieusement pas par qui) dans des attentats, attaques, voitures piégées… Pour les 28.707 autres images de cadavres, HRW « comprend » qu’ils sont morts entre les mains du régime ; et plus précisément, HRW a réellement enquêté sur… 27 personnes tuées.
Je ne doute pas que le régime syrien pratique la torture et les exécutions sommaires à large échelle (« avant 2011 », la Syrie faisait même partie, nous disait-on, des pays vers lesquels les États-Unis envoyaient des gens se faire torturer dans le cadre des extraordinary rendition). Mais si un site « hum-hum » avait expliqué, depuis 2 ans, que la moitié des photos de César étaient en réalité des cadavres de gens « du côté » du régime, et que seuls 27 cas étaient réellement identifiés, tu ne l’aurais pas cru (je pense qu’on aurait trouvé que ce genre d’affirmation aurait relevé de la paranoïa complotante).
If the Dead Could Speak
►https://www.hrw.org/node/284486
The largest category of photographs, 28,707 images, are photographs of people Human Rights Watch understands to have died in government custody, either in one of several detention facilities or after being transferred to a military hospital. What distinguishes this batch of photographs is that all the bodies in them have identification numbers, typically three separate numbers, either written directly on the body or on a paper that is placed on the body or held in the photograph frame. There are multiple photographs of each body, typically four to five but ranging between three to more than twenty. SAFMCD, which reviewed the entire collection and logged the photographs by individual body, found that these 28,707 photographs correspond to at least 6,786 separate dead individuals each with their own unique identification numbers.
The second category of photographs are images of dead army soldiers or members of the security forces. These photographs were also taken in the morgues of military hospitals. However, unlike the first batch, the cards on these photographs include the name of the person who died, and sometimes the date of their death. In many cases, their name is prefaced by the word shahid, or martyr, in Arabic, as well as by their military rank. In addition to the cards, their name, the word shahid, and their military rank also often appear in the file name.
The third category of photographs taken by the Syrian Military Police can be described as crime scene photographs taken in the aftermath of attacks and cover several categories of incidents including the aftermath of explosions, assassinations of security officers, fires, and car bombs. The name of the folder in which sets of photographs were saved indicates the type of incident, the date, and sometimes, the name of the victim. Human Rights Watch was able to confirm some of these incidents and killings, which were covered in the Syrian media at the time they occurred and provide further evidence as to the authenticity of the photographs.
[…]
To verify the photographs, Human Rights Watch conducted in depth investigations into the cases of 27 deaths in detention of people whose bodies appeared in the photographs. The investigations included examination of evidence provided by families of the deceased and fellow detainees. Human Rights Watch also examined photographs of the 27 detainees before their arrest and compared them to the photographs of their dead bodies smuggled out of Syria by Caesar.
