SETF team honored for work

A Hot Springs native was among a Syrian advocacy group recently presented an international peace award in Germany.

Lakeside High School graduate Mouaz Moustafa has been executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force since he helped found the organization in 2012. Natalie Larrison, a fellow graduate of Lakeside and the University of Central Arkansas in Conway joined the SETF in early 2016 as director of outreach.

The organization helped smuggle a former Syrian Military Police photographer, who assumed the pseudonym of Caesar, out of Syria with a file of almost 55,000 photographs documenting victims of abuse and torture in Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's prisons during the ongoing civil war. Moustafa is a member of the Caesar Team, a group of volunteers working to identify victims in the photographs.

The Caesar Team was presented the 2017 Nuremberg International Human Rights Award on Sept. 24 for its "courage in bringing the systematic torture and mass murders in Syria to the attention of the world public," according to the Nuremberg International Human Rights Film Festival.

"No impunity for the perpetrators -- this objective motivated 'Caesar' and so this year's award presentation closes the link to Nuremberg's heritage," Ulrich Maly, mayor of Nuremberg, said. "He himself has also said why he risked his own life in the face of this everyday horror, 'Truth will prevail.' A right is only lost if nobody stands up for it any more."

Garance Le Caisne, author of the book "Operation Caesar. In the Heart of the Syrian Death Machine," accepted the prize on behalf of the team. Stephen Rapp, former chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and Special Court for Sierra Leone, held a tribute for the prizewinners.

"This honor is extended to all of those who have worked to bring awareness and shed light on the behavior of the Syrian government, who have documented the torture and death of thousands of civilians in Syria and the processes they have used to manipulate false death certificates and confessions from the incarcerated," the SETF said in a statement.

At least 500,000 Syrians are estimated to have died so far in the Syrian Civil War since the conflict began in 2011. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights recently reported September was the deadliest month of the conflict in 2017 with more than 3,300 killed, including almost 1,000 civilians.

About half the more than 14 million civilians displaced by the war have become international refugees throughout the world. Syria's population was about 22 million before the war began.

Caesar's photographs have been displayed throughout the world, including in a prominent exhibit in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The SETF issued a special thanks to the museum for the display and the many events it has hosted surrounding the search for justice for the victims who "disappeared" in Syria.

"We'd also like to recognize the journalists and documentarians who have revealed 'Caesar's' story to publications so that more people may be aware of the atrocities occurring under our nos es in Syria," the SETF statement said.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the president of Germany, thanked the team for its work in the name of human rights.

"The fact that the Nuremberg Human Rights Award is shining light on Syria this year is most welcome," Steinmeier said. "This year's prizewinner, the Caesar group, has courageously pursued the cause of human rights -- in spite of the threats to its members' own security in the midst of this brutal civil war, which has now been raging for six years.

"Through photographs taken in secret, it has documented how people are suffering torture, executions and abuse in Syrian prisons, images that are helping to prevent these crimes from going unpunished. Moreover, they are a harrowing reminder and an appeal to the international community, as well as to the actors in the region in particular, namely that you bear responsibility. This conflict can only be brought to an end by balancing political interests -- and not by bleeding an entire country dry."

Local on 10/07/2017

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