Hey Muslim World–Where is the Condemnation?

The call came after The New York Times reported on Monday that an online video showed a 13-year-old boy, arrested at a protest on April 29, who it said had been tortured, mutilated and killed before his body was returned to his family.

Protests against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad broke out in southern Syria in March and have spread across the country. Human rights groups say 1,000 civilians have been killed and 10,000 arrested in a government crackdown.

In a statement, UNICEF said use of live ammunition against demonstrators had reportedly killed at least 30 children, although it said it could not independently confirm that figure or the circumstances of their death.

The agency said it was “particularly disturbed by the recent video images of children who were arbitrarily detained and suffered torture or ill-treatment during their detention leading in some cases to their death.”

“We call on the government to thoroughly investigate these reports and ensure that perpetrators of such horrific acts are identified and brought to justice,” it added.
UNICEF did not specifically cite the case reported by The New York Times, involving Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, arrested in Jiza, a village near the southern city of Deraa, where the protests first erupted.

Video posted online (link requires a sign-in because of the graphic nature of the images) shows his battered, discolored face. His skin is scrawled with cuts, gashes, deep burns and bullet wounds that would probably have injured but not killed, The New York Times reported. According to an unidentifed narrator, his jaw and kneecaps are shattered, and his penis chopped off.

“These are the reforms of the treacherous Bashar,” the narrator says in the video. “Where are human rights? Where are the international criminal tribunals?”
Relatives told Al Jazeera that the boy’s parents were shocked when they saw their boy, who reportedly spent about a month in the custody of Syrian security forces.

“When Hamza’s mother came to see the body she was only shown his face,” a cousin, who was present at the time, told Al Jazeera.

“We tried to tell the father not to look, but he pulled the blanket back. When he saw Hamza’s body he fainted. People ran to help him and some started filming – it was chaos.”

The reported torture demonstrates a “total collapse” of the Syrian government’s willingness to listen to its people, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“President Assad has a choice, and every day that goes by the choice is made by default. He has not called an end to the violence against his own people, and he has not engaged seriously in any kind of reform efforts,” she added.

“Every day that goes by the position of the government becomes less tenable and the demands of the Syrian people for change only grow stronger,” Clinton said.
UNICEF reminded Syria Tuesday that as a party to the 1990 U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, it was bound to ensure children’s right to life, to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, and protection from violence, exploitation and abuse.