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Syrian Artist Destroys Statue Outside UN in Political Message

The United Nations flag flies at half-mast at the European headquarters, honouring the more than 100 employees killed in Gaza since the Israel-Hamas war began last month in Geneva, Switzerland, November 13, 2023. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse Purchase Licensing Rights
The United Nations flag flies at half-mast at the European headquarters, honouring the more than 100 employees killed in Gaza since the Israel-Hamas war began last month in Geneva, Switzerland, November 13, 2023. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse Purchase Licensing Rights
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Syrian Artist Destroys Statue Outside UN in Political Message

The United Nations flag flies at half-mast at the European headquarters, honouring the more than 100 employees killed in Gaza since the Israel-Hamas war began last month in Geneva, Switzerland, November 13, 2023. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse Purchase Licensing Rights
The United Nations flag flies at half-mast at the European headquarters, honouring the more than 100 employees killed in Gaza since the Israel-Hamas war began last month in Geneva, Switzerland, November 13, 2023. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse Purchase Licensing Rights

Syrian sculptor Khaled Dawwa on Friday destroyed his giant artwork outside the United Nations office in Geneva to denounce tens of thousands of enforced disappearances in Syria.

Using saws and hammers, relatives of disappeared Syrians helped the artist break apart the wood, plaster and foam statue on the International Day of the Disappeared.

"We are here to protest against the system, to say, 'enough'. We have a right to know the truth," the 39-year-old sculptor, who lives in exile in France, told AFP.

Dawwa's 3.5 metre (11ft 6 inch) - high colossus, "The King of Holes", depicted a potentate with a massive body, reflecting the artist's condemnation of oppressive power, before it was thrashed to pieces.

The idea for the protest came from rights group Syria Campaign, which suggested that Dawwa tear down the installation outside the UN headquarters.

He created it in 2021 in Paris with the intention of demolishing it later. "It is a fragile piece that is difficult to keep," he said.

Dawwa took part in Syria's demonstrations in 2012 that escalated into a bloody, protracted war.

He was in his studio in May 2013 when he was severely wounded by bullet fragments from a government helicopter and jailed for two months after leaving hospital. Echoing the conflict, the legs, face and arms of the artwork are riddled with small holes.

Amongst the rights campaigners on site was Wafa Mustafa, 34, who has not heard from her father since he was arrested in 2013.

"This statue, to all the Syrian families here, does not represent only the Assad regime" which is mainly "responsible for the detention of our loved ones", the Syria Campaign activist told AFP.

"But also it represents the international community and the UN that has failed us for the past 13 years" and "has not provided any real action to stop the massacre in Syria, and to give Syrians their basic human rights," she said.

Around 100,000 people have disappeared in the Syria as part of government repression or kidnappings by anti-regime militias, according to several non-profit organizations.

Ahmad Helmi, 34, said he had fled Syria after he was arrested by the country's secret services as a university student, and jailed for three years.

He followed Dawwa to Geneva to help him destroy the statue.

"The pain of three years in prison, three years of torture... doesn't count to one day of the pain my mum experienced every single day when I was disappeared," said Helmi.

"Hundreds of thousands of families and mothers are in Syria and around the world today experiencing the same pain," he added.

The Syrian war began after the repression of anti-government protests in 2011 and spiralled into a complex conflict drawing in foreign armies and militants, killing more than 500,000 people and displacing millions.

Dawwa says the statue's holes are like those made by "animals that eat wood".

"For me, that's like hope," he said. "There is always something that eats at it."

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Challenges of the Gaza Humanitarian Aid Pier Offer Lessons for the US Army

A truck carries humanitarian aid across Trident Pier, a temporary pier to deliver aid, off the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, near the Gaza coast, May 19, 2024. US Army Central/Handout via REUTERS
A truck carries humanitarian aid across Trident Pier, a temporary pier to deliver aid, off the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, near the Gaza coast, May 19, 2024. US Army Central/Handout via REUTERS
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Challenges of the Gaza Humanitarian Aid Pier Offer Lessons for the US Army

A truck carries humanitarian aid across Trident Pier, a temporary pier to deliver aid, off the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, near the Gaza coast, May 19, 2024. US Army Central/Handout via REUTERS
A truck carries humanitarian aid across Trident Pier, a temporary pier to deliver aid, off the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, near the Gaza coast, May 19, 2024. US Army Central/Handout via REUTERS

It was their most challenging mission.
US Army soldiers in the 7th Transportation Brigade had previously set up a pier during training and in exercises overseas but never had dealt with the wild combination of turbulent weather, security threats and sweeping personnel restrictions that surrounded the Gaza humanitarian aid project.
Designed as a temporary solution to get badly needed food and supplies to desperate Palestinians, the so-called Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore system, or JLOTS, faced a series of setbacks over the spring and summer. It managed to send more than 20 million tons of aid ashore for people in Gaza facing famine during the Israel-Hamas war.
Service members struggled with what Col. Sam Miller, who was commander during the project, called the biggest “organizational leadership challenge” he had ever experienced.
Speaking to The Associated Press after much of the unit returned home, Miller said the Army learned a number of lessons during the four-month mission. It began when President Joe Biden announced in his State of the Union speech in March that the pier would be built and lasted through July 17, when the Pentagon formally declared that the mission was over and the pier was being permanently dismantled.
The Army is reviewing the $230 million pier operation and what it learned from the experience. One of the takeaways, according to a senior Army official, is that the unit needs to train under more challenging conditions to be better prepared for bad weather and other security issues it faced. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because assessments of the pier project have not been publicly released.
In a report released this week, the inspector general for the US Agency for International Development said Biden ordered the pier's construction even as USAID staffers expressed concerns that it would be difficult and undercut a push to persuade Israel to open “more efficient” land crossings to get food into Gaza.
The Defense Department said the pier “achieved its goal of providing an additive means of delivering high volumes of humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza to help address the acute humanitarian crisis.” The US military knew from the outset “there would be challenges as part of this in this complex emergency,” the statement added.
The Biden administration had set a goal of the US sea route and pier providing food to feed 1.5 million people for 90 days. It fell short, bringing in enough to feed about 450,000 people for a month before shutting down, the USAID inspector general's report said.
The Defense Department’s watchdog also is doing an evaluation of the project.
Beefing up training Army soldiers often must conduct their exercises under difficult conditions designed to replicate war. Learning from the Gaza project — which was the first time the Army set up a pier in actual combat conditions — leaders say they need to find ways to make the training even more challenging.
One of the biggest difficulties of the Gaza pier mission was that no US troops could step ashore — a requirement set by Biden. Instead, US service members were scattered across a floating city of more than 20 ships and platforms miles offshore that had to have food, water, beds, medical care and communications.
Every day, said Miller, there were as many as 1,000 trips that troops and other personnel made from ship to boat to pier to port and back.
“We were moving personnel around the sea and up to the Trident pier on a constant basis,” Miller said. “And every day, there was probably about a thousand movements taking place, which is quite challenging, especially when you have sea conditions that you have to manage.”
Military leaders, he said, had to plan three or four days ahead to ensure they had everything they needed because the trip from the pier to their “safe haven” at Israel's port of Ashdod was about 30 nautical miles.
The trip over and back could take up to 12 hours, in part because the Army had to sail about 5 miles out to sea between Ashdod and the pier to stay a safe distance from shore as they passed Gaza City, Miller said.
Normally, Miller said, when the Army establishes a pier, the unit sets up a command onshore, making it much easier to store and access supplies and equipment or gather troops to lay out orders for the day.
Communication difficulties While his command headquarters was on the US military ship Roy P. Benavidez, Miller said he was constantly moving with his key aides to the various ships and the pier.
“I slept and ate on every platform out there,” he said.
The US Army official concurred that a lot of unexpected logistical issues came up that a pier operation may not usually include.
Because the ships had to use the Ashdod port and a number of civilian workers under terms of the mission, contracts had to be negotiated and written. Agreements had to be worked out so vessels could dock, and workers needed to be hired for tasks that troops couldn't do, including moving aid onto the shore.
Communications were a struggle.
“Some of our systems on the watercraft can be somewhat slower with bandwidth, and you’re not able to get up to the classified level,” Miller said.
He said he used a huge spreadsheet to keep track of all the ships and floating platforms, hundreds of personnel and the movement of millions of tons of aid from Cyprus to the Gaza shore.
When bad weather broke the pier apart, they had to set up ways to get the pieces moved to Ashdod and repaired. Over time, he said, they were able to hire more tugs to help move sections of the pier more quickly.
Some of the pier's biggest problems — including the initial reluctance of aid agencies to distribute supplies throughout Gaza and later safety concerns from the violence — may not apply in other operations where troops may be quickly setting up a pier to get military forces ashore for an assault or disaster response.
“There’s tons of training value and experience that every one of the soldiers, sailors and others got out of this,” Miller said. "There’s going to be other places in the world that may have similar things, but they won’t be as tough as the things that we just went through.”
When the time comes, he said, “we’re going to be much better at doing this type of thing.”
One bit of information could have given the military a better heads-up about the heavy seas that would routinely hammer the pier. Turns out, said the Army official, there was a Gaza surf club, and its headquarters was near where they built the pier.
That "may be an indicator that the waves there were big,” the official said.