Some 120 personalities from academia and culture call on France to
"immediately repatriate"
French children retained with their mothers in Syrian camps where they
"perish slowly"
, in a column published Friday by
Le Monde
.
Read also: Women and children detained in Syria: French lawyers seize the ICC
“These children are innocent. They did not choose to go to Syria or to be born in a war zone or in these camps ”,
underline in this appeal the signatories, among which the actresses Sandrine Bonnaire and Audrey Fleurot, the directors Ariane Mnouchkine and Jean-Michel Ribes or the directors Costa Gavras, Claude Lelouch and Robert Guediguian.
"They are victims that France abandons by making them pay for the choice of their parents,"
they continue.
200 children detained ISIS
About 200 children and 80 French women have been detained since the fall in March 2019 of
the
Islamic State group's
“caliphate”
in Syria, in camps in the northeast of the country controlled by the Kurds. Paris has so far maintained a case-by-case return policy for these children - 35, mostly orphans, have been repatriated so far - and considers that the adults should be tried on the spot.
"Letting these children perish in these camps is unworthy of our rule of law and contrary to our international commitments",
they believe, while judging that
"to repatriate them without their mothers, as some States would like, does not respond to the best interests of those children ”.
"These French children, the vast majority of whom are under 6 years old, bear the scars of their injuries and traumas"
, they still observe, stressing that they did not receive
"any appropriate care"
and were
" not in school ”
. The appeal, also signed by two fathers of victims of the Bataclan attack on November 13, 2015 or the former French ambassador to Syria Michel Duclos, indicates that
“these women and children are all or almost all (.. .) remained crammed into cells of a few square meters, without being able to wash themselves or to eat their fill, for weeks and sometimes months ”.
Some of these signatories, such as the writer Marie Despleschin or the actor Bruno Raffaelli, member of the Comédie Française, will participate on Monday in a conference on the subject organized at the Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris by the International Federation of Human Rights. Homme (FIDH) and the Human Rights League (LDH). Recently, Germany, Finland and the Netherlands have carried out repatriations. Denmark and Belgium have for their part announced that they are preparing for the return of their children.
