(Geneva) Exiled Syrian sculptor Khaled Dawwa destroyed his giant work “The King of Holes” in front of the UN on Friday, depicting a potentate with a massive body, to denounce the tens of thousands of people who have disappeared in his home country.
Some relatives of people who disappeared in Syria were also present on the emblematic Place des Nations, on the occasion of the international day of the disappeared.
“We are here to protest against the system, to say that enough is enough. We have the right to know the truth,” Khaled Dawwa, who lives in France, told AFP.
He destroyed his work with hammers and saws.
The giant sculpture made of wood, foam and plaster, whose legs, face and hands are riddled with holes, weighs 700 kg and is 3.5 m high.
Khaled Dawwa built it in 2021 in Paris, but a month ago, the Syria Campaign movement proposed to destroy it in front of the UN in Geneva, on the occasion of the International Day of the Disappeared.
“This statue does not only represent the Assad regime which is primarily responsible for the detention of our loved ones,” Wafa Mustafa of the Syria Campaign told AFP.
“She also represents the international community and the UN that have failed us for the past 13 years” and “that have taken no real action to stop the massacre in Syria and to give Syrians their fundamental rights: freedom, dignity and the rule of law,” denounced the 34-year-old woman, who knows nothing about her father’s fate in Syria. She has had no news of him since his arrest in 2013.
Pain
Ahmad Helmi, 34, also fled Syria after being held there for three years. Having come to Geneva to help Khaled Dawwa destroy the statue, he explains that “the pain felt during three years of prison and torture is nothing compared to the pain felt every day” by his mother while he was missing.
“Hundreds of thousands of families and mothers are experiencing the same pain today in Syria and around the world,” he added.
The war in Syria, sparked by the repression of protests in 2011, has killed more than half a million people, displaced millions and fragmented the country.
According to NGOs, some 100,000 people have since disappeared in this Middle Eastern country, victims of repression or kidnapped by factions fighting against the regime.
From the beginning of the revolution in 2011, he participated in the demonstrations. Seriously injured in May 2013 in his workshop by bullet fragments from a regime helicopter, Khaled Dawwa was imprisoned upon leaving the hospital before being sent to the army, which he deserted to come to France in 2014.