Who will take on Assad?
Jun 16th 2011 | from the print edition
THE comparison with Libya is irresistible. Colonel Muammar Qaddafi and Syria’s President Bashar Assad are both odious dictators.
The colonel is a lot crazier, has been in charge a lot longer, has killed a lot more people over the years, and has drawn up a far longer list of enemies at home and abroad. But Mr Assad, who has run Syria since his long-ruling father, Hafez, died in 2000, inherited a regime that has been just as nasty.
Jun 16th 2011 | from the print edition
THE comparison with Libya is irresistible. Colonel Muammar Qaddafi and Syria’s President Bashar Assad are both odious dictators.
The colonel is a lot crazier, has been in charge a lot longer, has killed a lot more people over the years, and has drawn up a far longer list of enemies at home and abroad. But Mr Assad, who has run Syria since his long-ruling father, Hafez, died in 2000, inherited a regime that has been just as nasty.
Assad père notoriously butchered perhaps as many as 20,000 people in the city of Hama in 1982. The son is surrounded by the same clique of greedy gangsters, many of them his close relations, who have routinely used assassination, imprisonment and torture as instruments of rule. And since Syria’s protesters have started to express their democratic yearning, Mr Assad has been matching Colonel Qaddafi’s brutality.
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| Mass march in Jisr al-Shughour highlights Syria's unity against conspiracies |
Human-rights groups reckon his security forces have killed at least 1,300 Syrians, most of them civilians. The tempo of repression is quickening (see article). Moreover, the unrest and the violence seem to be spreading; the opposition says that on Friday June 10th demonstrators rose up in no fewer than 138 places.
The NATO campaign against Colonel Qaddafi has saved many lives in Libya—even though he clings on to power. Seeing that outsiders have intervened to stop the butchery and, by extension, to remove the tyrant from power in one Arab country, why should they not dish out the same salutary treatment to Syria and Mr Assad?
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| Tens of thousands participate in Syrian Youth Gathering activities in Aleppo to stress full support to national unity, refusal to foreign interference |
Liberal intervention is not about charging blindly in, but about using force judiciously when possible. Whereas Libya, though vast in desert area, is a country of 6m-plus fairly homogeneous people living on a narrow coastal strip, Syria is a web of religions and sects embracing 21m people scattered across an area that abuts the Middle East’s most combustible flashpoints, including Israel, Lebanon and Iraq.
The intensification of sectarian strife that might well accompany a military intervention in Syria could light a fuse in neighbouring Lebanon, where tensions in an even more complex sectarian labyrinth keep the country smouldering at the best of times. Iraq has long suffered from the infiltration of jihadists from Syria, who might be emboldened if the Assad regime were to fall. As for Israel, Syria is still technically at war with it, though the Assads have been canny enough, on the whole, not to tempt it into using its full military might against them.
But instability in Damascus is already causing ructions on the Israeli-Syrian border.
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| People of Jisr al-Shughour Denounce TV Fabrications on them being Attacked by Army |
Finally, there is Turkey, which for many years got on badly with Syria, but which more recently managed a rapprochement. However, in the past fortnight, since thousands of terrified Syrians have fled across the border into Turkey, relations have sharply worsened. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s recently re-elected prime minister, has turned against Mr Assad. There has even been talk of Turkey creating a haven for those refugees, which would inevitably become a source of tension and even violence. In sum, Syria is a regional snake-pit in which few neighbours—or outsiders from farther afield—would be wise to dangle their toes.
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| Popular Rally at al-Salamiya Affirms Loyalty to Syria, Adherence to National Unity, Support for Reform Process, Rejection of Foreign Interference |
But Mr Assad must not get away with murder. Nor should he bank for ever on his old friends in Russia (with China standing by) to fend off condemnation in the UN Security Council. Sanctions against leading Syrians and firms linked to them may hurt a bit—and should be widened. But the best-placed people to make Mr Assad give ground are local—the Turks, the Gulf Co-operation Council with Saudi Arabia and Qatar to the fore, and the usually toothless but perhaps slowly stirring Arab League, which endorsed NATO’s intervention in Libya.
If he were sensible, Mr Assad would, under such neighbours’ pressure, agree to open talks with the gamut of liberals and socialists, secular-minded Syrians and Islamists, including the banned Muslim Brothers and the signatories of the admirable Damascus declaration, which united opposition calls for reform in 2005. As a precondition, all political parties and the media would be set free, and open elections promised within, say, a year. As things stand, Mr Assad will surely reject all such ideas out of hand. But the tide may be turning. If he refuses to budge, the Syrian people will bring him down in the end—on their own, and bloodily. | Misleading Media Bogged in Conspiracy against Syria
Jun 19, 2011
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DAMASCUS, (SANA)- It has become so evident by now that the misleading propaganda against Syria is being run by a media team equipped with media psychologists and propagandists who are in charge of picking names and labels for Fridays to incite people to go out on demonstrations.
What they choose are far more than mere labels used to call for protests. Rather, they are giving direct messages to those saboteurs and gunmen who are waiting to infiltrate into the gatherings and shoot at innocent citizens and the security and police forces.
The instigating TV channels wanted last Friday to be 'a bloody Friday' and that was the name they labeled it. Along with the naming was the reporting of varying figures of the martyrs and injuries which were intentionally multiplied by some channels to reach 16 and 25 by others, claiming they were all 'peaceful demonstrators' and purposely ignoring the security and police martyrs.
Those channels did not only redouble the number of martyrs which was 9 according to official figures. They turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to fact that all of the martyrs were killed in the gunmen attacks on pubic buildings after Friday Prayer, since such information do not serve their purpose of instigating, deciding instead to rely on unknown eyewitnesses who are instructed in black rooms to tell those channels what they want to hear.
It seems nothing should stand in the way of fulfilling their purposes, not even the journalism rules and ethics they claim in their work.
Credibility demands that a news item that was belied by those concerned and harmed because of it be given the same interest, time and coverage the false news was given in the first place.
Those channels, however, blatantly violated this rule when for instance they did not give voice to the residents of Jisr al-Shughour who belied in live videos and scenes what appeared on those same channels about being attacked and harassed by the security and army forces on their way back to their city they were forced to leave after they were terrorized by armed groups which committed atrocities in the city.
The citizens who almost daily tell stories of them being kidnapped by armed gangs and forced to film videotapes in which they act as detected military members are completely overlooked by those channels, which go beyond ignoring the facts to fabricate news on innocently dead persons and picture them as if they were killed at the hands of security forces.
Mohammad Akta' Abdul-Razzaq from Aleppo was a case in point, whose death of a heart attack was exploited to insinuate that the city is now on demonstrations.
While the presenter on one of those channels was making a hero of Hussein Abu al-Seif, an eyewitness supposedly talking from Jisr al-Shughour telling lies about the death of the family of Abu Haitham Qasqous who later dismissed the news as false to the Syrian TV, the presenter was surprised that his hero was spending the summer holiday on the Syrian-Turkish border.
Day after day, since the Syrian event came into the spotlight, the misleading ways of the instigating channels have been exposed to all as more and more critical voices are coming together to unmask the true face those channels hide behind.
H. Said
What they choose are far more than mere labels used to call for protests. Rather, they are giving direct messages to those saboteurs and gunmen who are waiting to infiltrate into the gatherings and shoot at innocent citizens and the security and police forces.
The instigating TV channels wanted last Friday to be 'a bloody Friday' and that was the name they labeled it. Along with the naming was the reporting of varying figures of the martyrs and injuries which were intentionally multiplied by some channels to reach 16 and 25 by others, claiming they were all 'peaceful demonstrators' and purposely ignoring the security and police martyrs.
Those channels did not only redouble the number of martyrs which was 9 according to official figures. They turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to fact that all of the martyrs were killed in the gunmen attacks on pubic buildings after Friday Prayer, since such information do not serve their purpose of instigating, deciding instead to rely on unknown eyewitnesses who are instructed in black rooms to tell those channels what they want to hear.
It seems nothing should stand in the way of fulfilling their purposes, not even the journalism rules and ethics they claim in their work.
Credibility demands that a news item that was belied by those concerned and harmed because of it be given the same interest, time and coverage the false news was given in the first place.
Those channels, however, blatantly violated this rule when for instance they did not give voice to the residents of Jisr al-Shughour who belied in live videos and scenes what appeared on those same channels about being attacked and harassed by the security and army forces on their way back to their city they were forced to leave after they were terrorized by armed groups which committed atrocities in the city.
The citizens who almost daily tell stories of them being kidnapped by armed gangs and forced to film videotapes in which they act as detected military members are completely overlooked by those channels, which go beyond ignoring the facts to fabricate news on innocently dead persons and picture them as if they were killed at the hands of security forces.
Mohammad Akta' Abdul-Razzaq from Aleppo was a case in point, whose death of a heart attack was exploited to insinuate that the city is now on demonstrations.
While the presenter on one of those channels was making a hero of Hussein Abu al-Seif, an eyewitness supposedly talking from Jisr al-Shughour telling lies about the death of the family of Abu Haitham Qasqous who later dismissed the news as false to the Syrian TV, the presenter was surprised that his hero was spending the summer holiday on the Syrian-Turkish border.
Day after day, since the Syrian event came into the spotlight, the misleading ways of the instigating channels have been exposed to all as more and more critical voices are coming together to unmask the true face those channels hide behind.
H. Said
- Churkin: Saboteur Members in Syrian Opposition Seek Chaos in Syria
- Lebanese al-Binaa newspaper: Crisis in Syria on its way to retreat
- Anatolia News Agency reporter: Armed groups prevail blood, smoke and fear in Syria's Jisr al-Shughour
- Damascus bishops condemn foreign interference in Syria's internal affairs
Uprooted Palestinian
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