Category Archives: Arab Spring

Arab League votes to suspend Syria over crackdown

The New York Times reports: The Arab League moved to suspend Syria’s membership on Saturday, accusing the government of President Bashar al-Assad of defying an agreement to stop the violent repression of demonstrators, and it threatened economic and political sanctions if he did not comply.

In acting against Syria, a core member of the Arab League, the group took another bold step beyond what had been a long tradition of avoiding controversy. Alarmed by the region-spanning upheaval of the Arab Spring demonstrations, league delegates said they were trying to head off another factional war like Libya’s, in which the group took the unprecedented step of approving international intervention.

Syria’s formal suspension is to start in four days, offering what senior Arab League officials described as a last chance for Mr. Assad to carry out a peace agreement his government had accepted. The plan called for the Syrian government to halt the violence directed toward civilians, to withdraw all its security forces from civilian areas and to release tens of thousands of political prisoners.

Throughout the meeting, the Syrian ambassador, Youssef Ahmed, kept shouting that the move was illegal because such a decision had to be unanimous, participants said. He later repeated the claim on state television and accused the league of being “subordinate to American and Western agendas.” Nabil el-Araby, the Arab League’s secretary general, pushed the initiative to a vote, with 18 of the league’s 22 members supporting the action, Yemen and Lebanon opposing, Iraq abstaining and Syria not voting at all.

“We are hoping for a daring move from Syria to halt the violence and to begin a real dialogue toward real reform,” said Sheik Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr al-Thani, the prime minister and foreign minister of Qatar, as well as the current league chairman.

Facebooktwittermail

Occupy Wall Street sending envoys to Egypt

Megan Robertson, a digital producer for DylanRatigan.com, reports: At Thursday’s General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street in New York, a resolution was passed to allocate $29,000 to pay to send approximately 20 “OWS Ambassadors” to act as international observers in the Egyptian elections.

The Movement Building group of OWS brought this up to the GA after being contacted by a representative of a coalition of Egyptian civil society monitors, inviting the NY occupation to send representatives to help observe the elections.
[…]
While we don’t yet know what this means for Occupy Wall Street, it’s certainly a bold move — and one that could play out in several ways once they land in Egypt.

“It sounds like a brilliant move, in terms of Egyptian politics,” says Dr. Nathan Brown, professor of political science at George Washington University, and expert on Egyptian government and politics.

“Here’s the problem. Election monitoring in Egypt has always been a big issue. The country under the authoritarian regime has always been hostile to any kind of international monitoring role. After the revolution, essentially what the Egyptians brought in was a system of judicial monitoring of the elections. The judges themselves are not really interested in any international monitoring, and military rulers have been hostile to it as well,” says Dr. Borwn.

Strong nationalist sentiment within Egypt will also play a role, but could be a positive one.

“The world monitoring, in Arabic, can also mean”oversight” or “control.” “Monitors” sound like people who are coming in to take over. Now, there’s some sort of nationalist pride that can be set off — Egyptians may see it as, well, we’re teaching the Americans for a change. It can play into that very easily,” says Dr. Brown. “It’s a good political move because its an effective way to have a retort to the nationalist argument against monitoring.”

As far as the purpose of international monitors at the elections, they may not be able to play a huge role, but can still have an effect. “They can probably do a lot of seeing and watching the general atmosphere, but as far as being inside the polling places, there won’t be a lot of role for them. What groups of international monitors do, though, is provide a very effective cover for domestic monitoring efforts,” Dr. Brown explained.

Facebooktwittermail

Syria: Crimes against humanity in Homs

Human Rights Watch: The systematic nature of abuses against civilians in Homs by Syrian government forces, including torture and unlawful killings, indicate that crimes against humanity have been committed, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today. Human Rights Watch urged the Arab League, meeting in Cairo on November 12, 2011, to suspend Syria’s membership in the League and to ask the United Nations Security Council to impose an arms embargo and sanctions against individuals responsible for the violations, and refer Syria to the International Criminal Court.

The 63-page report, “‘We Live as in War’: Crackdown on Protesters in the Governorate of Homs,” is based on more than 110 interviews with victims and witnesses from Homs, both the city and the surrounding governorate of the same name. The area has emerged as a center of opposition to the government of President Bashar al-Assad. The report focuses on violations by Syrian security forces from mid-April to the end of August, during which time security forces killed at least 587 civilians, the highest number of casualties for any single governorate.

Security forces have killed at least another 104 people in Homs since November 2, when the Syrian government agreed to the Arab League initiative for a political solution. Arab foreign ministers will meet in an emergency session on November 12 to discuss Syria’s failure to comply with the Arab League initiative.

“Homs is a microcosm of the Syrian government’s brutality,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The Arab League needs to tell President Assad that violating their agreement has consequences, and that it now supports Security Council action to end the carnage.”

Homs has emerged as the most restive governorate in Syria since anti-government protests erupted in mid-March. Human Rights Watch documented dozens of incidents in which security forces and government-supported militias violently attacked and dispersed overwhelmingly peaceful protests. A woman who participated with her 3-year-old son in a protest in the Homs neighborhood of Bab Dreib on August 15 described how they came under attack:

We went out in a peaceful protest with the whole family about 10:30 or 11 p.m. It was calm, so everything seemed ok. Then two cars showed up suddenly and opened fire, targeting people even as they were ducking and lying on the ground. They were white Kia Cerato cars with tinted windows, like those used by Air Force intelligence. The guns were machine guns. My husband leaned over our son to protect him, but the bullet entered our boy’s stomach. The doctors were able to remove the bullet, but it left a lot of damage.

Security forces have also conducted large-scale military operations in several towns in the governorate, including Tal Kalakh and Talbiseh as well as the city of Homs, resulting in many deaths and injuries. Typically, security forces used heavy machine guns, including anti-aircraft guns mounted on armored vehicles, to fire into neighborhoods to frighten people before entering with armored personnel carriers and other military vehicles. They cut off communications and established checkpoints restricting movement in and out of neighborhoods and the delivery of food and medicine. One resident of Bab Sba`, a part of the city particularly affected by the violence, described how security forces encircled the neighborhood:

Security forces blocked off Bab Sba` completely on July 21. Cars trying to get through were shot at from heavy military vehicles and pedestrians and bicycles were shot at by snipers. When we tried to bring food and medicine into the area on the morning of July 21, security forces opened fire. They killed one person, wounded a second, and arrested the third.

As in much of the rest of Syria, security forces in Homs governorate subjected thousands of people to arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances, and systematic torture in detention. While most were released after several weeks in detention, several hundred remain missing. Most detainees were young men in their 20s or 30s, but security forces also detained children, women, and elderly people. Several witnesses reported that their parents or even grandparents – people in their 60s and 70s – had been detained.

Torture of detainees is rampant. Twenty-five former detainees from Homs were among those interviewed by Human Rights Watch. They all reported being subjected to various forms of torture. Human Rights Watch has independently documented 17 deaths in custody in Homs, at least 12 of which were clearly from torture. Data collected by local activists suggest even higher figures. They say that at least 40 people detained in Homs governorate died in custody between April and August.

Former detainees reported security forces’ use of heated metal rods to burn various parts of their bodies, the use of electric shocks, the use of stress positions for hours or even days at a time, and the use of improvised devices, such as car tires (locally known as dulab), to force detainees into positions that make it easier to beat them on sensitive parts of the body, like the soles of the feet and head. One witness described the torture he experienced at the Military Intelligence base in Homs:

They brought me into what felt like a big room with lots of people inside. I was blindfolded but could hear people around me screaming and begging for water. I could hear the sound of electric stun guns and interrogators ordering to hang people by their hands. Once they got to me, they started mocking me, saying, “We welcome you, leader of the revolution,” and asked me what was going on in Tal Kalakh. I said I didn’t know, and then the torture began.

They beat me with cables and then hanged me by my hands from a pipe under the ceiling so that my feet weren’t touching the floor. I was hanging there for about six hours, although it was hard to tell the time. They were beating me, and pouring water on me, and then using electric stun guns. For the night, they put me into a cell, about 3-by-3 meters, along with some 25 other detainees. We were all squeezed together. The next morning, they brought me in for another interrogation. This time, they “folded” me, pushed my legs and head into a tire, flipped me on my back, and started flogging the soles of my feet.

One of the most worrisome features of the intensifying crackdown has been the growing number of deaths in custody. In almost all of the 17 deaths in custody that Human Rights Watch was able to confirm independently, witnesses said they had no information concerning their relatives’ fate or whereabouts after security forces detained them at a protest or checkpoint until the day they received a call, usually from a local public hospital, asking them to pick up the body. In at least 12 cases in which Human Rights Watch reviewed photos or video footage of the bodies, they bore unmistakable marks consistent with torture, including bruises, cuts, and burns.

Syrian authorities have repeatedly claimed that the violence in Homs has been carried out by armed terrorist gangs, incited and sponsored from abroad. Protesters appear to have been unarmed in most incidents, Human Rights Watch found, but armed defectors from security forces did intervene on some occasions after protesters came under fire from security forces.

Local residents told Human Rights Watch that since June, army defections had increased and that many neighborhoods had about 15 to 20 defectors who would sometimes intervene to protect protesters when they heard gunfire. In addition, the security forces’ violent crackdown and increasing sectarian mistrust have led residents of some neighborhoods in the city of Homs, notably Bab Sba` and Bab `Amro, to organize in local defense committees that are often armed, mostly with firearms but in some cases with rocket propelled grenades (RPGs).

Violence by protesters or defectors deserves further investigation. However, these incidents by no means justify the disproportionate and systematic use of lethal force against demonstrators, which clearly exceeded any justifiable response to any threat presented by overwhelmingly unarmed crowds. Nor would the existence of armed elements in the opposition justify the use of torture and arbitrary, incommunicado detention.

The decision of some protesters and defectors to arm themselves and fight back shows that the strategy adopted by Syria’s authorities has provoked a dangerous escalation in the level of violence, and highlights the need for the international community to ensure an immediate cessation of lethal force lest the country slip into bloodier conflict, Human Rights Watch said.

SANA, the Syrian official news agency, reported on November 6 that on the occasion of Eid al-Adha, the authorities had released 553 detainees “who were involved in the current events with no blood on their hands.” But authorities published no names and three lawyers representing human rights and political activists told Human Rights Watch separately that none of their clients had been released.

Facebooktwittermail

Hamas is becoming what it says it opposes

Chris McGreal reports: Samah Ahmed is once again a prisoner of Gaza, but this time it is at the hands of Hamas not Israel.

Years of travelling relatively freely after Israel lost control of the enclave’s border with Egypt came to an abrupt halt a few months ago when Ahmed’s strident criticisms of Hamas caught the attention of Gaza’s increasingly unpopular Islamist rulers.

Ahmed was beaten and stabbed at a political demonstration. Her brother was warned to keep her in line. Then Hamas stopped Ahmed leaving the Gaza Strip. Four times.

“I try to tell the truth and maybe the government didn’t like it,” she said of her blog. “Anything that is not organised by the Hamas government is viewed as against the government.”

Hamas has been enjoying a surge in popularity following the swap of the captured Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, for the release of more than a 1,000 Palestinian prisoners last month.

“The people are now looking up to Hamas,” said one of the movement’s leaders, Ismail Radwan. “With the prisoner release, Hamas has given to the people what no other faction has given. If there is an election tomorrow we will win even more votes than before.”

But the huge rallies to welcome the prisoners back masked growing disillusionment with the armed Islamist movement’s five-year rule amid rising dissatisfaction at corruption, suppression of political opposition and, above all, its claim that violent resistance to Israeli occupation is more important than jobs.

“The prisoner swap has boosted Hamas’s popularity for now,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, professor of political science at Al-Azhar university in Gaza. “But it won’t last more than a few months. Hamas’s popularity has declined every year it has been in power. Hamas control of Gaza brought an Israeli blockade and siege. Even though it was Israeli-imposed, a lot of people blame Hamas. The Palestinians voted Hamas for reform and change. They didn’t vote for siege and blockade and unemployment. They voted to end the corruption. None of that happened.”

Hamas’s upset election victory in 2006 was built largely on despair with the corruption, misgovernance and authoritarianism of the ruling Fatah, led by Yasser Arafat until his death two years earlier. Many residents of Gaza now voice similar complaints about Hamas.

“They’re back to the same old corruption,” said Mohammed Mansour, a human rights activist and part of a growing community of young people pressing for political change. “Hamas is a party that only benefits its own party, its own supporters. If you want a job, if you want to do business, you must be a supporter of Hamas. Some people in Hamas have got very rich. You see the big houses, you see the new cars.”

That has created resentment among Gazans struggling to get by in the face of mass unemployment and low incomes.

But the real despair is around the widespread lack of hope for change as Hamas touts armed conflict with Israel as more important that economic reconstruction, and the sometimes violent political feud with its arch-rival Fatah has divided the Palestinian territories. While Hamas controls Gaza, Fatah governs the West Bank – a situation that plays into Israel’s hands.

“I think people are different now,” said Ola Anan, a 27-year-old computer engineer. “It’s a long time since anything has changed. I think people feel hopeless that they’re going to change. If it’s going to change it’s only for the worse. A lot of people are losing faith in politics altogether. Sometimes I think we need to follow the Arab spring and create something new. People are so fed up.”

Facebooktwittermail

Around the world in five revolutions: One reporter’s journey through the year’s protests in the Middle East, London, Athens, New York and Toronto

Jesse Rosenfeld writes: When 3,000 people marched through Toronto’s financial district on October 15, expanding the Occupy Wall Street protests north of the border, I scanned the crowd wondering if my home city could actually forge a connection with the social movements erupting around the globe. In the weeks that followed, I got my answer as hundreds of tents expanded across St. James Park, blocks from the heart of Canada’s financial district.

Canada has been relatively sheltered from the global financial crisis and detached from global issues — especially those in the Arab world — by its insular political culture. But the determination by these Canadian protesters to chart a new course seemed to radiate the same mix of desperation, necessity and optimism I witnessed firsthand in the recent protests in the Middle East, Europe and the US.

While the gulf between conditions affecting the protesters in the Middle East and those in the West is stark, it is clear that young people in both contexts are being driven by rage, marginalization and the demand for democratic representation. In a role reversal unthinkable just a few short years ago, the young dispossessed in London, Athens, New York and Toronto are being inspired by Arab youth to take up the struggle for democratic liberation.

Several months prior to the launch of the Occupy Movement, I stood next to young Palestinians in the West Bank as they fought tooth and nail with Palestinian Authority security forces to hold the center of Ramallah and transform the city’s central square into a platform for discussion and social action.

I watched this pattern of protest beginning to emerge on the foggy afternoon of January 28, 2011 from my unofficial “office” of three previous years. Glued to Al Jazeera in the crowded Ramallah shisha café, where locals gather to smoke and argue politics over coffee, I found myself in an atmosphere that more resembled a live sports match than an unfolding political crisis.

The cafe hosts an eclectic mix of people, ranging from a core of grumpy old men to university students, local journalists and artists. With everyone glued to the TV on the main floor, cheers erupted as Mubarak’s police were pushed back by youth advancing on Cairo’s Tahrir square. Curses in Arabic rang out responding to police attacks in a tone I had previously heard used only against advancing Israeli soldiers.

Facebooktwittermail

Syria unleashes assault to take an unbowed city

Anthony Shadid reports: The Syrian government has launched a bloody assault to retake Homs, the country’s third-largest city, facing armed defectors who have prevented the government’s forces from seizing it as they did other restive locales this summer, in what may stand as one of the most violent episodes in an eight-month uprising.

The specter of civil war has long hung over Homs, the most tenacious and determined of cities opposed to President Bashar al-Assad’s rule, where the city’s Sunni Muslim majority has closed ranks behind the revolt. This month, parts of the city have become an urban battlefield, with activists saying government forces have killed 111 people in just five days, opposition groups warning of dire shortages forced by the siege and residents complaining of lawlessness by marauding soldiers and paramilitary fighters.

The strife comes as mediation by the Arab League has apparently collapsed in one of the latest efforts to end what is among the most ferocious crackdowns on the revolts sweeping the Arab world this year. The government has increasingly demonstrated it will continue to try to stanch dissent by force, ignoring the relatively muted protests of the international community.

As important, in a country fraught with fears of a broader civil war, Homs may be emerging as an example to the rest of Syria of the relative success of fighting back against a military that, while still unified, has suffered more defections as fighting persists and more than 3,000 civilians have been killed.

“Homs is a turning point for now,” said an analyst based in Damascus who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It’s a successful model of self-defense, if you will, at a time when you really can’t expect people to take any more. They’ve seen too many corpses come back, too many people arrested, disappeared or returned after abominable treatment. It’s too much. And everybody seems to be losing control of the street.”

Facebooktwittermail

Syrian troops crush opposition in key Homs neighborhood

The Washington Post reports: Syrian troops on Monday routed government opponents in a neighborhood of Homs that had emerged in recent weeks as a center of armed resistance to the regime led by President Bashar al-Assad, dealing what appeared to be a serious setback to the protest movement and to an Arab League peace initiative designed to end the violence.

Homs residents and human rights groups said security forces stormed the Bab al-Amr neighborhood in the small hours of the morning, concluding a six-day assault in which dozens were killed and scores injured, many of them in tank bombardments.

Defected soldiers who had been defending the protest hot spot either fled to the surrounding countryside or were captured or killed, said residents and activists. Syrian troops combed through the neighborhood Monday detaining all the young men they encountered, and government supporters staged a noisy demonstration through the deserted streets.

The assault came as Assad’s government braced for the potential fallout from its failure to abide by the terms of an Arab League-sponsored peace initiative agreed to last Wednesday. Under the deal, Syria was to withdraw troops from cities, allow peaceful protests and release detainees.

Instead, the army launched an offensive in Homs, surrounding Bab al-Amr on the eve of the league’s announcement of the deal in Cairo and bombarding it with tank fire.

The offensive was accompanied by a surge in retaliatory sectarian killings in which hospital workers and human rights groups have said at least 70 people died, illustrating the potential for this religiously mixed city in the heart of Syria to serve as a crucible for a civil war many have feared since the uprising erupted in March.

Facebooktwittermail

The Arab world’s intifada

Phyllis Bennis writes: The “Arab spring” may have started in early 2011 when a young Tunisian fruit seller, in a desperate response to disempowerment and despair, immolated himself in the streets of a small town. But its origins link directly to the first Palestinian intifada, the non-violent, society-wide mobilization that transformed Palestine’s national struggle beginning in the late 1980s. Palestinian activists chose “uprising” as the logical English equivalent, but Arabic speakers were clear that intifada didn’t really mean that. It meant something closer to “shake up” or “shaking out”–exactly what Occupy Wall Street has done to the US body politic, and what the Arab spring has set loose in a region long trapped in the morass of US-backed military dictatorships, absolute monarchies, and repressive nationalists.

So when US analysts or European journalists or World Bank bureaucrats ruminate about “when will there be a Palestinian spring?”, it’s generally because they have no historical context, no idea that Palestine’s first intifada spring in many ways set the stage for this Arab spring more than two decades later. For Palestine and Palestinians, the shaking up of the region has provided one of the most comprehensive–and positive–changes in a generation: the end (or at least the beginning of the end) of the era of US-dependent Arab regimes whose commitments to Palestinian liberation were limited to a few dollars and the rhetoric useful for distracting their own populations from state repression, lack of rights and inadequacies of their own lives.

Civil society has risen to become the most important component of the Palestinian national movement–and not only because of the 20 years of failure of the US-controlled “peace process”. It’s also because the most creative and strategic ideas for achieving Palestinian human rights have come from civil society, not from the leadership recognized (or not) by the world’s governments. Beginning with the 2005 call for a global mobilization for BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions), Palestine’s civil society organizations have been at the centerpiece of the growing international movement to bring non-violent economic pressure to bear on Israel until it ends its violations of international law: ending the occupation of the 1967 territories, ending the legal discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel, and recognizing the right of return of Palestinian refugees.

Facebooktwittermail

Welcome to the “augmented revolution”

Nathan Jurgenson writes: Earlier this year, there was a spat that was both silly and superficial over the terms “Twitter” and “Facebook Revolution” to capture protests in the Arab World. On the one hand, those terms offensively reduced a vast political movement to a social networking site. On the other, Malcolm Gladwell’s response — that there was protest before social media, therefore social media had no role — was equally unfulfilling.

Neither view captured the way technology has been utilized in this global wave of dissent. We are witnessing political mobilizations across much of the globe, including the Middle East, North Africa, Asia and South America. Riots and “flash mobs” are increasingly making the news. In the United States the emergence of the Occupy movement shows that technology and our global atmosphere of dissent is the effective merging of the on- and offline worlds. We cannot only focus on one and ignore the other.

It is no historical coincidence that the rise of social media will be forever linked with the global spread of mass mobilizations of people in physical space that we are witnessing right now. Social media is not some space separate from the offline, physical world. Instead, social media should be understood as the effective merging of the digital and physical, the on- and offline, atoms and bits. And the consequences of this are erupting around us.

Occupy Wall Street and the subsequent occupation movements around the United States and increasingly the globe might best be called an augmented revolution. By “augmented,” I am referring to a larger conceptual perspective that views our reality as the byproduct of the enmeshing of the on- and offline. This is opposed to the view that the digital and physical are separate spheres, what I have called “digital dualism.” Research has demonstrated that sites like Facebook have everything to do with the offline. Our offline lives drive whom we are Facebook-friends with and what we post about. And what happens on Facebook influences how we experience life when we are not logged in and staring at some glowing screen (e.g., we are being trained to experience the world always as a potential photo, tweet, status update). Facebook augments our offline lives rather than replaces them. And this is why research shows that Facebook users have more offline contacts, are more civically engaged, and so on.

Facebooktwittermail

Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El Fattah accuses army of hijacking revolution

The jailed Egyptian revolutionary Alaa Abd El Fattah has written a secret letter from his prison cell, accusing the country’s military rulers of murder and lamenting what he views as the army’s hijacking of the revolution.

The letter, produced covertly from inside Bab el-Khalq prison where Abd El Fattah is being held, was handed to his pregnant wife, Manal, during a visit on Monday. It is being published in Arabic by the Egyptian newspaper al-Shorouk and in English by the Guardian, and is likely to intensify the growing divisions between Egypt’s increasingly repressive army junta and pro-change activists on the street.

Abd El Fattah, one of Egypt’s most prominent anti-regime voices and a former political prisoner under the Mubarak dictatorship, was taken into military custody on Sunday evening following public criticisms of the army’s conduct on the night of 9 October, when at least 27 people were killed during a Coptic Christian protest in downtown Cairo.

Like many other activists, Abd El Fattah accused the army of direct involvement in the bloodshed, a claim that appears to be supported by extensive witness reports and video footage. He was charged by military prosecutors with “inciting violence against the army”, and is being held initially for 15 days – a detention period that can be renewed indefinitely by the authorities. His arrest has provoked outrage across the Middle East and beyond.

Alaa Abd El Fattah’s letter begins: I never expected to repeat the experience of five years ago: after a revolution that deposed the tyrant, I go back to his jails?

The memories come back to me, all the details of imprisonment; the skills of sleeping on the floor, nine men in a six-by-12-foot (two-by-four-metre) cell, the songs of prison, the conversations. But I absolutely can’t remember how I used to keep my glasses safe while I slept.

They have been stepped on three times already today. I suddenly realise they’re the same glasses that were with me in my last imprisonment; the one for supporting the Egyptian judiciary in 2006. And that I am locked up, again pending trial, again on a set of loose and flimsy charges – the one difference is that instead of the state security prosecutor we have the military prosecutor – a change in keeping with the military moment we’re living now.

Last time my imprisonment was shared with 50 colleagues from the “Kifaya” movement. This time, I’m alone, in a cell with eight men who shouldn’t be here; poor, helpless, unjustly held – the guilty among them and the innocent.

As soon as they learned I was one of the “young people of the revolution” they started to curse out the revolution and how it had failed to clean up the ministry of the interior. I spend my first two days listening to stories of torture at the hands of a police force that insists on not being reformed; that takes out its defeat on the bodies of the poor and the helpless.

Facebooktwittermail

Egypt’s military may soon regret jailing Alaa Abd El Fattah

Brian Whitaker writes: Alaa Abd El Fattah is in jail. He was arrested on Sunday – accused of inciting violence against the Egyptian military – and on Monday was given 15 days’ detention for refusing to answer questions to a military court.

A campaign to secure his release has also got under way with extraordinary rapidity: protests in the streets, a Twitter hashtag (#FreeAlaa) and even graffiti appeared within the first 24 hours or so. That is not especially surprising as Alaa, besides being a pioneer of Egyptian blogging, belongs to one of the most famous families of leftist agitators.

By arresting him, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which is currently running Egypt (and increasingly being referred to as “the junta”), has picked a fight with the core of the movement that toppled President Mubarak in January. Leftists, liberals and Islamists have all been rallying to Alaa’s support and it may not be long before the junta starts to regret its action.

Facebooktwittermail

Defections from Syria’s armed forces are growing

The Economist reports: The glue and the guts of President Bashar Assad’s regime are the army and its allies in the police and the Mukhabarat, the intelligence service. So far they have generally stayed loyal. But defectors are growing in number and are getting better organised.

Since the start of the uprising in March there have been defections, mainly from the ranks of Sunni conscripts. Some flee the country, others hide among civilians. In July, Riad al-Asaad, a colonel in his 50s, left for Turkey and announced the formation of the Free Syrian Army. Another group, calling itself the Free Officers’ Movement, also emerged.

At the time the two organisations were thin. Defecting soldiers worked in small and disparate groups. But in late September the two outfits announced a merger. They now seem more coherent. The Free Syrian Army says it has 22 “battalions” across the country, with field leaders taking orders from a central command in Turkey. These include the Khalid bin Walid battalion in Homs, where clashes with loyalist forces have been fiercest. In the past few weeks, fighting has also broken out in Idlib, in the north-west, and al-Bukamal, on the border with Iraq.

The role of defectors is changing. “Defected soldiers initially just fled, then they came out with weapons behind protesters just to ensure they were safe to go out,” says a man who received military training and took part in Free Syrian Army actions. Now he says the army defectors are becoming more belligerent, attacking checkpoints, armed pro-regime gangs and military equipment. They often make grandiose claims, for instance to have disabled tens of tanks at a time. These are probably exaggerations. But ambushes of convoys of security men are certainly taking place.

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Telegraph, President Assad dismissed the Syrian National Council, a broad front bringing together most of his main opponents.

“I wouldn’t waste my time talking about them,” he said. “I don’t know them. It’s better to investigate whether they really represent Syrians.”

He insisted that anti-government demonstrators were being paid and were motivated by money

“You have a lot of money being paid every day, a lot of money moving across the border,” he said. “Part of this money actually supports our economy.”

Speaking to the Sunday Telegraph, President Assad warned that foreign intervention in his country would “burn” the whole Middle East.

“Syria is the hub now in this region,” he said. “It is the fault line, and if you play with the ground you will cause an earthquake … Do you want to see another Afghanistan, or tens of Afghanistans?

“Any problem in Syria will burn the whole region. If the plan is to divide Syria, that is to divide the whole region.”

Opposition groups and activists accused the Syrian leader of raising false fears to deter action against his regime, which has killed at least 3,000 civilians, including 187 children, in months of street protests.

“After eight months of uprisings, why do you think this will suddenly descend to civil and then regional war?” said Nasser Ahme, a Kurdish activist member of the Sawa, or ‘Together’, youth movement, speaking from a hiding place in Turkey.

“He is trying to make the uprising seem threatening to the West and the Middle East,” said Walat Afimeh, another member of the group.

In Damascus, where Assad’s interview has been widely reported, ordinary Syrians voiced support for his views.

“Everybody’s talking about it,” said a café owner, Maher Omran, interviewed in the presence of a government minder. “What he said was powerful and very comforting for the Syrian people.”

Despite the unpopularity of the regime in many quarters, it also enjoys some uncoerced support. Massive demonstrations in support of Assad have taken place in three Syrian cities, including the capital, over the past week. Independent observers said the participants did not appear to have been forced to attend.

The latest pro-regime rally, yesterday, saw thousands of people holding Assad posters in the central square of the southern city of Sweida.

Activists meanwhile renewed the call for a Libyan-style no-fly zone, and the equipping of the ‘Syrian Free Army’ (SFA) – an opposition military group composed of defecting soldiers.

However, Western diplomatic sources said that there was “no appetite” for military intervention against Syria.

Facebooktwittermail