Category Archives: Arab Spring

Tahrir Square meets Occupy Wall Street

Egyptian activists Asmaa Mahfouz and Ahmed Maher visited Zuccotti Park to briefly join Occupy Wall Street on Monday. Thanassis Cambanis writes: People asked about the role of women in the Egyptian uprising, the connections between youth and labor movements, and the importance of social media. Some of the questions were well intended but astonishingly vague: “How do you overthrow a system?” one man asked. Maher politely replied, “It’s easier to overthrow a dictator than an entire system.” He didn’t belabor the point that the Egyptian revolutionaries, so far as they are concerned, have not yet won; they still are fighting their system. Egypt’s military rulers have staged a vicious campaign against Maher’s April 6 movement, accusing them with no evidence of working as American spies and subjecting them to a public inquiry.

The Americans wanted to know how they could help Egypt.

“Get your revolution done. That’s the biggest help you can give us,” Mahfouz said, expressing the hope that America would one day cut off the $1.3 billion yearly payments that sustain Egypt’s military.

She also advised Occupy Wall Street to select its own leaders and craft a simple message “that no one can change.”

On Monday evening at Zuccotti Park, Mahfouz was eager to model the fiery disobedience with which she’s inspired so many Egyptians. “Let’s march!” she said after an hour-long question-and-answer session, grabbing an Egyptian flag and flashing the victory sign with both hands.

A few hundred demonstrators fell in line behind her and Maher, who gamely joined the English chants. The police allowed the march onto Wall Street itself, and at each corner the American leaders consulted an officer about the preferred route. Weary of the somewhat stilted slogans, which lacked the umph and rhythm of Egyptian chants, Mahfouz and Maher taught the crowd the iconic cry of the Arab uprisings: “Al shaab yurid isqat al nizam,” or “The people demand the fall of the regime.” The crowd adopted its own hybrid: “Al shaab yurid isqat Wall Street.”

As they wound back to Zuccotti Park, demonstrators awaited a cue from the police before crossing Broadway. It was too much for Mahfouz. She stopped in the middle of the intersection, stopped traffic, pumped a fist in the air, and demanded the fall of Wall Street. Nervous demonstrators skittered to the sidewalk, leaving Mahfouz with just the cameras and a few dozen stalwarts who seemed willing to accept her invitation to be arrested.

Facebooktwittermail

Tough post-revolution reality for NGOs in Egypt

IRIN reports: Egyptian NGOs hoping for greater freedoms and more space to operate after the fall of Hosni Mubarak’s government say they have encountered just the opposite: an unprecedented clampdown by the post-revolution military rulers.

“Following Egypt’s historic protests calling for basic political freedoms, it is deeply disturbing that the Egyptian military has targeted Egypt’s democracy and human rights community in ways not even dared during Mubarak’s despotic rule,” wrote Stephen McInerney, executive director of the Washington-based Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED).

The first parliamentary elections since Mubarak’s fall are scheduled for 28 November, but NGO leaders say the transitional government led by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) has mounted a “smear campaign” against them by accusing them of receiving millions of dollars from foreign donors to destabilize the country – going so far as to say the violence on the streets of Cairo during and after the revolution was supported by foreign funding channelled through NGOs.

Many of the local organizations being targeted intended to monitor the upcoming elections, but have been prevented from doing so by the Electoral Commission. SCAF has already banned foreign groups from monitoring the vote.

“This [smear campaign] is yet another episode in the suffering of NGOs in this country,” Maged Adeeb, the chairman of local NGO National Centre for Human Rights, told IRIN. “By accusing us of receiving funds and using them in weakening Egypt’s security, the government creates an unbridgeable gap between us and ordinary citizens.”

In a recent conference in Cairo, Negad Al Borae, a leading civil society activist, said the new government was collaborating with some political powers – namely members of the former ruling party – to destroy the nation’s NGOs.

Facebooktwittermail

Can the West stop worrying and learn to love the Islamists?

Tony Karon writes: Tunisia’s election and Libya’s celebration of the overthrow of Col. Muammar Gaddafi won’t have made for a happy weekend among those fevered heads in Washington who believe the West is locked in an existential struggle with political Islam: If anything, the Islamist tones of the Libyan celebrations, coupled with the Islamist victory in the Tunisian polls will have evoked the collapsing dominoes of Vietnam-era anti-communist metaphor.

“We are an Islamic country,” said Mustafa Abdel Jalili, leader of Libya’s Western-backed Transitional National Council in his speech proclaiming his country’s liberation on Saturday. “We take the Islamic religion as the core of our new government. The constitution will be based on our Islamic religion.” As Jalili spoke of lifting a Gaddafi era ban on polygamy and called for an Islamic banking system (which bans charging interest on loans), he was greeted by thunderous chants of “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great”). The character of Libya’s rebellion, at least among those doing the fighting rather than those doing the talking to Western governments, has been far more Islamist than its NATO backers may care to admit. Indeed, conspicuously absent from Jalili’s Benghazi liberation speech was Mahmoud Jibril, the Western-backed interim prime minister forced out at the behest of Islamist and regional militias, who accused him of trying to sideline them.

Jalili’s comments underscore the likelihood that a post-Gaddafi Libya will have a strongly Islamic character. Having emerged from a 42-year secular dictatorship, the smart money says that some version of political Islam will likely trounce any liberal rivals in the race to represent a national vision when a country riven by tribal and regional rivalries goes to the polls eight months from now.

In Tunisia, meanwhile, where some 90% of voters turned out to vote in the Arab rebellion’s first democratic poll, the only question remains whether the Islamist Ennahda party wins an outright majority, or must settle for a plurality of the vote that will requires it to lead a coalition government. Opposition parties had conceded on Monday, even before the count was completed, it was clear that Ennahda had won by far the largest share. The party’s leaders made clear, however, that they intended to seek a coalition.

There’s good reason to suspect that Tunisia’s electoral outcome will be repeated in an Egyptian poll: The main political contest there may turn out to be the one between the Muslim Brotherhood and its more radical Salafist challengers than between the Brotherhood and the secular liberals.

There’s no inherent contradiction between Islam and democracy — the range of political parties in the Muslim world claiming to be guided by Islamic values ranges from Turkey’s moderate, modernizing AK Party to the radical fundamentalist Salafis. Post-Saddam Iraq has been ruled by coalitions led by Shi’ite Islamist parties since its first election in 2005.

Democratically elected governments in the Arab world — most of which are likely to include a strong Islamist component, particularly when emerging from years of secular dictatorship — are highly unlikely to follow U.S. policy on Israel or Iran, but that doesn’t preclude them establishing pragmatic, cooperative relationships with the West. And if Washington’s yardstick for judging Arab political outcomes was the extent of support they yield for its own positions on Israel and Iraq, the U.S. would have to rely exclusively on dictators and monarchs.

Jonathan Steele writes: Having launched what became known as the Arab spring, Tunisia has now led the region by holding a clean election with an enthusiastic turnout and highly encouraging results. The three parties that have come out on top in the most democratic of north African states have no links with the capital city’s upper middle class or those sections of the business community that benefited from the ousted Ben Ali dictatorship. They both have a tradition of struggling for democratic values.

As in post-Mubarak Egypt, there was reason to fear that the old regime would re-emerge in Tunisia with new faces, but this now seems unlikely. The party that has emerged from the poll most strongly is An-Nahda (Renaissance), which suffered massive repression under Ben Ali and has won great respect for its sacrifices. This party of modern democratic Islam campaigned hard on the two issues that concern most Tunisians: corruption and unemployment, particularly youth unemployment.

While several smaller secular parties tried to manipulate Islamophobia – a relatively easy card to play given the official state-controlled media’s demonisation of the Islamists over several decades – their efforts have failed. Voters had their first chance to listen to An-Nahda’s candidates and they were not put off by what they heard. An-Nahda made special efforts to show that it wanted an inclusive government of national unity and would respect all points of view. It also reached out to voters in the more impoverished interior, making it clear it would not be just a party of the Mediterranean coast as Ben Ali’s regime had been.

The Associated Press reports: A moderate, once-banned Islamist party in Tunisia was on track Tuesday to win the largest number of seats in the first elections prompted by the Arab Spring uprisings, according to partial results.

The Tunisian electoral commission said the Ennahda party has won 15 out of 39 domestic seats so far in a 217-member assembly meant to write a new constitution. Together with the results announced Monday from Tunisians living abroad, Ennahda now has 24 out of 57 seats total, or just over 42 percent.

The final results from Sunday’s elections could boost other Islamist parties running in elections in North Africa and the Middle East.

Facebooktwittermail

The radical power of just showing up

Jillian Schwedler writes: The Arab Spring initiated a jarring series of events in 2011 that illustrate the radical political possibilities of just being present. When the regime won’t listen, when being heard as an individual isn’t really a viable option, simply standing together and being seen can be profoundly political and empowering.

But will just “being there” really bring significant change?

Revolutions never happen overnight. They result from accumulations of dozens, even hundreds of moments, often stretching over a period of years, that make possible the ruptures that emerge when vast numbers of people begin to imagine, and then to demand, an alternative to their living conditions. We have been seeing these moments over the past year, first in the Middle East but then spreading to England, Brazil, Spain, Great Britain, the United States, and elsewhere. In this sense, we are experiencing a revolutionary moment in which the popular perception of what is possible has indisputably shifted in a way unseen on a global scale since 1968.

This moment is revolutionary, even though revolutions are not imminent everywhere. People around the globe are simultaneously imagining alternatives to the conditions under which they live, and they recognise such movements taking place elsewhere and feel a connection, a kinship, with other who are taking to the streets and reclaiming public spaces. For some, the imagined future entails a fundamental change in the structures of government; for others, it entails an alternative to the economic status quo. But for all of them, often for the first time in generations, an alternative future feels possible and tangible rather than fantastical.

Revolutionary moments don’t always foster revolutions, of course. Political revolutions are only possible when the repressive security apparatuses that defend the regime – the army, the police, and other agencies of force – become divided. When armies divide, when some leaders and their troops defect, that is when a revolution becomes possible. But even this does not mean that a revolution will be successful. It can lead to a regime change, even a rapid or peaceful one, but more often it can lead to a bloody, protracted civil war. But for many of the citizens – albeit not for all of them – sustained bloodshed is preferable because it keeps alive the hope that an alternative future is finally within grasp. Witnessing people choose these bloody moments of possibility over the (sometimes bloody) status quo has a dramatic impact. If they can do it-when the obstacles they have successfully overcome were far more daunting than the ones we face – why are we acquiescing to the repressive conditions that limit the possibilities of our own lives?

Although many hope to dismiss its potential, Occupy Wall Street represents just such a revolutionary moment. It is a politics of refusal because of its strong and sustained rejection of a system that dismisses the economic struggles of most of the people on the globe. It is a refusal to feel helpless and powerless in the face of economic policies that favour banks and corporations at the expense of flesh and blood. That refusal has been manifest in the retaking of public spaces, an outpouring of people into places where their frustrations and grievances become visible. Merely standing together in public can be a radical political act because governments around the world seek to control how public spaces are used, preserving them for certain kinds of loyal and conforming citizens. “Undesirables” – the homeless, the punks, skateboarders, graffiti artists, groups of young men, and of course protesters who question the prevailing political and economic policies – must all be cleared from those spaces, sometimes at high costs. Who is welcome? Nuclear families, particularly if they are spending money.

Facebooktwittermail

Why Egypt’s elections won’t be like Tunisia’s

Wendell Steavenson describes the complex rules that will operate in Egypt’s upcoming elections: Overall, this system seems to me to do its utmost to disconnect the voter from the consequence of his checked ballot paper.

All the way along, there will be Egypt’s traditional electoral mayhem: thugs, intimidation, cash handouts, ballot stuffing, strong-arm local families, clan and mosque. Most people think there is bound to be violence (there always is), and the obfuscation of lawsuits countering close or convoluted results (there always are). If people don’t understand what they are voting for, and if the results are obscured by irregularities, the Egyptian people will have no sense that they have participated in a free and fair election.

In any case, the mandate of the new parliament will be, as far as I can tell, to do one thing only. To elect, choose, or appoint (the mechanism remains totally unclear) within a given six month period, a hundred member constitutional committee that will then have a further six months to draft a new constitution. The new constitution will then be ratified (or maybe not) by national referendum. Subsequently, presidential elections will be held—perhaps some time in 2013.

Whatever shop-assembly version emerges, the Supreme Council of Armed Forces have made it clear they will retain control over the appointment of the Prime Minister and the cabinet as well as control over the budget. Egyptians will not be voting in a new government. The nasty irony may be that if the crowds in Tahrir Square had accepted Mubarak’s proposal to step down in September, they might have elected a new President by now. (How free those elections would be is another question.) Increasingly it has begun to appear that the Supreme Council of Armed Forces wants to stretch a transition out over the longest possible time frame, affording it, inevitably, greater control.

Facebooktwittermail

In Egypt, corruption cases had an American root

The Washington Post reports: Beginning two decades ago, the United States government bankrolled an Egyptian think tank dedicated to economic reform. A different outcome is only now becoming visible in the fallout from Egypt’s Arab Spring.

Formed with a $10 million endowment from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies gathered captains of industry in a small circle — with the president’s son Gamal Mubarak at the center. Over time, members of the group would assume top roles in Egypt’s ruling party and government.

Today, Gamal Mubarak and four of those think tank members are in jail, charged with squandering public funds in the sale of public resources, lands and government-run companies as part of a dramatic restructuring. Some have fled the country, pilloried amid the public outrage over insider deals and corruption that toppled President Hosni Mubarak.

“It became a crony capitalism,” Magda Kandil, the think tank’s new executive director, said of the privatization program advocated by its founders. Because of the corruption, the center now estimates, the assets that Egypt has sold off since 1991 have netted only about $10 billion, $90 billion less than their estimated worth.

The privatization saga is a cautionary tale about the power and perils of U.S. foreign aid — most notably the nearly $8 billion that the United States has provided to Egypt since the 1990s to push the country toward economic reforms.

Gamal Mubarak, 47, and the others deny any wrongdoing and are fighting corruption charges filed by the new Egyptian government, saying they have been trumped up to placate street protesters calling for retribution. The defendants also assert that the deals were legal under existing laws.

But the arc of the American-backed privatization effort in Egypt recalls years of questions from critics about the transparency and effectiveness of the more than $70 billion in military and economic assistance [PDF] to that country over the past six decades, the most aid given to any country other than Israel.

Facebooktwittermail

Imprisoned blogger Maikel Nabil admitted to mental hospital

Al-Masry Al-Youm reports: The Interior Ministry’s prisons administration on Sunday ordered the admission of blogger and activist Maikel Nabil, who has been on a hunger strike for nearly 60 days, to the mental hospital in Abbasseya, according to security sources.

Nabil, a Coptic Christian, was arrested by military police on 28 March at his home in Cairo. He was later sentenced to three years in prison on charges of spreading false information about Egypt’s military in a case that drew criticism from rights groups around the world.

On Thursday, the European Union urged Egyptian authorities to ensure proper medical care for him and told them to respect international standards in protecting prisoners.

He went on hunger strike on 23 August in protest at his conviction.

His family told rights group Amnesty International this month that the activist’s health had deteriorated and the authorities had prevented him from taking his medication.

Nabil was the first Egyptian since the revolution to be sentenced to a prison term for expressing his opinion.

Facebooktwittermail

Tony Blair views Arab desire for democracy as a threat to Mideast peace

Forever the slick salesman, Tony Blair says evolution is better than revolution — which sounds like saying change is good so long as there isn’t too much of it and it doesn’t come too fast. That’s the kind of change he can believe in. Just like a peace process which in the eyes of most observers looks like a rotting corpse, but for Blair it’s just a matter of getting it back on track — a track the clearly leads nowhere.

Reuters reports: Arab pro-democracy uprisings spell more regional instability that could complicate peace efforts between Israel and the Palestinians but also make it necessary to get the process back on track, envoy Tony Blair said on Sunday.

Blair will sit down separately with Israeli and Palestinian officials this week in Jerusalem to try to revive a peace process that broke down more than a year ago because of a dispute over Jewish settlement expansion.

“It is a great thing that people are wanting democracy, but in the short term there is reduced stability in the region so that can pose problems for Israel and the peace process,” said Blair.

“Because of the instability and uncertainty in the region, it’s right that we grip the peace process and put it back on track again.”

“We need strong, clear commitments that both parties will produce comprehensive proposals on borders and security within 90 days,” he said.

Underlining the bleak prospects for a breakthrough, Israel recently unveiled plans for new settlement building including 2,600 homes on land near East Jerusalem, where the Palestinians aim to found their capital.

Facebooktwittermail

Arms trade: Business before human rights?

Al Jazeera reports: Earlier this year, as mass popular uprisings spread through the Middle East and audiences across the world sat transfixed by images of unarmed citizens confronting iron-fisted security forces in the streets of Arab capitals, powerful governments from Russia to the United States were forced to begin accounting for the weapons they had for decades sold to the very rulers they now found themselves abandoning.

In Egypt and Bahrain, protesters held up tear gas canisters stamped “Made in USA”, giving longstanding US support for autocratic Arab regimes a painful physical manifestation.

But the United States has not been the only culprit. Egyptian riot police fired shotgun shells made in Italy, and Libyan special forces wielded Belgian assault rifles. Bulgaria has led weapons sales to Yemen, and Russia likely supplies a huge amount of Syria’s armoury.

According to a report released on Wednesday by London-based human rights organisation Amnesty International, in the five years preceding the Arab Spring, a host of at least 20 governments – including Italy, the United Kingdom, France, Serbia, Switzerland and South Korea – sold more than $2.4 billion worth of small arms, tear gas, armoured vehicles and other security equipment to the the five countries that have faced – and violently combated – popular uprisings: Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen.

Facebooktwittermail

Huge turnout in Tunisia’s Arab Spring election

Reuters reports: Tunisians turned out in huge numbers to vote in the country’s first free election on Sunday, 10 months after Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in a protest that started the Arab Spring uprisings.

The leader of an Islamist party predicted to win the biggest share of the vote was heckled outside a polling station by people shouting “terrorist,” highlighting tensions between Islamists and secularists being felt across the Arab world.

The suicide of vegetable peddler Bouazizi, prompted by despair over poverty and government repression, provoked mass protests which forced President Zine al-Abidine to flee Tunisia. This in turn inspired uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain.

Rachid Ghannouchi, leader of the moderately Islamist Ennahda party, took his place in the queue outside a polling station in the El Menzah 6 district of the capital.

“This is an historic day,” he said, accompanied by his wife and daughter, both wearing Islamic headscarves, or hijabs. “Tunisia was born today. The Arab Spring was born today.”

As he emerged from the polling station, about a dozen people shouted at him: “Degage,” French for “Go away,” and “You are a terrorist and an assassin! Go back to London!”

Ghannouchi, who spent 22 years in exile in Britain, has associated his party with the moderate Islamism of Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan. He has said he will not try to impose Muslim values on society.

In Tunisia, ideas about Islam, and restrictions on things like alcohol, are more relaxed than in many Arab countries.

“This morning I voted for Ennahda and this evening I am going to drink a few beers,” said Makram, a young man from the working class Ettadamen neighbourhood of Tunis.

Nevertheless, the party’s rise worries secularists who believe their country’s liberal traditions are now under threat.

Larbi Sadiki writes: Islamists define all things political in the Arab world. This applies to extremist Islamism as well as to civic Islamism.

Indeed, October 24, 2011, the day after the election, will be a turning point in the history of Tunisia. The Islamists will resoundingly establish themselves as a key political player in the country’s democratic transition. Thus far Tunisia has been run by Francophile elites favouring secular politics. In this regard, Tunisia will be following in Turkey’s footsteps.

Those who are not versed in Tunisian politics should go and stand in the square opposite the Municipality of Tunis and just absorb the architecture of political Tunisia. This square has no analogue elsewhere in the Arab world.

With the municipality to one’s back, the Sadiki school – founded by reformer Khayr al-Din Pasha – symbolises not only Ottoman connections, but also a reformist agenda begun more than 150 years ago. To the right, stands the Aziza Othman hospital, named after a woman who cultivated the earliest forms of civic networks in Tunisia.

Just opposite the Kasbah, the seat of government and the lush manicured trees shading the squares joining the prime minister’s office and the ministry of finance, the onlooker sees architectural syncretism at its best. Various shapes of domes and minarets – Tunisian and Ottoman – dot the skyline of Tunis, the country’s hub of political power. Some of my pro-democratisation students from the University of Exeter and I brainstormed on how to understand this perennial quest for synthesis in Tunisia.

It is this synthesis which will triumph. The embrace of the Habib Bourguiba Avenue, a mini-Champs Elysees with its open-air cafes, a refuge for all, including the unemployed, and the Medina, the Old City, hints at how Tunisia will vote.

Tunisians champion syncretism, and this is really the crux of Tunisia’s “political culture”. They do not wish to ditch their Arab and Islamic heritage. Nor do they wish to detach from the brighter spots of reformist politics in their history. French and European inputs into the mix of their culture are now deep-rooted and appreciated.

Facebooktwittermail

Death of Gaddafi revives opposition, and hope, in Syria

Anthony Shadid reports: The death of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi reverberated across Syria on Friday, reviving protests that had begun to stall and focusing attention on a newly organized, unarmed opposition group seeking to challenge the Assad family’s four decades of rule.

With an ordinary name and ambitious task, the Syrian National Council, announced in Istanbul this month, has begun trying to emulate the success of Libya’s opposition leadership, closing ranks in the most concerted attempt yet to forge an alternative to President Bashar al-Assad and courting international support that proved so crucial in Libya.

“The focus of the world will now turn to Syria,” Samir Nachar, an activist from Aleppo and leader of the group, said Friday. “It’s Syria’s turn to receive attention.”

But the challenges before this effort remain vast, many of them the same issues that have beset the uprising in Syria since it began seven months ago. A gulf still separates the opposition in exile and at home, and rivalries and ideological disputes compromise their work. As important, Europe and the United States have proven reluctant to give the council the recognition that they quickly provided the opposition in Libya.

Perhaps most challenging is a debate that has overshadowed many of its discussions — what kind of international intervention it will seek, as unlikely as the prospect may be now, in trying to end Mr. Assad’s rule. Not even activists these days believe that protests alone, however big, are enough to topple the government.

“Libya’s model will be tempting,” said Louay Hussein, a prominent opposition figure in Damascus, the capital, though a critic of the council itself.

Protests erupted across Syria on Friday, and at least anecdotally, activists called them bigger than in past weeks, and just as bloody. Security forces killed at least 24 people. Colonel Qaddafi’s death offered a bloody lesson in an autocrat’s fate, and became a theme on Facebook pages, Twitter and in the demonstrations themselves. “Qaddafi is gone, your turn is coming, Bashar,” one banner read.

Facebooktwittermail

Syria uses U.S. technology in cyber crackdown

Hamed Aleaziz writes: As the autocratic regime in Syria brutally cracks down on a pro-democracy opposition, it is using technology developed by an American company, Blue Coat Systems, to suppress dissent and block access to the internet, tech experts say.

Two weeks ago, Telecomix, a tech activist group, released information from the Syrian government-run Syria Telecommunications Establishment. The release revealed gigabytes of electronic records, called log files, dating back to late July and early August of this year, and the material indicates that Syria’s government is using Blue Coat’s devices [PDF] to prevent its citizens from accessing social media, video-sharing, and other websites. By using the devices, the Syrian regime can block information about its abuses from getting out of the country and monitor web activity. (Peter Fein, a hacktivist with Telecomix, says the information came from "publicly accessible, completely unsecured servers which were found using traditional network scans.") Selling most US-manufactured goods to Syria has been forbidden by US law since 2004.

Jacob Appelbaum, a tech expert and computer science researcher at the University of Washington who was dubbed "The Most Dangerous Man in Cyberspace" by Rolling Stone, said in an email that "the log files are direct evidence" that Syria is utilizing Blue Coat’s technology. "Every IP address in all of the information released is registered in Syria," Appelbaum added. "Every IP address routes from Syria or from known Syrian equipment with the expected latency of machines run in Syria." Appelbaum believes that the Syrian government uses Blue Coat’s device to monitor citizens’ internet activity, record it for future reference, and then take action against dissidents. "That is to say that it’s a super policeman with a general warrant who spies on every person, records everything about that person and their activities and then it acts as the judge, jury and executioner," he wrote.

Facebooktwittermail

Inside Homs, besieged centre of Syrian resistance

Sue Lloyd-Roberts reports: “You’ll never get there,” Syrians living outside the country said to me when I told them I was on my way to the city of Homs. “It’s circled by tanks on the outside and there’s an army checkpoint on every street corner inside the city.”

Homs was one of the first cities to join the Syrian anti-government uprising when in March thousands gathered in the main square to call for the lifting of the government’s emergency laws and a genuine democracy.

Since then it has been besieged by President Bashar al-Assad’s armed forces and seen almost daily attacks.

The city has earned the unofficial title of the “Capital of the Syrian Revolution” but at a heavy price – almost half of the killings of civilians since the uprising began, estimated to be at least 3,000, have happened there.

I will not describe precisely how I got in to Homs – but I will say that it was entirely due to an incredibly resourceful, brave and cunning network set up by young Syrian activists who want their story told to the outside world. [See also Lloyd-Roberts’ video report.]

Facebooktwittermail

U.S. awaits inquiry ahead of Bahrain arms deal

Al Jazeera reports: The US has said that it will consider a special investigation of alleged human rights abuses in Bahrain before moving ahead with a $53m arms deal to the Gulf kingdom.

In a letter to Ron Wyden, a US Democratic senator, and in public statement, the state department said on Tuesday that it shared congressional misgivings about Bahrain’s treatment of protesters and would await the results of a special inquiry established by the king.

The commission’s report to King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa is due on October 30.

“That’s something we would look at closely,” Mark Toner, the State Department spokesman, said, speaking about the commission’s report.

“We’re going to continue to take human rights considerations into account as we move toward the finalization of this deal.”

He added that several procedural steps remain before the US could deliver the weapons to Bahrain and noted the sale pertained to equipment for Bahrain’s “external defence purposes”.

Wyden and Jim McGovern, a US Democratic representative, have introduced a resolution to block the arms sale to Bahrain, which includes Humvee combat vehicles and missiles.

Facebooktwittermail