Bitterlemons interviews the economist Samir Aita.

BI: How can the average Syrian be expected to think about the uprising as the economy gets worse and what does this mean for the opposition?

Aita: The socioeconomic situation is one of the major reasons for the uprising. You have what I call a “youth tsunami” in Syria–300,000 people coming into the labor market every year. In the last 10 years, with all the [government] liberalization, the economy was creating 60-65,000 [jobs], which is really not enough. What is not said is that among those 65,000, there are only 8-10,000 real jobs, i.e., with a real contract and social security and so on. The rest of these are informal jobs, like that of [self-immolated Tunisian Mohamed] Bouazizi, who was university-educated. He was considered statistically as “working”, not jobless, but he was only pushing a small [cart] to sell vegetables and fruits, which is a menial job. This is one of the major reason for the calls for “dignity”.

The second thing is that Syrian society is an exceptional society, meaning that social networks are very, very strong. Syria received during the war in Iraq over two years, 2006 and 2007, 1.5 million Iraqis. [This is comparable to] 7.5 percent of the Syrian population. I don’t know any other society that could receive such a flow of migrants without international aid. This is like saying France received four million people in two years, while France, because of 10,000 Tunisians who came here during the crisis in Tunisia and Libya, was shouting and changed Schengen [a border treaty that sets visa rules], etc.

But what is feared lately is that [Syrian] society has become really exhausted and some of its beautiful functions are deteriorating because of the political money and weapons that are being pushed by some countries, mainly the Gulf countries through Turkey. This is a big push–buying people for a cause, one cause against another. This is very dangerous. This is [making Syria resemble] Lebanon, where political money and foreign intervention have threatened not only to overthrow the regime, but also society.

The regime has already fallen, in my opinion. It cannot survive. But what is to be kept in society? If society collapses and, like [United Nations and Arab League envoy on Syria] Kofi Annan is saying, enters civil war, this is disastrous. But maybe some foreign countries want that. [Continue reading…]

(H/t Joshua Landis)

AFP reports: The Syrian army kept up its bombardment of rebel strongholds on Sunday despite an international outcry over the killing of 92 people, a third of them children, in the shelling of a central town.

Arab and Western governments expressed outrage at the “massacre” in the town of Houla on Friday and Saturday.

But the rebel Free Syrian Army warned that unless the international community took concrete action it would no longer be bound by a UN-backed peace plan that was supposed to start with a ceasefire last month.

Government troops raked rebel neighbourhoods of the central city of Hama with heavy machinegun fire, while the town of Rastan to its south came under artillery fire for a 14th straight day, a human rights watchdog said.

Rebel fighters who pulled out of the flashpoint central city of Homs earlier this year in the face of a devastating assault by the army are holed up in Rastan, activists say.

“The town is being hit at a rate of two shells a minute,” the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Troops loyal to President Bashar al-Assad also clashed with rebel fighters in the town of Harasta near Damascus.

The head of the UN military observer mission overseeing the ceasefire that was supposed to take effect on Apil 12 called what happened in Houla a “brutal tragedy.”

“This morning UN military and civilian observers went to Houla and counted more than 32 children and over 60 adults killed,” Major General Robert Mood told reporters in Damascus on Saturday.

“Whoever started, whoever responded and whoever carried out this deplorable act of violence should be held responsible,” Mood said.

“Those using violence for their own agendas will create more instability, more unpredictability and may lead the country to civil war,” he added.

Robert Mackey writes: As my colleagues Neil MacFarquhar and Hwaida Saad report, the United Nations mission in Syria said in a statement that its observers had visited a village near Homs on Saturday and “counted more than 32 children under the age of 10 and over 60 adults killed,” after what Syrian activists described as a government massacre.

Activist YouTube channels filled with extremely graphic, distressing images of dead children, which prompted large, angry street demonstrations across Syria. The arrival of U.N. military observers in the village of Houla was caught on video by activists, who also posted a somber clip of the monitors viewing rows of corpses prepared for burial.

Later, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s office said in a statement condemning the killings: “Observers from the U.N. Supervision Mission in Syria have viewed the bodies of the dead and confirmed from an examination of ordnance that artillery and tank shells were fired at a residential neighborhood.” [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: At least 90 people, including many children, have been killed after Syrian forces shelled and attacked the town of Houla in Homs province, according to anti-government activists.

The death toll reported on Friday was one of the highest in one area of the country since an internationally brokered ceasefire came into effect last month.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the violence began when security forces opened fire on an opposition protest in Houla. Anti-government forces retaliated and the army began shelling the area, killing an estimated 90 people.

A spokesman for the United Nations’ envoy to Syria told the Associated Press in an email on Saturday that international monitors were travelling to Houla “as we speak” to investigate.

The surge in violence came as Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general told the UN security council there had been some progress in reducing violence, but the overall situation remained very serious.

The Associated Press reports: The leader of Lebanon’s Shiite militant group Hizbollah has appealed for calm after people blocked roads and burned tires in Beirut to protest the kidnapping of 11 Lebanese Shiites in neighboring Syria.

Tuesday’s abductions in Syria’s northern Aleppo province threatened to ignite dangerous sectarian tensions and fueled fears that Lebanon is getting drawn into the chaos next door.

The Lebanese were on their way home from a religious pilgrimage in Iran when Syrian rebels intercepted their vehicles, Syria’s state-run SANA news agency said. The rebels abducted the 11 men and a Syrian driver. The women were released.

Lebanese security officials confirmed the kidnapping.

As the news of the kidnappings spread, residents of the southern suburbs of Beirut, a Shiite area, took to the streets and burned tires and blocked roads in protest. The leader of Hizbollah, a strong ally of the Syrian regime, appealed for calm and warned his followers against revenge attacks targeting Syrians.

“This is strictly prohibited,” Hassan Nasrallah said in a televised speech.

He said the Lebanese government must press for the pilgrims’ release.

The Associated Press reports: A prominent Palestinian writer who was jailed in Syria for nearly three weeks described the facilities as “human slaughterhouses,” saying security agents beat detainees with batons, crammed them into stinking cells and tied them to beds at night.

Salameh Kaileh, 56, was arrested April 24 on suspicion of printing leaflets calling for the ouster of Syrian President Bashar Assad, who is fighting a 15-month-old uprising against his rule. Kaileh’s story offers a rare inside glimpse into the conditions faced by detainees held by the country’s feared security services.

“It was hell on earth,” Kaileh told The Associated Press on Sunday, nearly a week after Syrian forces released him and deported him to Jordan. Speaking at his friend’s home in an Amman suburb, Kaileh had bluish-red bruises on his legs, which he said were the result of beatings with wooden batons that were studded with pins and nails.

“I felt I was going to die under the brutal, savage and continuous beating of the interrogators, who tied me to ropes hung from the ceiling,” said Kaileh, a soft-spoken man with a shock of white hair who appeared frail, barely able to stand on his feet.

Born in Birzeit, West Bank, Kaileh has suffered under the regime in Damascus before. He was imprisoned by the Syrian government in 1992 for eight years because of his alleged links to underground Syrian communist and leftist opposition groups. A well-known leftist, he has written books on subjects ranging from Marxism to Arab nationalism.

This time, he was held in at least four detention centers after security forces arrested him at his home in Damascus, the Syrian capital where he’s lived for more than 30 years.

Kaileh denied printing the leaflets, which he said angered the regime because they read: “For Palestine to be free, Syria’s regime has to fall.”

Syria often has touted its support of the Palestinian cause to boost its credentials as a bastion of Arab nationalism.

AFP reports: The international community is not doing enough to help resolve the Syrian crisis, Turkish President Abdullah Gul said Tuesday as he urged an orderly transition to democracy.

“The international community as whole has so far performed poorly in providing an effective response to the crisis at hand,” Gul said in a public address following the NATO summit in Chicago.

Gul said Turkey is doing “all it can to alleviate the suffering of the Syrian people,” including hosting close to 25,000 Syrians who “fled from the regime’s campaign of violence.”

He deplored the fact that “scores of people are dying in pursuit of their rights and dignity” in Syria and said it is the responsibility of the international community to support the Syrian people’s journey to democracy.

“The six-point Annan Plan might still be the last chance for an orderly transition in Syria if it is urgently implemented in all its aspects, including an effective ceasefire, free political activity and exercise of democratic rights,” Gul told the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

“Once this is achieved, I believe a relatively peaceful political transition can be reached in Syria.”

Turkey is “highly concerned” about nuclear proliferation and continues to call for the establishment of a “weapons of mass destruction free zone” which would include both Iran and Israel, Gul said.

The Associated Press reports: United States and NATO officials say the North Atlantic alliance has no intention of intervening militarily to quell violence in Syria.

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder said members of the alliance continue to seek ways to pressure Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime so it abides by a peace plan brokered by special envoy Kofi Annan.

Reuters reports: U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed concern on Monday that violence from the 14-month conflict in Syria could spread to neighbouring Lebanon, and reiterated his fear that the Syrian violence may erupt into a full-scale civil war.

In a readout of a meeting between Ban and new French President Francois Hollande on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Chicago, the U.N. press office wrote that Ban said the world is at “a pivotal moment in the search for a peaceful settlement to the crisis.”

Ban was “extremely troubled about the risk of an all-out civil war (in Syria) and was concerned about the outbreak of related violence in Lebanon,” the U.N. statement said.

The Guardian reports: In the shadow of the monolith they call the Corner Mountain, Firas Abu Hamza was carefully counting his most prized possessions. He removed a dirty sock from his camouflage vest and spilled its contents, 13 old bullets, on to the fire-scorched concrete in front of him.

“I’ll use them if I have to,” he said. “But I have to be very accurate. And there has to be a good reason to fire.”

At $4 each, one bullet is more expensive than the total sum Abu Hamza and the 12 rebels around him spend in a week on food. And three bullets are worth more than the monthly salary of many of the young defectors like him who now live in this shabby concrete room in northern Syria.

The coveted rifles they fled with from the Syrian military, worth at least $4,000 each on the black market, hang on nails driven into a dirty white wall. Two green wooden boxes in the corner contain extra rounds of ammunition and three explosive heads that fit on to the end of rocket-propelled grenade launchers (RPGs).

An officer, Abu Ahmed, walked into the room and asked the latest defector to have joined the rebel ranks, a 19-year-old from the ruined Baba Amr district of Homs called Adnan, to display the RPG heads. “They are $1,000 each,” Abu Ahmed said. “Beyond anyone here’s wildest fantasies.”

Just as incredible to many of the men who live in this makeshift outpost, known as Katibat al-Harameen al-Sharifeen, is that they had finally found a way to break the shackles tying them to the Syrian military and Bashar al-Assad’s uncompromising regime.

Layla Al-Zubaidi writes: ‘Welcome to Assad’s Syria,’ the signpost at the Lebanese-Syrian border still says, letting the visitor know who owns the country. The ceasefire had just been announced, but few Syrians I knew held out much hope that three hundred UN observers could keep an eye on the whole army. The journey from Beirut to Damascus by shared taxi takes less than three hours. For years I’ve come this way to visit the Syrian side of my family. It was clear that things had changed. Political talk among the passengers used to be limited to hushed complaints about the border police. The taxi drivers would stick a packet of Marlboros and a banknote into the pocket of the customs officers to speed things up. Occasionally they’d mumble an Arab proverb: ‘If you want the grapes, don’t upset the gardener.’

Once across the border, you used to hold your tongue, especially around people you didn’t know – ‘dictatorship mode’. This time a passenger joked loudly that Tefal was now making chairs for Arab presidents, to stop their arses from getting stuck. Both sides of the highway bristled with banners showing Bashar al-Assad waving to a sea of followers or raising his hands, under slogans like ‘We Say Yes to Syria.’

‘How could anyone be stupid enough to think he’d just leave like Ben-Ali or Mubarak?’ the driver asked, waving his hand dismissively. ‘The Assads’ arses are stuck to their chairs with superglue.’

When protesters began playing around with the family name, they were striking at the symbolic pillars of ‘Assad’s Syria’. Al-Assad – ‘the lion’ in Arabic – served as a symbol of strength for four decades, and monuments to father and son were surrounded with stone statues of lions. Not long after the Guardian published leaked emails in which Hadeel al-Ali, Bashar’s media consultant, affectionately wrote ‘I missed you, batta,’ to her boss, fly-posters began to appear featuring his new nickname (batta = ‘duck’). A photo of a school blackboard with a question scrawled on it circulated online: ‘Has Darwin’s theory of evolution been reversed? See the magical transformation of Bashar-the-Lion to Bashar-the-Scaredy-Cat to Bashar-the-Duck.’ A picture uploaded alongside it showed a yellow plastic duck with an innocent plastic smile and a sign round its neck that read: ‘But Bashar doesn’t represent me either!’ [Continue reading…]

The Independent reports: In the rolling blue hills and lush olive groves of the north Syrian countryside, a fledgling rebel state is forming, as opponents of Bashar al-Assad’s regime attempt to take control.

The winding roads are criss-crossed with regular Free Syrian Army (FSA) checkpoints and although some are simply lines of rocks scattered across the road, others have kiosks painted with the colours of the opposition flag. Plain-clothes FSA men co-ordinate with short-wave radios, checking the roads ahead are clear and searching passing vehicles for weapons and regime forces.

“The army can’t come to here,” said Abu Mari, an FSA commander, recently returned from 30 years in exile. Driving through the streets of these villages, he receives salutes of recognition. He openly carries a gun, its butt taped with the colours of the new Syrian flag.

At the secret headquarters of the al-Haq brigade, hidden in a cave complex in the mountains, he outlined the plans for a future free zone here, modelled on the area around Benghazi in last year’s Libyan war. “First thing, we make checkpoints,” he explained. “Anyone who is working with the government, we capture him.”

“Idlib is our Benghazi,” agreed the dozen or so men slouched on the Persian carpets and cushions that lined the rocky walls and floor of the cave. A mix of army defectors and local volunteers, they’re part of a brigade of armed men. Their headquarters is equipped with a satellite dish powered by a stolen generator and routed through neighbouring Turkey. There’s satellite television and high-speed wireless internet. But it’s a long way from the Libyan safe haven protected by Nato air strikes, which was the springboard to the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi.

The National reports: If the Syrian opposition’s failure to forge a truly inclusive national movement can be traced to one geographic area, then that failure shows up most clearly in Syria’s east. For it is here where the Syrian National Council has been unable to win over influential leaders. And without them, efforts to topple the regime will remain in jeopardy.

Known as Al Jazira, the eastern part of Syria consists of three provinces and makes up over 40 per cent of the country. The area shares a roughly 480-kilometre-border with Turkey in the north, and nearly the same with Iraq in the east, making it indispensable if the uprising were to evolve into a full-blown armed struggle under external protection (for arming of and providing safe havens to fighters).

Al Jazira is populated by Arab tribes and Kurds; both have historically suffered from the Baathist regime in Damascus. The area is also economically vital for the regime, as it accounts for 70 per cent of Syria’s oil and gas output and is a main source of agricultural and livestock products. If the Assad regime lost control here, it would suffer a heavy blow.

So why hasn’t Al Jazira shifted fully against the regime? [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: After three decades of persecution that virtually eradicated its presence, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood has resurrected itself to become the dominant group in the fragmented opposition movement pursuing a 14-month uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.

Exiled Brotherhood members and their supporters hold the biggest number of seats in the Syrian National Council, the main opposition umbrella group. They control its relief committee, which distributes aid and money to Syrians participating in the revolt. The Brotherhood is also moving on its own to send funding and weapons to the rebels, who continued to skirmish Saturday with Syrian troops despite a month-old U.N.-brokered cease-fire.

The revival marks an extraordinary comeback for an organization that was almost annihilated after the last revolt in Syria, which ended in the killing by government forces of as many as 25,000 people in the city of Hama in 1982. Only those who managed to flee abroad survived the purge.

The Brotherhood’s rise is stirring concerns in some neighboring countries and in the wider international community that the fall of the minority Alawite regime in Damascus would be followed by the ascent of a Sunni Islamist government, extending into a volatile region a trend set in Egypt and Tunisia. In those countries, Brotherhood-affiliated parties won the largest number of parliamentary seats in post-revolution elections.

Brotherhood leaders say they have been reaching out to Syria’s neighbors, including Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon — as well as to U.S. and European diplomats — to reassure them that they have no intention of dominating a future Syrian political system or establishing any form of Islamist government.

“These concerns are not legitimate when it comes to Syria, for many reasons,” said Molham al-Drobi, who is a member of the Brotherhood’s leadership and sits on the Syrian National Council’s foreign affairs committee.

“First, we are a really moderate Islamic movement compared to others worldwide. We are open-minded,” Drobi said. “And I personally do not believe we could dominate politics in Syria even if we wanted to. We don’t have the will, and we don’t have the means.”

The Associated Press reports: A Syrian opposition leader said Friday the regime is trying to destroy a U.N.-brokered peace plan for the country. The accusations came as security forces fanned out following twin suicide car bombings that killed 55 people in Damascus.

The bombings fueled fears of a rising Islamic militant element among those seeking to oust President Bashar Assad and dealt a further blow to international efforts to end the bloodshed. Assad’s government blamed the blasts on armed terrorists it says are driving the uprising.

During a new conference in Tokyo, Burhan Ghalioun, chief of the opposition Syrian National Council, said there would be no peaceful solution to the violence in Syria without “a threat of force against those who don’t implement the plan.”

“Assad feels that he can run away from implementing all of his obligations without any consequences,” Ghalioun said.

In Damascus, workers were paving over two massive craters caused by the bombs that struck a Syrian military compound Thursday. The attack, which also wounded more than 370 people, was the deadliest against a regime target since the Syrian uprising began 14 months ago.

The Washington Post reports: Obama administration officials said they could not confirm who carried out the attack, but placed the blame squarely on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for allowing the situation to escalate rather than complying with a United Nations resolution ordering a cease-fire supervised by U.N. monitors.

Russia, whose approval is necessary at the Security Council for any further U.N.-authorized action, accused countries supporting the U.S.-backed Syrian opposition of intentionally instigating heightened violence to justify military intervention.

“Some of our foreign partners are taking steps to ensure, both literally and figuratively, that the situation explodes,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said, making clear that he was “referring to the bombings.”

Lavrov made his remarks at a news conference in Beijing, alongside his Chinese counterpart, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, who reiterated his government’s rejection of “outside military intervention in Syria.”