Jonathan Miller writes: New evidence has emerged that members of Bashar al-Assad’s family and inner circle are directly ordering the commission of crimes against humanity in Syria. Experts in international law consider it “preposterous and completely implausible” that the president himself would be unaware of the systematic and widespread killing and torture.

Defectors from Syrian intelligence and security agencies, used by the regime to crush the revolt, claim that Assad’s cousin issued shoot-to-kill orders against civilian protesters in Dera’a, the cradle of the insurrection. Kill quotas were reportedly issued to snipers tasked with assassinating pro-democracy activists.

They allege that Assad’s brother Maher, a senior army commander, was among senior figures operating out of a secret command centre in Dera’a when orders were issued to contain a protest march by all means necessary. More than 100 civilians were shot dead. In addition, Maher is accused of ordering the indiscriminate mass punishment of the entire male population of a troublesome town, al-Moudamya, last year.

The defectors’ testimony, to be broadcast by Channel 4 Dispatches on Monday night, has added resonance after a weekend when arguably the ugliest atrocity of the 15-month confrontation was perpetrated at Houla. Though the regime blamed rebels, western powers are adamant that regime tanks were responsible.

In the documentary, The Real Mr & Mrs Assad, there is footage not seen before in the UK of the president saying: “Every mistake [that] happens in this government, you are responsible, not somebody else. Not the minister. Not the prime minister. At the end you should be responsible.” In more recent months, Assad has repeatedly denied any role in the killings.

“No one is authorised to give orders to the security forces except for him,” said the exiled former Syrian vice-president Abdul Halim Khaddam, who fell out with Assad in 2005, having served under him and his father. Speaking in Paris, where he lives, Khaddam said: “Will anyone believe that 300,000 soldiers can come out of their barracks to slaughter citizens due to an initiative by their officers? These orders are issued by the president of the state.” [Continue reading…]

Patrick Cockburn writes: Parts of Syria are convulsed by civil war, while in other areas life continues almost as normal. At the same moment as more than 30 children had their throats cut and dozens of civilians were killed by shelling in Houla in central Syria on Friday, people in Damascus were picnicking on the slopes of Mount Qassioun, overlooking the capital.

Fighting can be intense, but it is also sporadic, even in highly contested areas. Over the past week, insurgents, many of them defectors from the army, have been fighting to capture Rastan, a strategically placed town on the road running north from Homs. During the same period, militants in the small city of Douma, an opposition stronghold on the outskirts of Damascus, were involved in UN mediation over access to hospitals, the release of detainees and the restoration of services. Soldiers manning sand-bagged checkpoints surrounding Douma’s narrow streets, where shops and markets were reopening, looked bored and relaxed.

Kofi Annan, the UN-Arab League envoy, returns to Damascus in the next couple of days to attempt to give more substance to the so-called ceasefire that began on 12 April. This now looks like a critical visit, as the Houla slaughter makes Syria once again the centre of international attention and a possible target for some form of foreign intervention.

The ceasefire was only sporadically implemented from the beginning. The government has always had more interest in its successful implementation, which would stabilise its authority, than the insurgents, who need to keep the pot of rebellion boiling. The UN monitoring team says that during the ceasefire “the level of offensive military operations by the government significantly decreased” while there has been “an increase in militant attacks and targeted killings”. But any credit the Syrian government might be hoping for in showing restraint will disappear if the latest atrocities are confirmed.

Not that anybody in Syria expects a quick solution to the crisis in which a mosaic of different interests and factions are battling to control the country. “My picture of Syrian society is that 30 per cent of people are militantly against the government, 30 per cent are for them, and 40 per cent don’t like anybody very much,” said a Christian in Damascus. A diplomat said people are much more polarised than six months ago into pro-government, anti-government and “what I term the anti-anti government, the people who dislike the regime, but equally fear the opposition”. The government has been exploiting this by targeting its non-violent opponents “so they can say it is a choice between us and guys with long beards. People want change, but they are frightened it might be for the worse”. [Continue reading…]

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…]