The price of impunity

First posted at Syria Notes.

Sam Dagher’s history of Assad rule tells of how Western governments accommodated and even rewarded the criminality of the Syrian regime, with disastrous consequences for Syria and the world.

Assad or We Burn the Country: How One Family’s Lust for Power Destroyed Syria
By Sam Dagher
Little, Brown & Company 2019
ISBN-13: 9780316556729

Hama

Khaled al-Khani’s paintings have a visual tension built on contrasts, between crisp outlines and the shadowed and blurred forms they contain, between monochrome faces and figures and bright overpainting of strong pure colour, between sombre moods and bursts of frenzied movement.

As a young boy in the early 1980s, when Syria was under the rule of Hafez al-Assad, Khaled al-Khani was a witness to the Hama massacre, where the regime deliberately killed thousands of civilians in response to an armed uprising.

In February 1982, as regime forces shelled the city, he was together with his mother and siblings hiding in a bedroom in the family home, the house packed with women and children from the neighbourhood looking for shelter behind its solid walls, and the courtyard converted into a field hospital for both fighters and civilians.

Journalist Sam Dagher puts the number of people who had joined the 1982 armed uprising in Hama city at nearly 2,000. The insurgency was being fought by Tali’a al-Muqatila, the Fighting Vanguard, a splinter group of the Muslim Brotherhood, but the Assad regime’s response had been to target all political opposition including members of other parties and members of the Muslim Brotherhood who opposed the militants, and in Hama city the regime targeted the civilian population as a whole.

The Assad regime’s power base was rooted in Syria’s Alawite population, while Hama’s population was overwhelmingly Sunni. Hafez al-Assad’s commanders on the ground were mainly his own kin and other members of the Alawite minority. They included his brother Rifaat, later referred to as The Butcher of Hama.

While Khaled and his family were sheltering inside, the top floor of the Khani home was hit by a shell, and Khaled’s mother took him and the other children to a neighbouring basement. The assault went on for days with tanks, rocket launchers, snipers. His mother took her children and joined other families fleeing the neighbourhood. His father and aunt stayed behind with friends and neighbours still trying to defend their homes.

By mid-February, the regime had crushed remaining resistance and began massacring survivors, with torture, mass rape, mass executions, and murder of children and babies. Regime forces looted devastated neighbourhoods, taking anything of value.

Khaled, with his mother and siblings, were amongst the many civilians rounded up and detained. They threatened with death. Eventually they and some others detained with them were released and forced to leave the city. They later learned that Khaled’s father had been captured, tortured, blinded and murdered.


‘Assad or we burn the country’

In his book, Assad or We Burn the Country, Sam Dagher tells Khaled al-Khani’s story over the length of a whole chapter. The chapter is titled The Hama Manual, so named because the 1982 Hama massacre by Hafez al-Assad’s forces served as the model for this century’s destruction of Syria by the son of Hafez, the current president Bashar al-Assad. The book’s title comes from the slogan Bashar’s forces sprayed on the walls of neighbourhoods that they looted and burned in one city after another.

Like Khaled al-Khani’s paintings, Sam Dagher’s book builds tension from the contrasts in Syria’s recent history. Out of its complexity and confusion, he gives us a coherent picture of state criminality, international complicity, and Syrians’ ongoing fight for justice in the face of mass murder.

A decade after the start of Syria’s 2011 revolution, no single volume can give the whole story. Sam Dagher’s 2019 book, though rich in its telling, has to choose which parts of the story to render in detail, and which to leave as outline sketches. As the title indicates, his focus is on the regime as the cause of the conflict, and on how others responded to the regime, Syrian activists, civilians, fighters, and importantly also on how Western leaders responded.

Syrians took to the streets to protest the regime’s oppression, violence, and corruption. What Western leaders saw in that were risks to their allies and themselves, of social, economic, and political destabilisation, of terrorism, regional conflict, and the strategic threat of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Western responses were often less about saving lives and ending suffering than about preserving their alliances, containing disruption, and maintaining regional influence, while avoiding political responsibility. The US government in particular, while repeatedly expressing concern over the suffering of civilians, prioritised WMD and terrorist threats to the West in its response.

A virtue of the book is the range of viewpoints Sam Dagher draws on to put together the story, while still maintaining a clear narrative thread. He has interviewed a number of people deeply involved in the regime, most notably Manaf Tlass who up to his defection in July 2012 had been close to the top of the regime. His father, Mustafa Tlass, had been a friend and co-conspirator to Hafez al-Assad in his bloody ascent, using the military and the Baath party as their means to gain power in the 1960s. Mustafa Tlass had also played a lead role in preparing the way for Bashar al-Assad’s succession in the year 2000.

Sam Dagher follows the path of Mustafa Tlass alongside Hafez al-Assad from companions in military academy in the early 1950s, to taking part in a failed military coup in 1962, followed by a spell in jail, to a successful coup in 1963. “We were like wolves,” said Mustafa Tlass. “We turned each military base that we took over into a citadel of the Baath.” In 1964, Mustafa Tlass was on the ground when the new Baath regime put down an earlier revolt against them in Hama city, ordering one of his armoured vehicles to smash down the door of the historic mosque where protesters had barricaded themselves, and presiding over a military tribunal handing out death sentences.

By the late 1960s, Hafez al-Assad with his brother Rifaat had violently disposed of hundreds of rivals within the Baath party and the military, by gun battles, purges, executions, and assassinations. Hafez al-Assad became defence minister, and Mustafa Tlass a key enforcer against possible rivals, using torture to force confessions of foreign conspiracies, and presiding over executions. By the end of 1970 he had helped Hafez al-Assad rise to the very top. Mustafa Tlass continued his central role in regime repression through the 1970s and early 1980s. Sam Dagher reports Mustafa Tlass saying that he signed so many death sentences that he eventually lost count.

A childhood friendship between Manaf Tlass and Hafez al-Assad’s first son Bassel was encouraged by their parents. Manaf Tlass had followed his father’s path into the military and the regime’s leadership. After the death of Bassel in a car crash, Manaf Tlass had taken on the role of one of Bashar al-Assad’s companions, helping prepare the next in line to inherit the throne.

When the 2011 demonstrations began, Manaf Tlass seems not to have had the same stomach for slaughter as his father, and he argued against the violent options that were advocated by others in the regime. He came to learn however that Bashar himself was committed to the path of bloody repression. His position became untenable, and Manaf Tlass fled with his family to France.

In contrast, Sam Dagher also follows the fates of several opponents to the regime. Prominent amongst these is the story of Mazen Darwish. The book retraces his role in civil society organising prior to the first protests of 2011 along with other activists such as Razan Zeitouneh, and then his imprisonment, trial, relentless torture, and incredible defiance. Eventually Mazen Darwish and his wife Yara Bader also escaped into exile.

Once in exile, both Manaf Tlass and Mazen Darwish continued to try and change the course of events. Both came up against the limitations of Western political imagination and will on Syria. But while both were opposed to the regime’s mass murder, their ideas for a future path for Syria were very different. Manaf Tlass hoped to align with the desire of Western governments for some kind of negotiated outcome that would include both regime and opposition elements, and that would elevate himself to leadership, while Mazen Darwish sought accountability and justice for crimes by the regime and by other parties.


What was the West’s role in Syria?

Throughout the conflict, an often simplistic argument has played on loop between advocates of Western military intervention and opponents of military action. Many advocates have portrayed Syria’s tragedy as a case of Western inaction with dreadful consequences—of the West doing too little. Several opponents believe it to be the consequence of a failed regime change war by the West—so of the West doing too much. Advocates point to Obama’s failure in 2013 to enforce his own red line on chemical attacks as evidence of his weakness, while opponents point to the Obama administration’s CIA-run covert programme to arm Syrian rebels as evidence of US culpability for the entire disaster. These two narratives can seem so contradictory as to be irreconcilable.

Sam Dagher explores the more complex history of Western policies towards the Syrian regime going back to the time of Hafez al-Assad. Prior to 2011, Western governments had repeatedly sought to engage the Assad regime and to entice it towards a path more aligned with their interests. But the Syrian regime ran foreign policy like a protection racket, facilitating armed groups operating via Syrian territory, notably Lebanese Hezbollah but also at different times Palestinian armed groups, the Turkish PKK, and even Al Qaeda in Iraq, aka Islamic State in Iraq. The Syrian regime then used the threat of these armed groups to gain leverage with neighbouring governments and with Western powers, insisting that their cooperation was necessary in any attempt to combat terrorism or to negotiate peace in the region.

In Hafez al-Assad’s time, there was significant collaboration between French and Syrian intelligence services, and Hafez al-Assad made his regime indispensable to the old colonial power in forwarding any French agenda in Lebanon. This leverage helped prepare the way for Bashar, who was hosted by French President Chirac for lunch at the Élysée Palace in 1999, before he even became president of Syria.

After the 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks in the US, Bashar al-Assad wrote to President Bush offering to join in fighting terrorism by sharing intelligence, and the CIA and FBI were allowed to run intelligence gathering operations in Aleppo, northern Syria. Bashar al-Assad wanted the US to stop treating Syria as a state sponsor of terrorism. But at the same time, the Syrian regime continued to deal with Saddam Hussein to buy Iraqi oil, bypassing UN sanctions, a trade worth about two billion a year to the regime, according to Manaf Tlass. And the regime continued to act as a conduit for Iranian military support to Lebanese Hezbollah.

Then when the US and UK invaded Iraq in 2003, Assad’s regime gave passage to fighters from across the Arab world to cross the border and fight against the US. After Saddam Hussein was defeated, the Assad regime gave its active support to the insurgency. This had the double benefit for the Syrian regime of undermining the US-led project for democracy in Iraq, while also sending abroad many young Syrian men who otherwise might act against the regime at home. Khaled al-Khani recalled to Sam Dagher that friends of his from Hama who had opposed the Assad regime eventually joined those going to to Iraq.

Those recruits who survived their time in the Iraqi insurgency and tried to return home to Syria were imprisoned. And when popular demonstrations against the regime filled the streets in 2011, and Assad wanted to paint the uprising as the work of terrorists, he released these veterans of the Iraqi insurgency held in his prisons. This helped to radicalise and militarise the opposition, and to make real the regime’s earlier propaganda linking demonstrations to a terrorist threat.

Despite the transparency of the regime’s game of arsonist playing firefighter, foreign governments kept coming back for more. There were always some amongst Western political and military leaders who saw cooperation with the Assad crime family as the ‘realist’ option. Even after the brutality shown by the regime in response to the popular demonstrations of 2011, Western governments remained fearful of the prospect of regime collapse, fearful that Syria without the regime could be more chaotic and harder to manage. So as the regime started losing control of territory, the US and its allies sought to press the regime into a negotiated settlement rather than see it collapse further.

In mid-2012, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defence Secretary Leon Panetta backed a proposal by then CIA Director David Petraeus to vet, arm, and train Syrian rebels, in order to at least maintain US influence in the situation, but President Obama was resistant. By then, US allies in the region, particularly Saudi Arabia and Qatar, were competing against each other to fund and influence opposition armed groups. Hillary Clinton later wrote that the proposal to get the US involved aimed to responsibly control the flow of arms.

By acquiring clients within Syria’s varied opposition, Saudi Arabia and Qatar and their allies were competing in order to be in a position to shape the aftermath of what seemed a likely end to the Assad regime. In this, Qatar and Turkey seemed to see the overthrow of the regime as the priority, while the monarchies of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Jordan, although wanting an end to the regime’s destabilisation of the region and to limit Iranian expansion, worried that a successful and independent-minded Syrian revolution might come to threaten their own rule.

By December 2012, the US was involved in training rebels in Jordan, and in organising flights of arms by its regional allies. “The idea was not to give them the means to win the battle; it was to give them the means to be more structured in order to show the regime that there was no military victory possible and a need to go to the negotiating table,” a Western official explained to Sam Dagher.

The Obama strategy of pressure not overthrow was repeatedly signalled in public, as US and other Western diplomats adopted the mantra of “no military solution,” and promoted a series of diplomatic initiatives via the UN. It seemed that Assad read that policy of no regime overthrow as effectively a licence for regime preservation. The West might prefer the regime had a different leader, but they wouldn’t act to remove him for fear the rest of the regime would fall with him. And so the Assad regime played along with UN-centred diplomatic processes to a degree, but treated them with contempt.

At one point Sam Dagher quotes a line Bashar al-Assad spoke to journalist Barbara Walters in December 2011, where he claimed, “if they isolate Syria, Syria will collapse and it's going to be domino effect, everybody will suffer, so they don't have interest to isolate Syria.” In the same interview he also said of the United Nations, “it's a game we play, it doesn't mean you believe in it.”

The one point on which Obama seemed to promise action in 2012 was chemical weapons. The US had long been concerned about Assad’s WMD programme. In the aftermath of overthrowing Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration also tried to pressure Bashar al-Assad on the Syrian regime’s stockpiling of nerve agent, but without success. Israel’s 2007 airstrike on an incomplete nuclear facility in the Syrian desert seemed a more effective counterproliferation action than US diplomacy.

Sam Dagher relates how in Summer 2012, the US received intelligence that the Assad regime from some of its sites. Syria was known to have stockpiles of mustard gas, blister agents, and nerve agents including sarin and VX, and had the rockets and shells to deliver them. Obama publicly warned of “enormous consequences” if the regime used chemical weapons.

At that same time, the Assad regime was beginning its barrel bombing campaign, targeting civilian neighbourhoods with cheaply made bombs dropped from helicopters. Unlike chemical weapons, Obama offered no threat to deter these high explosive weapons which would kill thousands upon thousands of civilians in the following years. Calls for even a partial no-fly zone in northern Syria were rejected.

In December 2012, the first reports of chemical attacks began. Six people were reported killed by a chemical attack in central Homs. More small scale attacks followed in early 2013, in Aleppo and in several locations around Damascus. Under pressure to follow words with action, in June 2013 the Obama administration responded to these chemical attacks by announcing a package of “nonlethal aid” the the Syrian opposition and reiterated the aim of “achieving a negotiated political settlement.”

Just over two months later, in the early morning of 21 August 2013, the Assad regime large rockets filled with Sarin nerve agent at the town of of Zamalka in the Eastern Ghouta suburbs of Damascus. Before dawn, more rockets struck the town of Moadhamiya southwest of Damascus. “I saw people dead in their beds, and those who tried to escape from their homes collapsed at the front door or on the stairs—it was as if someone just pressed a button and people froze in their place,” a rescuer in Zamalka told Sam Dagher.

For a brief period then in 2013, it looked like the US and its allies might strike Assad. But after British members of Parliament voted against UK participation, Obama turned away from action. The US and Russian governments negotiated a chemical disarmament deal for Syria. It meant no punishment of Assad, no protection of Syrian civilians. Instead the regime was to give up its chemicals and carry on bombing with high explosive instead. Assad had read Obama correctly: The policy of pressure not overthrow was a licence for regime preservation.

The Assad chemical weapons deal, which removed enormous amounts of chemical material from Syria for destruction, but which didn’t stop the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons, and which was never intended to put any limit on Assad’s slaughter of civilians by other means, was echoed a couple of years later in the Iran nuclear deal, which likewise focused only on WMD proliferation while leaving Iran and its proxies free to continue killing civilians and crushing civil activism in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and at home in Iran.

This cynical form of realism showed its limitations as the consequences of giving licence to mass murder increasingly affected Western interests, with the large scale flow of refugees to Europe, the rise of ISIS, and destabilisation and overt state criminality spreading amongst Syria’s neighbours.

Western states led by the US were forced to intervene against ISIS in Syria, as the regime’s former client terror group rose amid Assad’s destruction of the country. And even after this, the US and its allies left the Assad regime free to continue killing. Over time, the US ended even limited military aid to Syrian rebels, investing instead in the PYD militia with its history of accommodation with the regime. Rebels in the south were forced to cede territory to the regime, while the US sought to freeze conflict lines in the east, and Turkey increased control of opposition-held areas in the north, aiming to negotiate a fixed buffer zone along its border.


Understanding the conditions for mass atrocities

In nature, things exist because it is possible for them to exist. Where there is an opening, a gap in the ecosystem, some life form, be it scavenger, predator or parasite, will evolve to exploit it, and it will thrive until it is countered by some other form of life, or conditions otherwise become inhospitable to its existence.

In politics, tyranny exists because it is possible. The majority of people may be good and kind, but if there is nothing and no-one to prevent it, the few who are not will rule. Where a state depends on the consent of the country’s population, tyranny is unlikely, but where the rulers are supported economically and militarily from outside the country, tyranny can thrive. So the rulers of the Syrian state and of its neighbours, in a region of valuable resources and strategic trade routes, can each find the foreign backers to sustain them, and between them squeeze their populations.

The Assad regime exists not for any reason of unique evil, but because the world allows it to exist. Assad’s sponsors are Iran and Russia, nominally enemies of the West, but the regime has for decades been part of an interlocking system of tyrannies, some clients of the West, some backed by the West’s rivals, and the West’s clients may have as much to fear from Assad’s fall as the West’s rivals do.

In his closing chapter, Sam Dagher considers the normalisation of brutality that followed Assad’s counterrevolution: from Putin’s brazenness to the bullying presidency of Trump, the increased authoritarianism of Turkey’s Erdogan, the murder of journalist Jamal Kashoggi by agents of Saudi’s ruling prince, the deadly war in Yemen, the new military dictatorship in Egypt.

Syria is made a realm outside law, by the Assad regime and also by intervening powers that wish to avoid the inconveniences of accountability. But with the widening effects of the regime’s criminality have come new opportunities to bring some measure of legal accountability for crimes inside Syria.

Khaled al-Khani, the artist who as a boy lived through the Hama massacre, gave his support to a Swiss lawsuit against Rifaat al-Assad, the so-called Butcher of Hama, brother to the late Hafez al-Assad, uncle to Bashar al-Assad. Rifaat al-Assad had left Syria after losing out in a power struggle with his brother in 1984, taking a great amount of wealth with him. He has been tried in Europe for tax fraud and embezzlement, but never for his leading role in the mass murder of thousands of Syrians.

In Berlin, Mazen Darwish relaunched the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression in order to work to bring legal accountability for crimes in Syria, not just crimes by the regime but also crimes by other armed groups, such as the 2013 forced disappearance of his friend Razan Zeitouneh and three others in rebel-held Douma. He joined with fellow Syrian human rights lawyer and former prisoner Anwar al-Bunni in working with European organisations, particularly the Berlin-based European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, to present cases against regime officials to European prosecutors.

Mazen Darwish told Sam Dagher of an encounter in Geneva with Staffan de Mistura, then the UN Syria envoy. “There won’t be peace if you want to put the justice and accountability file on the table. You mist choose: accountability or peace,” de Mistura had said.

Mazen Darwish’s view of what constitutes realism is the direct opposite. For him, the only realistic path to stability, to ending the refugee crisis, to defeating terrorism, is through justice and accountability.

“The Americans, Russians, and Iranians can liberate Mosul, Raqqa, and Deir Ezzour and declare victory over the Islamic State, but without justice and accountability, a change in the political system, and coming to terms with the legacy of the past fifty years, come six months or one to two years and you will have something worse than Islamic State,” Mazen Darwish tells Sam Dagher. “Can we go back if the same organs, regime, and people remain in place? The same police state with the same sectarian, gang-like and mafia mind-set? People—and myself included—won’t return unless there’s change. Going back would be like committing suicide.”


‘Assad or We Burn the Country’ is available from your local bookshop or online via the publisher’s page for the book.

Read more about Trial International’s efforts to bring Rifaat Al-Assad to justice.

Read more about the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression.

See Khaled al-Khani’s art.

Animation, continuity and change

There has been a lot of animation going on in our house during the pandemic. As one of the partners in Superpower Partners, I have been helping make two very short animated films for Dawlaty, a Syrian civil society organisation. The first of these is now finished, on sexual violence against women in Syria, and you can watch it on Vimeo with either Arabic or English subtitles.

And at the same time, daughter Peggy has taken up animation, making several very short clips, some of a duck character, and others of circus performers.

Animation is about creating an illusion of movement. In reality, nothing in an animation drawing moves, but it is replaced by another drawing to give the illusion of movement. Put another way, the illusion is that several different drawings are one single changing drawing. The same illusion is at work in all films and videos—the photographic images on the screen don’t move, they are just replaced on the screen by other similar but different photographic images to give that illusion of movement.

For this Superpower Partners short, we didn’t want to make the characters move, but wanted to give a sense of life to the film through having them appear as if being drawn by an unseen hand, with shifting light and shade. The artwork was created physically in several different parts, so for one shot there might be as many as sixty variations of the image drawn in black ink, all of which were scanned into computers and then layered in Photoshop to create the many final images that made up the animated shot.

While a character remains on the screen, individual drawing elements appear and disappear. No drawing element remains present for the entire time a character is on screen. It’s like the old joke about the axe that has been in the family for generations, the handle of which has been replaced several times, and the head of which has also been replaced. How is it the same axe? In another old joke, a man realises he has been burgled: everything in his apartment has been stolen and replaced with an exact replica. In the film, the replicas are far from exact; instead the point is in the difference between one representation of the character and the next, and yet we accept the proposition that the same character is present through the succeeding changing representations.

Why does the human mind fall into this illusion? The simple answer is to invoke ‘persistence of vision’, but that phrase in itself doesn’t amount to an explanation, and the term has been rejected by some. Simply put the phrase suggests that physical limits in our eyes’ capabilities cause the illusion. A slightly more complex view is that the mind compensates for the limits in information received from the eyes by filling in the gaps with assumptions or extrapolations about what is being seen.

Human brains have evolved alonside the evolution of senses from something even more primitive to the limited senses we have today, where our eyes can still only detect a limited spectrum of colours, can only see a limited scale of small detail, and can only distinguish a limited number of successive images in a short span of time. Ancestor species must have had an even poorer ability to see fine grain detail, and a lower ability to distinguish colours. This may be why our evolved brains continue to be able to extrapolate an understanding of monochrome images even when we are used to seeing a full rainbow of colours, and why 20th Century television was successful despite its very low resolution compared to today’s high resolution screens.

Evolution from more primitive sensory capacity may also be a part explanation for why we often find simple cartoon representations of characters more engaging than more complex images. While this could be because cartoon representations link to early infancy perception, it could also be because they engage parts of the brain developed earlier in evolution to interpret the world based on more limited information. Perhaps having to do this work of interpretation gives us a deep form of pleasure because it engages these early-evolved parts of the brain?

So interpreting and extrapolating a mental picture of the world based on limited information is likely a primary development in the evolution of the brain. There’s also more to consider in how we have adapted to cope with change. All of the brain’s basic work is to do with tracking and responding to change in our environment, and as our senses have evolved from lower capacity to higher capacity, so have our brains. Basic categories of friend and foe, threat and asset, must come before more detailed understanding of individual entities and locations.

So if we detect a tiger-like object in position A and then a moment later detect a tiger-like object in position B, we will rapidly extrapolate a mental image of a single threat on the move. But if we detect a tiger-like object in position A three days in a row, with no change in its appearance, we will treat it as a fixed feature of the landscape rather than a threat.

This can apply to food as well as to threats. Peggy’s pet lizard eats locusts. It will only eat locusts that move, and it will only eat them if they have been recently introduced into the lizard’s enclosure. If a locust survives a few days, the lizard treats it as part of the landscape and won’t eat it.

This primitive distinction between things that move fast and are seen as potential threats—or as food in the case of the lizard and the locusts—and things that don’t move fast and are seen as permanent features of the landscape, can be dangerously misleading, leading us to overestimate some threats, and under-estimate others. Most of us have an exaggerated image of continuity in our environment, particularly when we’re young. We think of the house we grow up in, the streets, trees, shops and schools around us, as a permanent landscape, when in fact they are slowly changing, and can come to change very rapidly indeed.

Some time ago I heard war reporter Janine di Giovanni compare experiences in Bosnia and Syria, and talk of how people in both places had difficulty in believing war threatened them in their own homes and neighbourhoods, even as attacks were escalating nearby. In a few weeks, months, and years, streets, towns, and cities, were changed beyond recognition.

Our exaggerated expectation of continuity in our environment seems likely to be a legacy of our evolution from more primitive senses and more primitive brains. Perhaps we also have an exaggerated or even illusory image of continuity in ourselves? In our bodies, individual cells grow and die, and the infant is replaced with the child, replaced with the adolescent, the adult. In the passing of the day, we wake, we eat, we sleep again with a great part of our mental functions shut down, perhaps we dream, and then we wake once more still imagining ourselves to be the same person we were a day ago.

Perhaps this too is an illusion brought on by evolutionary necessity? Perhaps in order for individuals to survive long enough for the species to reproduce, it is necessary to maintain an illusion of the self as something distinct from the wider world, something with integrity and continuity through time, rather than a flickering succession of variations?

Below: Animation by Mirai Mizue.

Tap the screen at the right time! pic.twitter.com/p1XSOqQ8m2

— 水江未来 (@MIRAI_MIZUE) October 12, 2020

Just words? Ed Miliband and the Anne Frank Declaration

This was first posted on 30 March 2015 at NFZ Syria. I am reposting it now five years later as Labour’s new leader Keir Starmer has just brought Ed Miliband back to Labour’s front bench.

Why is the The Galway Advertiser promoting atrocity denial?

Review: My Country, by Kassem Eid

First posted at SyriaUK.

My Country, A Syrian Memoir
Kassem Eid, Bloomsbury, 2018

On the early morning of 21 August 2013, the Damascus suburbs of Zamalka and Ein Tarma in Eastern Ghouta, and Moadamiya in Western Ghouta, were attacked with rockets loaded with Sarin nerve agent. An estimated 1,500 people were killed. Kassem Eid, then 27 years old, was amongst the survivors.

The Sarin attack comes halfway through Kassem’s book. By then he has already told of how the people of Moadamiya had suffered regime violence, snipers, car bombs, massacres with hundreds shot or stabbed or burned by regime militia.

Childhood

When Kassem Eid was just three years old, his family came to Moadamiya. Only three miles from Damascus city, Kassem describes the rural quality of his childhood home town, with old mud houses, surrounded by fields and olive groves, with neighbouring families who had farmed there for generations. Kassem’s large Palestinian-Syrian family lived in one of the few modern buildings, a block built by the Ministry of Media for its employees.

Kassem describes his parents with great fondness, his late father working in TV, radio, and journalism, and passing to his young son an interest in the outside world and the English language through an illicit hoard of Reader’s Digest saved from the parents’ years in Saudi Arabia.

But as Kassem grew older, the harshness of his world was revealed. He tells of his first day at school, lined up under the sinister smile of the dictator Hafez al-Assad and reciting the daily pledges of loyalty, of learning that at every level Syria was governed by connections to the ranks of power, with no opening to advance on merit, and with privilege and power maintained by violence.

His friendships growing up included a few across sectarian divides. In particular he writes of his schoolfriend Majed, a son of a military pilot who goes on to be a fighter pilot himself, from an Alawite family, the same sect as Assad. Their relative positions are demonstrated in the sixth grade when Kassem outperforms Majed in test scores, only to be docked marks in his fimal report card to give the military officer’s son top place.

Later when the revolution comes, Kassem’s contacts with Alawites help him to arrange the smuggling of food and medicine into Moadamiya, but his relationship with Majed cannot survive the uprising. At their last meeting, Majed says, ‘Many Alawites hate Assad too, but we still fight for him, because if he falls, they’re coming for all of us.’

Revolution

Moadamiya’s revolution began with a protest on the afternoon of 18 March 2011. Around 300 people marched through the town centre calling for the resignation of the mayor, and for the return of municipal lands confiscated by the regime. Plain-clothes Shabiha regime agents arrived, armed with clubs, swords, and guns to attack the demonstrators. Despite this immediate resort to violence by the regime, Kassem describes himself and his family that evening daring to hope that freedom was possible for the first time in years.

With Shabiha militia on Moadamiya’s streets, the town’s community leaders went to negotiate with Air Force Intelligence chief Jamil Hassan, who threatened them: ‘Make sure that such events never happen again. We wil not be so forgiving next time.’ He was in a position to deliver on his threat. Germany’s chief federal prosecutor has recently filed charges against Jamil Hassan, for ‘crimes against humanity.’ He is charged with command responsibility for the systematic torture and killing of hundreds of detainees by Air Force Intelligence staff between 2011 and 2013.

Moadamiya’s residents knew much of what to expect from the start, even if they were to be shocked by the scale of what followed. Kassem knew from personal experience. Years earlier his eldest brother Yazid had spent months in prison after being picked up by Air Force Intelligence, and Kassem himself had previously been picked up by regime security forces, giving him a brief and brutal experience of the Syrian state’s violent system of institutionalised torture.

After the first protest, the Shabiha imposed a curfew on Moadamiya. Despite this, by early April Moadamiya saw daily protests of over 10,000 people, and over 15,000 people on Fridays, with every protest attacked by Shabiha.

The book describes how in those first weeks Kassem witnessed a horrifying sexual assault on two women by Shabiha, after which he persuaded his sister to leave Syria along with her young family. He and his brothers also persuaded their mother to leave for Jordan. Kassem began joining the protests, experiencing gunfire, and witnessing increasingly frequent killings by snipers.

Kassem puts the count of people killed in Moadamiya in the first seven or eight months as 200 people. More than 5,000 people were detained, including children, close to ten percent of Moadamiya’s total population. By the end of 2011, over seventy percent of the town’s population had fled. This was the point when some joined together to start the Free Syrian Army.

The year that followed, 2012, saw even more extreme violence, with executions in the streets and horrendous massacres where as many as 450 were killed by Shabiha in one event. Kassem describes the aftermaths of the massacres with images of pure horror. With his knowledge of English, Kassem focused on media activism, translating reports, filming fighting, and documenting casualties.

Although Kassem knew nearly every founding member of the FSA in Moadamiya from school or from the neighbourhood, at first he wasn’t ready himself to take that step. That day would come later, on the 21 of August 2013 when while still suffering the effects of nerve agent he picked up a gun and joined his neighbours in fighting to try and stop regime forces advancing into Moadamiya after the chemical attack.

Survival

The second half of the book describes what followed the international failure to respond forcefully to Assad’s chemical massacre: the grinding starvation siege of Moadamiya, the division and gradual surrender of the community, and his own surrender and then brazen escape from Syria.

But perhaps the bitterest experience was his time in America. He had told his friends in the first months of revolution that the United States had a million reasons to take Assad down. Now he experienced the alienation of visiting a society enjoying a privileged protected peace, disconnected from the reality of his war.

Protests in America were without gunshots, but a demonstration in America’s capital didn’t attract the thousands seen in Moadamiya. Just 1,400 people, most of them Syrian. Where, he asked, were Washington DC’s Muslims? Where were the non-Syrian Arabs, the Palestinians, the Americans who wanted to defend democratic values?

In America, Kassem spoke at universities, on news programmes, in meetings with policymakers. He writes that he was pleased when Samantha Power, Obama’s UN Ambassador, asked him to stand up in front of a Security Council meeting, but later he wished that he had not stood silently, but that he had screamed.

Kassem has cut a tight, powerful story from the span of his personal experience. No one book can capture the full scale of events in Syria in the past few years, but by the intensity of this sample of one neighbourhood seen through one pair of eyes, Kassem Eid’s memoir gives a powerful impression of the great drama and disaster of the Syrian revolution and its violent suppression.

The clear line Kassem Eid traces through this one vital part of Syria’s story should make a good introduction to readers not immersed in all of the war’s details, as well as being welcomed by those already deeply involved. May his testimony endure.

Syria’s crime story

Trailer for Syria’s Disappeared: The Case against Assad

Syria looks bloody awful and impossible to deal with.

Any sane person would want to run a mile.

Over five million Syrians have run much further.

But if we—you and me—don’t deal with it, the awfulness won’t stop. It will get worse. It will spread further. It will last longer. It will get even harder to deal with.

What can we do? Lots. There is lots we can do. There is lots we need to do. But first we need to recognise the threat to all of us if we continue to fail.

Syria is the world’s biggest crime scene. It’s the crime of the century. And the crime wave has spread through the whole neighbourhood and beyond.

The scale of the crime in Syria is impossible to take in. When we turn to a crime novel for light relief, we read of one or two people being murdered, and the entire plot revolves around identifying and stopping the killer. In Syria, something like half a million people have been killed. One organisation alone has gathered names and details of over 209,000 individual civilians violently killed, with the vast majority, over 196,000, killed by the Assad regime and its allies.

Assad is the main killer. But because he and his allies have killed hundreds of thousands of ordinary adults and children, rather than just the one or two of a crime novel, we don’t get a neat detective story where he is tracked down and brought to justice. Instead of a police cell, he has a seat at the UN. Instead of a trial, he is cajoled to join in negotiations in Geneva. Instead of justice, he is offered bribes of billions of reconstruction money if only he will make a deal.

In a crime novel, why is it so important to catch the criminal? People die for all sorts of reasons—very few by murder. But crime threatens society more widely. Stopping crime, stopping killers, isn’t just about stopping a threat to a few individuals, it is about protecting an entire society from a breakdown in trust.

To prosper, a society needs trust. For our everyday dealings with each other to run smoothly, we need to be able to trust that we are not all out to rob or injure each other. And when someone violates that trust, we need to know we can rely on each other to stop them from repeating that violation.

International relations similarly require trust. Without trust we are unable to travel, unable to trade over any distance. Without trust we face piracy, plunder, and war.

There will always be some violations of trust in international relations as within nations’ own societies. Maintaining trust depends on sincere collective efforts to counter those violations.

The failure on Syria has torn an enormous hole in that international trust. Governments cannot trust governments that are openly opposed to them, but now also find they cannot trust governments that are supposed to be their allies. And the international lack of trust then spreads into national societies with heightened xenophobia and extremism.

The unravelling goes like this: Assad sees himself free to shoot, torture, bomb and poison Syrian men, women, children, by the thousands. International governments show themselves unwilling to join in collective action to stop him, judging the risk too great. UN resolutions and all the other instruments of diplomacy are revealed as a sham.

And as governments find it easier to tolerate Syrians being murdered in Syria than to stand together against Assad, why not tolerate them drowning in the Mediterranean? The judgement is similar: the political risk of uniting in offering safe passage is deemed too great.

Then the same applies when we reach Europe’s shore: brutality triumphs over unity. If murder abroad and drowning offshore is acceptable, how different is it inside Europe’s borders?

In Europe, instead of an effective collective humanitarian response, we’ve had separate states fracturing into individual responses of varying degrees of brutality. This hasn’t just harmed Syrians arriving to Europe, it continues to harm European societies. If a Syrian could be beaten, or robbed, or detained without charge in a European country yesterday, who else can be beaten or robbed or detained in that country today? And which country will it happen in tomorrow?

This unravelling of trust has gone so far that we risk losing sight of where it begins. It has gone on so long we risk believing this is how the world must be.

So what can we do? First, recognise that crimes on the scale seen in Syria are not an internal issue but an international threat. They threaten all of our societies and all of humanity. They threaten us, our friends, our families, our children. Stopping these crimes in Syria is a matter of self defence.

Second, understand that we may need to use force. The UK and other states accept the need to use force against international non-state criminal threats in Syria: against Al Qaeda and ISIS. The Assad regime is equally an international criminal threat, even though it clings to the trappings of a state.

Third, understand that to restore trust we have to protect civilians. Assad’s crime is the mass slaughter of civilians, and the deliberate destruction of any civil society outside the control of the regime. Merely prosecuting a few individuals at some future date will not restore trust either within Syria or internationally.

Protecting civilians is not a simple task for today or tomorrow. It requires long term commitment to protecting Syrian lives and protecting and supporting independent Syrian civil society. It requires showing trust and earning trust, not a hit and run action followed by handover to the next authoritarian offering security in exchange for an arms deal.

We have so far failed on Syria because of individual and collective failures of comprehension, of imagination, of morality, and of courage. Changing that is not just a task for leaders; it is a task for all of us in understanding our own personal stake in the outcome of Syria’s crime story.

Jo Cox’s compassion on Syria had no borders—nor should ours

By Dr Yasmine Nahlawi, Dr Mohammad Isreb and Kellie Strom

First published by the i paper

Today marks the first anniversary of the murder of Jo Cox, who was a great friend, a beautiful soul, and a true humanitarian.

While the entire country grieves for Jo, for Syrians in the UK her death represents a double blow.

In Jo we lost a voice for tolerance and inclusion, a voice to counter racism and xenophobia.

Syrian refugees particularly appreciated her strong compassion, which lives on in the Jo Cox Foundation’s support for Hope Not Hate, and in the Great Get Together events marking this anniversary.

But for Jo, supporting refugees was not enough. She also wanted to help those Syrians still inside Syria, the ones unable to escape.

• Supporting Syrians

She supported Syria Civil Defence, the rescuers known as the White Helmets. In parliament, Jo made one central demand: protect civilians. She didn’t just sympathise with Syrians, she fought for their rights with relentless passion.

Many on both the left and the right are content with the UK’s role in accepting refugees, delivering humanitarian aid, and fighting only ISIS.

But Jo understood that the refugee crisis, the humanitarian crisis, and the terrorism threat all stemmed from a single atrocity: Bashar al-Assad’s war against those Syrian civilians who opposed his rule.

Jo rejected the suggestion that we ‘need to make a choice between dealing with either Assad or ISIS.’ She recognised that ‘Assad is ISIS’s biggest recruiting sergeant, and as long as his tyranny continues, so too will ISIS’s terror.’

She advocated a comprehensive approach to Syria involving humanitarian, diplomatic, and military measures.

• More than words

Those three aspects of UK policy—diplomatic, military, humanitarian—remain out of sync. British diplomats demand an end to the killing, but have nothing to give force to their words.

Britain’s military focuses only on ISIS, constrained from acting to stop Assad’s bombing, or even from acting when Assad uses chemical weapons.

Britain’s aid workers deliver record amounts of aid, but don’t have the backing from government to do aid airdrops to besieged communities.

An ever-worsening situation for civilians in Syria and refugees outside Syria is matched by a strengthening of pro-Assad forces dominated by militias, by Iran’s foreign fighters, and by Hezbollah, who are a growing terrorist threat.

ISIS is pushed back, but there is no end to terror in sight.

Jo’s analysis has proven true: fail to protect civilians and we fail by every other measure.

• Where are we now?

Jo would have been utterly disappointed to see that her calls for a no-bombing zone and aid drops, including in her last speech as an MP, were ignored.

The UK has stood by as residents of cities such as Daraya and East Aleppo were forced from their homes by starvation sieges and air attacks.

She would have been horrified by the chemical attack on the city of Khan Sheihoun in April, and by the continued daily bombardment of hospitals and residential areas by Assad and Putin, most recently in Daraa.

What would she have thought of the US strike in response to the chemical attack?

She did call for the UK to use the threat of just such a targeted response as a deterrent, not just against chemical attacks but against all bombing of civilians.

Her aim would have been to stop the killing, not to stop just one type of weapon.

• Jo’s legacy on Syria

Jo would clearly have found it unacceptable that the International Coalition against ISIS is now itself killing hundreds of civilians in Syria, outpacing even Assad and Russia’s toll in the month of May. The Coalition even reportedly used white phosphorous on the city of Raqqah.

The RAF is not implicated in these escalating killings. But as UK Syrians recently wrote to the Prime Minister, the UK is ‘a major partner in the Coalition, with a British officer as deputy commander, and therefore carries joint responsibility for such actions.’

In the aftermath of her murder, Jo’s brave and passionate work for Syria was praised by UK political leaders from both major parties. The reality, however, is that her legacy on Syria has not been honoured in Westminster.

• Compassion without borders

In reflecting on today’s anniversary, let us renew our commitment to the ideals to which Jo pledged her life.

Let us embrace our diversity as a country and advocate for tolerance. And let us make a fresh start for Syria with civilian protection at the core of our policy.

Let us ensure accountability for our own actions and those of our allies. Let us listen to Syrians, and work for a solution that respects Syrians’ rights and enables them to enjoy a peaceful future in a free Syria.

Jo’s ideals and her compassion were not limited by borders. Let them not limit ours.


Dr Yasmine Nahlawi is Research and Policy Coordinator for Rethink Rebuild Society, a Manchester-based Syrian advocacy and community organisation.

Dr Mohammad Isreb is a member of the Syrian Association of Yorkshire.

Kellie Strom is Secretariat to the Friends of Syria All-Party Parliamentary Group and a member of Syria Solidarity UK.

Save a school in Aleppo

Friends of mine in Syria Solidarity UK have been directly involved in putting together the following emergency appeal. We know the people running the school in Aleppo and the people fundraising in the UK.

We have been in ongoing contact with people in Aleppo over several months. Even as they face the horror of constant bombing and the anxiety of increased food shortages, one of our key contacts has been working on funding for this school.

Established funders we have been speaking to won’t take it on because Aleppo is high risk and therefore falls outside their guidelines for funding. Being in besieged east Aleppo there is of course no safe school option for these children, but they still need an education as well as protection from bombs and food to eat.

Please support and share.


From the Just Giving page:

We at Human Care Syria have been approached with this urgent request from a school in East Aleppo. The school has run out of funds to continue operating and we have decided to take on the challenge of running the school and raising the funds necessary because we understand how critical the situation is.

Since the start of the Syrian crisis four million Syrian children are out of school and not receiving their basic human right to an education.

What does this mean for the community around East Aleppo?

This school is the only school in the area, serving 900 students (aged 5-14) in the community. If it shuts down the children will face the risk of traveling to another school, and traveling inside Aleppo is very dangerous at this present time! This will inevitably make parents keep their children at home. It will also mean a loss of jobs for teachers and maintenance staff.

One year’s running cost is £49,000 (covering 28 classrooms for a double shift school).

Please give here:

https://www.justgiving.com/campaigns/charity/hcfww/saveaschoolinaleppo

The legacy of Syria

THE EU VOTE AND UK POLITICAL FAILURE ON SYRIA

Cross-posted from Syria Solidarity UK


David Cameron now has little time to right a shared legacy of failure on Syria.

Reasons for the UK’s narrow vote to leave the EU are many. One is Syria: Both the Leave campaign and UKIP connected fears over immigration to the Syrian crisis. Assad’s war against Syria’s population has created the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War.

In or out of the EU, we have a duty to care for refugees. We also need to understand that this refugee crisis is not caused by EU rules on free movement; it’s caused by the failure of world leaders, including Britain’s leaders, to stop Assad.

Inaction has consequences. At every point when world leaders failed to act against Assad, the impact of the Syrian crisis on the world increased. The failure of British Government and Opposition leaders on the EU vote is in part a consequence of their failure on Syria, but this story doesn’t end with today’s result. Without action, Syria’s crisis will continue to impact on us all.

Leaders failed to act in October 2011 when Syrians took to the streets calling for a no-fly zone.

By the end of 2011 there were 8,000 Syrian refugees in the region.

Leaders failed to act in 2012 when journalists Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik were killed reporting from the horror of besieged Homs.

By the end of 2012, there were nearly half a million Syrian refugees.

Leaders failed to act in 2013 when the Assad regime massacred as many as 1,700 civilians in one morning with chemical weapons. That August, there were 1.8 million registered Syrian refugees.

Also in 2013, the UK failed to act when the Free Syrian Army faced attacks by ISIS forces infiltrating from Iraq. Instead of strengthening the FSA to withstand this new threat, UK MPs denied moderate forces the means to defend themselves.

By the end of 2013, there were 2.3 million registered Syrian refugees.

Leaders failed to act in 2014 as the Assad regime ignored UN resolutions on barrel bombing, on torturing and besieging civilians. Diplomacy without military pressure only emboldened Assad to continue the slaughter.

By the end of 2014, there were 3.7 million Syrian refugees.

Leaders failed to act in 2015 as Russia joined Assad in bombing hospitals, humanitarian aid convoys, and rescue workers, and Syrians were denied any means to defend themselves.

By the end of 2015, there were over 4.5 million Syrian refugees.

Now the UK Government is failing to act as Assad breaks ceasefire agreements and breaks deadlines on letting aid into besieged communities. The UK has failed to deliver on airdrops. The UK has failed to apply serious pressure to stop Assad’s bombs.

There are now 4.8 million Syrian refugees in the region. There are many millions more displaced inside Syria. Just over a million Syrians have applied for asylum in Europe, but that is a fraction of the total who have fled their homes.

The refugee crisis is just one impact of Assad’s war on Syrians. Voting to leave the European Union won’t insulate Britain from further effects of Syria’s man-made disaster. This crisis can’t be contained and must be brought to an end, and it can only end with the end of Assad.

Act now. Break the sieges. Stop the bombs. Stop the torture. Stop Assad.

The Humanitarian Impact of Russia’s Intervention

The same day as the House of Commons debated airstrikes, elsewhere in Westminster the APPG for Syria was hosting a briefing by GOAL, an Irish NGO working inside northern Syria. The briefing was led by CEO Barry Andrews.

GOAL’s programme began in 2012, and is now reaching over a million people in rebel–held or contested areas. They distribute food to nearly 500,000 people. They supply flour to over 50 bakeries providing bread at stabilised prices to nearly one million people.

GOAL also supports water and hygiene services for over half a million people. In 2016 they plan expanding water systems and rural sanitation.

On livelihoods, GOAL supports farming families with pesticides, and plans on supporting related businesses and market systems, and developing small business groups accessible to women.
When GOAL first set up projects inside Syria, it was in the expectation that the war would end more quickly, and that the effort would support post–war transition and reconstruction. As things are, their work has helped temper the flow of refugees, making it possible for many to stay inside Syria. Their North Syria Response Fund is reaching over 200,000 internally displaced people, many from Aleppo and Homs.

Now the violence of Russia’s intervention has thrown the future of all this in doubt.

Russia is seen as carrying on Assad’s work, choosing to hit non-ISIS forces and infrastructure. There are fewer of Assad’s barrel bombs now, but the Russian weapons have far greater intensity. Buildings are gone in a single strike. They are targeting areas that were previously relatively safe, targeting border areas, hitting humanitarian convoys as well as commercial traffic.

People who before were prepared to stay now lack confidence that it is tenable, and there is a danger that pressure on Aleppo and Homs could displace as many as a million more.

While they see some grounds for hope in negotiations, GOAL are concerned not just by the bombing of civilians, but also at the bombing of FSA forces “holding the line against ISIS.”

While some have questioned the existence of moderate Syrian forces to fight ISIS, GOAL’s experience is that where there is extremism it’s amongst foreign fighters, whereas Syrian fighters are nationalists and “can be reasoned with.”

Where once there was talk of humanitarian intervention, now the focus has shifted to security threats and funding for aid has reduced even as the humanitarian crisis has worsened.

There is both a humanitarian and a political reason to continue aid work inside Syria, Barry Andrews argued; if you want forces of moderation to resist extremism, they need to be able to live and survive.

With thanks to the APPG for Syria Chair Roger Godsiff MP and his staff.

First published in Syria Notes.

Related at EA WorldView: Russia’s Aerial Victory—80% Aid Cut, 260,000 Displaced, Infrastructure Damaged.

An alternative letters page for The Irish Times

The Irish Times is not the newspaper it once was, and it may be that it simply doesn’t have the budget to be choosy in its foreign correspondents, nor the staff to read all the mail it receives. Below is a recent letter to the paper from a member of the Irish Syria Solidarity Movement, the latest in a series of unpublished letters on the newspaper’s coverage of Syria.

Sir,
Phenomenal. Another psychedelic “analysis” piece from Michael Jansen on Saturday (Assad remains in power as bulwark against Islamic State). This writer has already in your pages (Op. Ed July 2nd, 2011) spectacularly confused the MASSACRE of Hama (1982) when the current presidential incumbent's father slaughtered up to 40,000 people (estimates vary) in the city of Hama with the BATTLE of Hama (605 BC.) between the Babylonians and the Egyptians. In her latest wide-ranging synopsis of the Syrian and middle-eastern crisis, she has managed in the nearly 1000-word article never once to mention a single human-rights violation by the Assad regime. She gushes of Assad “his army constitutes the only force on the ground countering and containing Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaeda radicals.” That surreal assessment requires no further comment. She provides no data to back up her outlandish claims such as Assad having the backing of the Kurdish minority. Nor does she provide any analysis on why it would possibly be that people who are being bombed out of opposition-held towns and districts would flee to regime-held districts insofar as that is the case. In the context of the regime's terrorism strategy of barrel-bombing, sniper attacks, chemical weapons attacks, starvation sieges, etc., etc., the conclusion of the analysis: “the flow into government-held areas demonstrates strong aversion to his opponents” really beggars belief.
Yours, etc.
Michael Lenehan

The Irish Times article referred to by the letter is here: Assad remains in power as bulwark against Islamic State (Analysis: Western leaders know Syria president’s army is only ground force in region) by Michael Jansen.

In it, not only does Ms Jansen implicitly deny the existence of Free Syrian Army and Syrian Kurdish forces fighting ISIS, she asserts that “Syrian protests, far smaller than those elsewhere, were within days infiltrated by armed men backed by external interests and powers seeking his overthrow,” a grotesque distortion of the peaceful protests of 2011 that were met with gunfire by the regime, as well as with torture, mutilation, and murder in regime prisons.

And as Michael Lenehan points out, on internally displaced people fleeing violence, Ms Jansen claims that “the flow into government-held areas demonstrates strong aversion to [Assad’s] opponents,” without making any mention of the daily bombing of civilians in opposition-held areas by Assad’s air force.

It’s a miserable state of affairs for Ireland’s old newspaper of record that it should now rely on such a blatant propagandist for the Assad dictatorship to fill its pages.

Photo by Daniel Dudek-Corrigan.

London’s refugee march on Twitter

Peter Tatchell demonstrated how to present a clear message:

At #RefugeesWelcome rally in London. #Assad & #ISIS kill Syrians. We welcome them. UN no-fly zone to stop Assad bombs pic.twitter.com/bHo7xG5WN8

— Peter Tatchell (@PeterTatchell) September 12, 2015

But his effort wasn’t matched by co-organiser Syria Solidarity UK. It was easier to see Stop The War placards than Syria Solidarity ones. And Stop The War’s visual message was clear.

From Amnesty activist Kristyan Benedict:

"Don't bomb Syria" signs next to revolution flags at London's #refugeeswelcome demo. (Their message isn't for Assad) pic.twitter.com/EinQXI9PaR

— kristyan benedict (@KreaseChan) September 12, 2015

Shame that some will welcome a Syrian when they are a refugee but not when they are an anti regime activist trying not to become a refugee.

— kristyan benedict (@KreaseChan) September 12, 2015

From Syrian blogger Maysaloon:

What exactly do people waving "don't bomb Syria" placards at the London rally for refugees think they are doing?

— Maysaloon (@Maysaloon) September 12, 2015

An how on earth is it Jeremy Corbyn's business to speak at a rally for a refugee crisis that Iran and Hezbullah helped to create?

— Maysaloon (@Maysaloon) September 12, 2015

From Mauritanian-American activist Weddady:

Forgive me for not being moved; these are the same ppl who demonstrated to let Assad continue killing Syria's people https://t.co/cQ20TcTxEk

— weddady (@weddady) September 12, 2015

From an Assad apologist:

Only one thing marred it: speech from "Syria Solidarity Movement" (she wasn't Syrian) called for bombing Syria ("no fly zone"). Classy.

— Asa Winstanley (@AsaWinstanley) September 12, 2015

.@SyriaUK Oh and p.s. the way you leeched onto Saturday's demo in support of refugees to call for bombing a country was vile

— Asa Winstanley (@AsaWinstanley) September 12, 2015

UPDATE – here is Clara’s excellent speech that so annoyed Mr Winstanley:

Never again, and again, and again

Reckless Diplomacy Disguised as Caution Cost Lives in Srebrenica. And It’s Happening Again, This Time in Syria

Ambassador Muhamed Sacirbey former Bosnian foreign minister and ambassador to the United Nations joined with Najib Ghadbian, Special Representative to US and UN, National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces to write this comparison of two avoidable man-made disasters.

“As Bosnia & Herzegovina’s first Ambassador to the UN and the Syrian opposition’s first Ambassador to the UN, we are struck by the painful parallels between our two conflicts, and how indecision and a lack of moral courage are once again leaving innocent civilians to pay the ultimate price.”

Sacirbey and Ghadbian argue that although a no-fly zone in Syria lacks the wide support given to the no-fly zone in Bosnia, it would be even more effective in saving lives, it would counter extremism, and it would make a political solution more possible. Read the rest.

From an interview with Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and former U.N. humanitarian chief, at Syria Deeply:

“We have Srebrenica happening every few months in Syria in terms of civilians killed and maimed.”

Read the rest: Jan Egeland: It’s Time to Change the Narrative for Syria’s Refugees.

James Bloodworth also writes of UK complicity with the Srebrenica massacre, and compares it with Syria.

For more detail on how British, French, and US government decisions helped pave the way for the Srebrenica massacre, see How Britain and the US decided to abandon Srebrenica to its fate, by Florence Hartmann and Ed Vulliamy.

As it was in Bosnia, so also in Syria it is within the power of the UK, France, and the US, acting singly or together, to stop much of the killing.

The single greatest culprit in the killing of civilians is the Syrian Air Force.


Chart from Violations Documentation Center in Syria report for May 2015. More details.

Last month, 81 NGOs called on the UN Security Council to enforce its own Resolution 2139 to end the barrel bombing. Realistically, this won’t happen by collective Security Council action. Russia has blocked any effective Security Council measure, including blocking a resolution to give the International Criminal Court jurisdiction in Syria. This week Russia even blocked a resolution recognising the Srebrenica massacre as an act of genocide.

On Syria, as on Kosovo, in the absence of Security Council unanimity, individual Security Council member states must act.

Assad’s barrel bombings kill mostly civilians, and mostly in areas not held by ISIS but held by the Syrian rebels who are fighting both Assad and ISIS.

Assad’s air attacks have actually been helping ISIS attack Syrian rebels.

As the greatest danger to civilians, Assad’s air attacks are the greatest driver of refugee flows. The number of refugees has more than doubled since the UK, France, and US, turned away from military intervention in 2013.

Aid for Syria is becoming the most expensive sticking plaster in history, costing billions and still woefully underfunded. The need will not end until the violence is stopped, and the violence is mostly Assad’s.

If you are in the UK, write to your MP here.

If you are in the US, write to Congress here.

Download and share Syria Solidarity UK’s document: Ongoing chemical weapons attacks and bombing of civilians by the Syrian Air Force: A call for action (PDF)

Video: Peter Tatchell on Syria

Peter Tatchell on why the international community needs to act on Syria.

More from Peter Tatchell at www.petertatchell.net.

Via Syria Solidarity UK.

Why we support a No-Fly Zone

Cross-posted from Syria Solidarity UK.







Read more: A manifesto for Syria

Join us in London on the 26th of April to answer the call from Syria.

In this UK election, let’s talk about emergency services.

Cross-posted from Syria Solidarity UK.


Rescued in in the Aegean Sea, September 6, 2014. Photo: Coast Guard Aegean Sea Region Command.

With a death toll close to that of the Titanic sinking, a week of disasters in the Mediterranean has forced UK and EU leaders to pay attention to the failure of their brutal policy of withdrawing rescue services.

• The UK must join with other EU members to restore an effective Mediterranean rescue mission.
  

The UK Government can and should also act immediately to fund initiatives such as the joint MSF/MOAS rescue mission.

These disasters have made clear what is necessary. Still there are attempts by UK and EU leaders to displace responsibility, to distract from the primary causes and thus avoid effective action.

This exodus is not caused by “human traffickers”, it’s caused primarily by war. The term “human traffickers” is misleading, conflating people-smuggling with enslavement. Those fleeing across the Mediterranean, while they may be exploited by boat owners, are not enslaved by them. They have not been kidnapped and sold into bondage, but have for the most part made a rational choice between trying to survive war, and trying to survive the sea.

Attacking smugglers is no more a good answer than withdrawing rescue services was.

It’s not that long ago that some Europeans were charging other Europeans who were fleeing genocide enormous sums of money to make an escape by sea. For example Denmark proudly remembers 1943, when almost all of Denmark’s Jews escaped the Holocaust with the help of their fellow citizens. Less emphasis is placed on the fact that many were charged amounts equivalent of up to £5,500 for places on boats making the relatively short crossing to safety in Sweden.

Where there is desperation there will be exploitation, so tackle the reasons for the desperation to stop the exploitation.

• Resettle more of the most vulnerable Syrian refugees.
• Create safe routes as an alternative to dangerous sea crossings.
• Act to end the worst of the violence: Stop Assad’s barrel bombs.

Another diversion in some responses to the Mediterranean crisis has been to blame the deaths on NATO’s intervention in Libya.

But note that Libyans themselves are barely represented amongst those fleeing. Syrians make up over a third of those entering the EU irregularly according to figures from Frontex, the EU’s border agency. The next largest national group are people from Eritrea. 67,000 Syrians sought asylum in Europe last year, most arriving by sea.

In contrast UNHCR figures show the current total of Libyan refugees and asylum seekers at under 6,000 worldwide—though the number seeking refuge abroad may yet rise significantly as UNHCR believe up to 400,000 Libyans are internally displaced.

The true role of Libya in the Mediterranean crisis is as a place of transit, though it is far from being the only one. Sailing from Libya has become easier since the fall of the Gaddafi dictatorship. Previously a deal between Italy and Libya resulted in the regime acting as Europe’s outsourced border guards, locking up people trying to flee on boats. Here’s a description from a 2010 report by PRI’s The World, describing the experiences of Daoud from Somalia:

Daoud tried to make the trip north aboard a smuggling vessel, but he was arrested as he tried to board, and sent to a prison in Tripoli, where he became seriously ill.

“I believe it used to be a chemical plant because all of us had skin rashes and the Libyan prison guards used to beat us at least twice a day,” Daoud said. “And that’s what created and forced us to break out of jail. My intention was just to get out of Libya and head to the seas and to see where my luck takes me.”

Daoud alleges that his dark skin color had a lot to do with how he was treated in Libya: “They directly called me a slave. So, it was horrible. They will tell you in your face.”

Jean-Philippe Chauzy is director of communications for the International Organization for Migration in Geneva. He’s traveled frequently to Libya, and said Daoud’s story is shared by many migrants there.

Daoud’s experience shows why this policy was morally unsustainable. The collapse of Gaddafi’s regime showed it was also practically unsustainable. Had NATO not intervened to protect civilians there, the likely result would not have been a more stable Libya, but a longer and more bloody revolution as we’ve seen in Syria, with many more desperate people fleeing to Europe’s shores.

Links:

The 900 refugees drowned in the Mediterranean were killed by British government policy, by Dan Hodges, The Telegraph, 20 April 2015.

Mediterranean migrant deaths: where British parties stand, Channel 4 News, 15 April 2015.

UK Election Notes: Foreign Policy Opportunities – Resettling Syrian Refugees, by Dr Neil Quilliam, Chatham House, 10 April 2015.

Restart the Rescue: Help stop children drowning in the Mediterranean, campaign by Save the Children.


Read more: A manifesto for Syria

Join us in London on the 26th of April to answer the call from Syria.

In this UK election, let’s talk about education.

Cross-posted from Syria Solidarity UK.


Above: From a Syria Civil Defence video of a bombed elementary school in Aleppo city, 12 April 2015. At least 10 people were killed and 30 wounded. Via EA WorldView.

Schools in opposition-held territory in Aleppo shut for at least a week following the deaths of at least five children in the April 12 air attack pictured above. See Syria Deeply and EA WorldView for more.

An overview of the war’s impact on education within Syria:

Education is in a state of collapse with half (50.8 per cent) of all school-age children no longer attending school during 2014- 2015, with almost half of all children already losing three years of schooling. There is a wide disparity in school attendance rates across the country as the conflict is creating inequality in educational opportunities. The conflict has generated increasing inequality between the different regions, while the quality of education also deteriorated. The loss of schooling by the end of 2014 represents a human capital debit of 7.4 million lost years of schooling, which represents a deficit of USD 5.1 billion in human capital investment in the education of school children.

From a UN-published report, Syria: Alienation and Violence, Impact of the Syria Crisis (PDF), March 2015.

Save The Children report that:

• Basic education enrolment in Syria has fallen from close to 100% to an average of 50%.
• In areas like Aleppo which has seen active conflict for a prolonged period, that is closer to 6%.
• At least a quarter of schools have been damaged or destroyed.
• Almost three million Syrian children are out of school.
• In 2014, half of refugee children were not receiving any form of education.
• Education programmes are underfunded by almost 50%.

From The Cost of War: Calculating the impact of the collapse of Syria’s education system on Syria’s future (PDF), March 2015.

There is also an education crisis for children who have escaped Syria’s dangers. According to UNICEF, there are an estimated 400,000 out-of-school Syrian children in Lebanon. For The Guardian, Maggie Tookey describes the difficulty of supporting education for refugee children in Arsal, on Lebanon’s border with Syria. And at Syria Deeply, Lamia Nahhas talks of the difficulties in establishing and sustaining schools for refugees in Al-Rihaniyeh, Turkey, and for internally displaced children in the Atmeh camp on the Syrian side of the border.

Lastly, have a look at these descriptions by Robin Yassin-Kassab and blogger Maysaloon of working on Zeitouna education projects for Syrian refugee children.

Read more: A manifesto for Syria

Join us in London on the 26th of April to answer the call from Syria.