I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground. I do not believe that I have harmed anyone — I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.
I only hope that people pay as much attention to the people of the Middle East and their struggles in thıs year of revolutions. The events there are beıng shaped by the people living them on a daily basis. I have only tried to illuminate them for a western audience.
This experience has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism.
However, I have been deeply touched by the reactions of readers.
Fearing a massacre, thousands of Syrians flock to Turkey as protesters in the US demand the UN take action against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Lindsey Parietti reports..
via Video: Syrians flee violence to Turkey | Gamut News.
Reem Haddad puts spin on the desperate attempt of hundreds of locals to flee Jisr al-Shughour before government clampdown
Esther Addley
guardian.co.uk
Reem Haddad
Reem Haddad acts as Syria's information ministry spokeswoman and has tried to portray the emerging humanitarian crisis as 'normal'.
She may look like the actor Isla Fisher and speak like a Mayfair lady who lunches, but appearances – and words – can be deceptive. As hundreds of refugees fled the Syrian border town Jisr al-Shughour on Thursday, desperate to avoid an expected government clampdown after the killing earlier this week of 120 soldiers, Reem Haddad , the director of Syria’s state TV network, gave an interview to the BBC to account for the crowds pouring into Turkey.
Many have relatives in villages just the other side of the border, she said. “A lot of them find it easy to move across because their relatives are there. It’s a bit like having a problem in your street, and your mum lives in the next street, so you go and visit your mum for a bit.”
As Syria’s security and humanitarian crisis escalates, Haddad, who acts as a spokeswoman for the country’s information ministry, has become one of the most familiar faces of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, with a talent for insisting on innocent explanations for the brutal government response to the protests.
In this she has drawn comparisons to Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, whose exuberant insistence on behalf of Saddam Hussein’s government that the Iraqi army was invincible earned him the nickname Comical Ali before the 2003 allied invasion.
Little is known about Haddad’s early career to date, though her father served as Syria’s ambassador to East Germany and is said to have modelled Syria’s secret police on the Stasi.
“I don’t think she believes all of what she’s saying, though I think she believes some of it,” Amr al-Azm, a former colleague at a Damascus language school in the early 1990s, told the Times. “She believes there’s a war here between two ideologies, two groups, and she believes she’s on the right side.”
Would the government allow the gathering protesters to make their demonstrations peacefully, she was asked by al-Jazeera in late April.
There were no demonstrators, she said. On the contrary, said the journalist, many people on the ground were reporting gathering crowds.
“I know, you have this ‘eyewitness phenomenon’ thing,” replied Haddad. “But we have our cameras everywhere and we have seen no gathering at all.” In principle, however, demonstrations were permitted. “But they have to apply for a licence and they have to tell the police, and the police will tell them along which routes they should follow, and how long they should demonstrate and how many people there should be.”
The same broadcaster, some weeks later, asked about 500 civilians thought to have been shot dead by security forces in street protests (that figure is now more than 1,000). “How do you know that sir, may I ask?” replied Haddad. “How do you know that 500 people have been shot dead, where is your information coming from?” It was a figure compiled by human rights organisations in Syria and London, among others, said the journalist.
“But my dear they are sitting in London. How can they confirm anything!” The world should confirm its facts independently, said the spokeswoman, “rather than taking shoddy, shoddy if I may say, eyewitness accounts.” As Haddad well knows, all foreign journalists are banned from Syria.
via Syria’s state TV director tells BBC ‘refugees’ just visiting family in Turkey | World news | The Guardian.
By A WALL STREET JOURNAL REPORTER in Damascus and NOUR MALAS in Antalya, Turkey
Syrian forces using tanks and machine guns pressed into towns outside Homs, the country’s third-largest city, in an apparent effort to shut down the area’s broad-based opposition movement, as activists meeting in Turkey drafted a road map for their effort to oust President Bashar al-Assad.
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images Activists chanted slogans against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad after a meeting of opposition groups in Antalya, Turkey on Thursday.
At least 25 people were killed by security forces Thursday in Rastan, north of Homs, according to activists and Homs residents with family members in the town, continuing what has been one of the deadliest crackdowns by the regime since the start of the uprising three months ago.
Rastan and the nearby town of Talbiseh have been scenes of large and sustained protests in recent weeks, as powerful tribal and merchant clans in the region have thrown their weight behind the opposition movement.
Residents have also reported incidents in which protesters in the region have fought back against security forces and members of Mr. Assad’s ruling Alawite ethnic minority, which has been the subject of growing resentment from the Sunni majority around Homs.
Many residents in the area own guns, which are easily smuggled over the border from Lebanon. The area is also home to tribal families with codes that dictate that the spilling of blood must be avenged, raising the potential that opponents of the regime will take up arms.
Ethnic tensions in the area were stirred in late April, when tanks belonging to predominantly Alawite army brigades moved into Sunni neighborhoods of Homs.
Unrest in Syria
Despite the rising death toll from weeks of unrest, people across Syria continue to protest the government of President Bashar al-Assad. See events by day.
Residents said armed Alawite gangs backing the Assad regime set up checkpoints in their neighborhoods, helped crack down on protests and ransacked houses in restive areas.
In one incident, on May 20—a day of nationwide protests in which at least 11 people were killed in Homs—a fight broke out between adjacent Alawite and Sunni neighborhoods, a resident said.
A resident of Deir Baalbe, a poor area close to the Alawite-majority district of al-Zahara, said tensions between the two groups were rising.
“We look next door and see people with jobs and decent services, whilst in our area we have nothing,” he said.
Homs residents say armed clashes with supporters of the Assad regime have been limited, and have grown out of opposition to the government, not to the dominant sect.
“The people on the streets of Homs don’t have a problem with spilled blood anymore,” a resident said. “In some cases they’re instigating the security forces because they’re tired and they’re angry and they’re fed up.”
Syria’s government—echoed by many Syrians and supporters of the regime—has often pointed to neighboring Iraq as an example of what they say is the kind of violent, sectarian power struggle that could break out if the Assad regime were to fall.
Tanks moved to surround several towns around Homs Saturday night, activists and residents said, in what has become the Syrian regime’s standard procedure for dealing with towns with large protest movements.
Communications, electricity and water were cut, before soldiers and security forces carried out shootings and ransacked houses, residents said.
The death toll since security forces began a siege in the area Sunday has risen to more than 70, according to the Local Coordinating Committees, a nationwide activist network that tallies only victims who have been identified by name.
Meanwhile, Syrian opposition groups meeting in Turkey drafted a statement calling on President Assad to step down and hand over power temporarily to the vice president until a transitional council is formed and a new constitution drafted.
They also laid the groundwork for a plan to support protesters working toward that goal.
At the conference, in the Turkish coastal town of Antalya, some 300 activists elected representatives who would name a nine-member committee to implement a support strategy for the protesters.
Attendees also committed more than $200,000 to finance the protests and pay compensation to families of those killed during the uprising.
Of the more 300 activists attending, almost all were supporting the movement from outside the country. Only one or two dozen attendees were Syria-based organizers.
The group has yet to bridge the divide between younger, street protesters and older, exiled opposition activists trying to create a political alternative to Mr. Assad, observers said.
ISTANBUL // Members of the Syrian opposition in exile gathered for a conference in southern Turkey yesterday to discuss ways of raising the pressure on the regime of President Bashar al Assad.
The meeting comes at a time when the government in Ankara is showing increasing signs of impatience with Damascus after weeks of fruitless efforts to push the Assad government to implement political reforms. The Assad regime has been trying to crush a popular uprising against the government.
Rights activists say more than 1,000 people have been killed in the crackdown that started in March and has been condemned by the United Nations and triggered western sanctions against the Assad government.
Ammar Qurabi, the president of the Egypt-based National Organisation for Human Rights in Syria, or Nohr, one of the groups behind the two-day meeting in the Mediterranean resort of Antalya, said he expected about 300 participants at the “Syrian Conference for Change”.
In a first reaction to the general amnesty declared by the Assad regime yesterday, Mr Qurabi stressed that important details about the scope of the amnesty were not known.
“As a start, we welcome any step that gets people out of jail,” he said. But he added it was unclear if people that were still in police custody after their arrest by Syrian security forces would also be released.
Mr Qurabi and other opposition representatives said one aim of the meeting was to create a body that could represent the Syrian opposition internationally, but not to form some kind of government in exile.
“Maybe we will establish a small committee” to coordinate communication between exile groups and to support the resistance to the Assad regime within Syria,” Mr Qurabi said.
As for political demands, Mr Qurabi pointed to the so-called Damascus Declaration of 2005, a five-page document calling for democracy in Syria and supported by a broad range of opposition groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, a powerful Sunni group banned in Syria.
Mr Qurabi said yesterday that the Muslim Brotherhood would also be represented in Antalya. The opposition should “unite under the roof of a revolution of freedom and dignity for the construction of the new Syria”, he said earlier in a Nohr statement released in the run-up to the conference.
“This regime cannot be reformed,” Anas Abda, secretary of the Damascus Declaration General Council, another opposition group, told the semi-official Turkish news agency Anadolu in Antalya. “The main demand of the conference is this: We want real change in Syria.”
But even before the meeting got under way, cracks appeared between opposition groups. Some reports said Kurdish organisations had not been invited to the meeting.
In London, Ribal al Assad, the director of the Organisation for Democracy and Freedom in Syria and a cousin of the Syrian president, said in a statement it was “very clear that some of these individuals [in Antalya] are not genuine representatives of the Syrian people. Moreover they are individuals who promote extremism or sectarianism, which has no place in the path to freedom and democracy.”
The Turkish government did not embrace the Antalya meeting officially. Mr Qurabi said the organisers had had no contact with Turkish government representatives. “We sent them the files about the conference, and they allowed it to go ahead,” he said, adding there had been no other Turkish involvement in the event.
A visit to Istanbul in April by leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood triggered an angry statement by Nidal Kabalan, the Syrian ambassador in Ankara. “For us, the Muslim Brotherhood is like the PKK is for Turkey,” Mr Kabalan told a Turkish newspaper at the time, in reference to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a rebel group fighting for Kurdish self-rule and regarded as a terrorist organisation by Ankara.
The fact that Turkey, one of the closest international partners of the Assad regime in recent years, is once again playing host to a meeting of the Syrian opposition despite reservations in Damascus is no coincidence, said Oytun Orhan, an expert on Syria at the Centre for Middle Eastern Strategic Studies, a think tank in Ankara.
“Turkey is disappointed by Assad,” Mr Orhan said. The government in Ankara has been calling on Mr Assad to implement what Turkish officials have described as “shock reforms” for more democracy, but Ankara’s pleas have been ignored by Damascus. “So Turkey is keeping up the pressure for reform on one hand and trying to sharpen the profile on the opposition on the other.”
According to Turkish news reports, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, renewed his demands for reforms when he spoke to Mr Assad by telephone last Friday. “Radical steps that stun everyone are needed now,” Mr Erdogan reportedly told the Syrian leader.
Mr Orhan said Turkey had invested a considerable amount of international credibility by telling the increasingly sceptical West that the Assad regime was willing to reform the country. But as Syria keeps ignoring Ankara’s advice and moves closer to Iran, Turkey has started to change tack, Mr Orhan said.
“This is not the first meeting of the Syrian opposition in Turkey,” he said about the conference in Antalya. “It can be read as a message to Syria.”
Mr Orhan said Turkey was also concerned about a perceived increase of Iranian influence in Syria. “I think there is a Turkish-Iranian competition in Syria, just like in Lebanon and in Iraq,” he said.
In a recent analysis posted on the website of the Centre for Middle Eastern Strategic Studies, Mr Orhan argued that Iran saw a potential regime change in Syria as a threat. “Right now, the Syrian government does not trust any player, including Turkey, as much as it trusts Iran,” he wrote.
In Antalya, the conference triggered a short confrontation between Syrians opposed to the Assad regime and supporters of the government in Damascus.
Government opponents and supporters arrived in Antalya on the same flight from Istanbul, Turkish media reported. The government supporters protested when the opposition representatives unveiled signs with anti-Assad slogans after their arrival, the report said. Turkish police intervened to prevent the situation from escalating. The Assad supporters were gathering for a counter-conference in another hotel in Antalya, the reports said.
A protester burns a picture of President Bashar al-Assad in Istanbul. According to one Syrian activist, fear is slowly dying as similar scenes are being witnessed inside Syria. (AFP/Bulent Kilic)
“Christians to Beirut and the Alawites to the coffin.”
This chant, which some Syrians say they’ve heard during demonstrations in their country, alludes to what many Syrian minorities fear might happen should the 40-year rule of the Baath regime come to an end.
Many experts agree that President Bashar al-Assad, an Alawite ruling a majority-Sunni country, has managed to keep his grip on power in part thanks to mutual backing between his regime and the country’s other minorities, a number of which is made up of educated, middle-class Christians. As a result, it comes as no surprise that a number of them voice worry about the regime’s possible downfall.
At the same time, “The regime has an active interest in frightening the Christians. And if you want to frighten someone, it’s always good if you have some evidence,” argues Professor Volker Perthes, director of SWP, the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin, referring to the abovementioned chants.
The regime, some experts say, is making it seem that fanatical Muslims are prepared to take over should the president and his cronies be pushed out.
But should Syria’s Christian community, which is around 10 percent of the population, actually be afraid?
A number of upper-middle-class Christians are still undecided, Ahed Al Hendi, a Syrian political refugee currently working for CyberDissidents.org in Washington, DC, told NOW Lebanon.
Many who have their own businesses fear the instability, said Al Hendi, who describes himself as a non-practicing Christian. They are pro-Assad and scared of the ascent to power of the Muslim Brotherhood or Salafists should Assad fall. “But I think it’s paranoia – I don’t think it is possible to have an Islamic dominance. For many reasons,” he said, starting with the fact that the population in Syria is much more diverse than in the rest of the region.
Compared to Egypt’s estimated 94-6 Muslim-to-Christian ratio, “Syria has Kurds, Alawites, Christians, and an overall more secular vibe, so it’s different,” he said.
“Christians seem to avoid strife and tend to their own business,” said one Lebanese woman, who is married to a Syrian Christian and just returned from Damascus. “But if you scratch a bit beneath the surface, you know that in their hearts, they feel the regime is wrong, [that it is] a dictatorship,” she said. The woman, who asked that her name not be printed to protect her in-laws in Syria, also said that the number of Christians engaged in the demonstrations is beginning to climb.
According to Professor Perthes, Christians and Alawites have been taking part in the demonstrations all along.
“The opposition has always made it very clear that confessional belonging doesn’t count for them,” he said during a phone interview with NOW Lebanon, noting longtime Christian and Alawite opposition activists Michel Kilo and Aref Dalila, respectively.
Unlike traditional sectarian or class battles, “The uprising in Syria… is rather a question of marginalization in a country where wealth is very much concentrated in Damascus,” stressed Perthes, noting that outlying areas, such as Homs and Hama, were always a “revolutionary hotspot.”
“It’s true, people are seeing it as a Muslim thing, because people are coming out of the mosque, but it’s known about Syria that there is no place to gather people without looking suspicious except in the mosques, or in football matches,” noted Al Hendi.
A video titled “Christians are with the Syrian revolution” that was uploaded onto YouTube on May 16 features Mar Agnathious Joseph the Third, Patriarch of Antioch for Syrian Catholics, stressing that Christians in Syria seek civil rights for everyone and have long been united with all the Syrian people to make the country prosper.
“One thing I would say is that the Christian community in Syria are very much citizens of Syria. They are very well grounded, a substantial minority, that has played a role in history,” said Harry Hagopian, an international lawyer in London and Middle East advisor of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference in England and Wales. But he stressed that there are tensions across all communities in Syria today, and that people should be wary of speculating too much on the situation from outside.
“My understanding is that many of those Christian communities would be happy and open to the sense of reform being requested for the past weeks,” he said, though he added it is hard to tell what the future holds, referring to the difficult plight of the Christians in Iraq and recent sectarian clashes in Egypt.
“But let me say another thing before we jump to conclusions: I have also been informed by many people that what is happening in Egypt,” Hagopian said in a reference to recent Muslim-Christian violence there, “has a lot to do with a sense of incitement that is being promoted, propagated and fed in by people from the former regime.”
Al Hendi stresses that the fear of sectarian strife in Syria is not realistic and stems from paranoia.
What’s more, things seem to be changing. “People are tearing photos of Assad out on the street,” he said. “We would have never even imagined this a few weeks ago. I think the fear is slowly starting to go.”
via Lebanon news – NOW Lebanon -Should Syrian Christians be afraid?.
I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground. I do not believe that I have harmed anyone — I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.
