Thurs. 17 Mar. 2011
NYTIMES
Ø In Syria, Demonstrations Are Few and Brief………………..1
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
Ø Syria: Peaceful Demonstration Violently Dispersed ………..4
GUARDIAN
Ø The fate of the Arabs will be settled in Egypt, not Libya…...6
Ø Editorial: The Arab revolution: Of rocks and hard places…10
WASHINGTON POST
Ø White House appears reluctant to take hard line with Arab monarchies…………………………………………………10
Ø Christian atrocities continue in the Middle East…………...15
TODAY’S ZAMAN
Ø Middle East uprisings: Arabs and Turks in Balkan perceptions………………………………………………....16
JERUSALEM POST
Ø 'Arms smuggling threatens Mideast balance of power'…….22
Ø Clinton: Bahrain, Gulf allies, 'on the wrong track'………....24
HAARETZ
Ø Egypt report: Israeli spy ring uncovered by Egyptian authorities…………………………………………….…….25
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In Syria, Demonstrations Are Few and Brief
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
March 16, 2011
DAMASCUS, Syria — For a moment, you might almost have thought you were in Cairo, or Tunis. Five brave young men stood in this city’s ancient Hamidiya market and began chanting, “We sacrifice our blood and souls for you, Syria!” Soon, a crowd of about 150 had gathered, and the call was heard: “The revolution has started!”
But it had not.
Within minutes, Syrian security men beat and dispersed the protesters, arresting several. That was Tuesday. On Wednesday, some 200 people gathered in front of the Interior Ministry building here. They included relatives of longtime political prisoners as well as activists and students, and they began calling for the release of those in custody.
Once again, a large force of armed officers — more numerous than the protesters — charged the group, and arrested 36 people, witnesses and human rights activists said. Among those arrested was Hannibal al-Hasan, the 10-year-old son of Ragda al-Hasan, a political prisoner.
After three months of uprisings across the Arab world, Syria has seen scarcely any protests. In a police state where emergency laws have banned public gatherings since 1963, few dare to challenge the state, which proved its willingness to massacre its own citizens in the early 1980s. The battles of that time, with armed members of the Muslim Brotherhood, have cast a long shadow.
Like those in many other Arab countries, the rulers here are unwilling to even acknowledge the protests or to confer any legitimacy on them. On Wednesday, the Syrian Interior Ministry denied that arrests had taken place, according to the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency. The agency said on its Web site that “some outsiders infiltrated” a group of families visiting the ministry to present requests for the release of their sons and “exploited” their gathering “to call for demonstration through uttering some provocative slogans”
Many witnesses disputed that account. “I only saw Syrians, families asking for the release of their loved ones,” said Mazen Darweesh, head of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression in an interview with Orient TV, a private Syrian channel run from Dubai.
Abdulaziz al-Khear, a well-known Syrian dissident and former political prisoner, said, “With the climate in the region things have got to change or we are going to witness more of these protests.” But Mr. Khear conceded that the environment in Syria was more difficult and that the slowing momentum of protests elsewhere had had an effect. “What is happening in Libya had discouraged people a bit,” he said, referring to the rebels’ struggle there.
Syrian protesters created a Facebook page called “The Syrian Revolution 2011,” calling on people to demonstrate against corruption and repression, and have gained more than 47,000 supporters.
The government has repeatedly been ferocious in quelling protests. Security forces chased and beat young people who gathered for a vigil on Feb. 23 to show solidarity with the Libyan people. They arrested 14 participants, releasing them hours later.
Gatherings less political in nature have elicited a milder response. On Feb. 16, more than 500 gathered spontaneously in the Harika district here after a policeman hit a man in an argument over a minor traffic violation. Defying the security forces and the police, citizens stayed there more than three hours.
“The Syrian people won’t tolerate humiliation,” the crowd chanted. It dispersed only after Interior Minister Saed Samour showed up and promised to punish the policeman.
The potential for protest is complicated by Syria’s ethnic and religious composition. The country is run by members of the Alawite religious minority, though the majority of Syrians are Sunni Muslims. There is also a restive Kurdish minority centered in the north. Syrians largely support the government’s foreign policy, including its refusal to sign a peace treaty with Israel and its support of the militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah. But the lack of basic freedoms — a key grievance of protesters in other countries — is as bad in Syria as in Egypt, or worse, many activists and human rights groups say.
Syrian state-run television welcomed the fall of the Egyptian government, calling it “the collapse of the Camp David” peace accords between Egypt and Israel. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in January, the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, expressed confidence in his rule, which he said represented the people, and dismissed the possibility of protests.
Most Syrians seem to have only begun to grasp the concept of public protest. By contrast, Mr. Khear noted that Egyptians had protested often over the past five years. Still, he said, “people know what they are entitled to now, and there is no taking that away.”
Again and again, Arab leaders have accused those who have risen against them of being traitors. But the few determined Syrians who showed up on Wednesday took a different view.
“The traitor is the one who kills his people,” they shouted. ”The traitor is the one who oppresses, bankrupts, intimidates, humiliates and imprisons his people.”
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Syria: Peaceful Demonstration Violently Dispersed
34 Reported Detained, Including Prominent Activists
Human Rights Watch Reporting on Syria
March 16, 2011
(New York) - Syria should immediately release all those detained on March 16, 2011, when security services violently dispersed a peaceful protest calling for the release of political activists, Human Rights Watch said today. The government should respect the right of Syrians to assemble peacefully and release all prisoners detained for peaceful political activity or for exercising their right to free expression, Human Rights Watch said.
A group of about 150 people, most of them human rights activists and relatives of political detainees, gathered outside the Interior Ministry in Damascus at about noon to present a petition calling for the release of Syria's political prisoners. When the families started raising pictures of their detained relatives, security officers dressed in civilian clothes attacked with batons, dispersing the demonstrators, three participants told Human Rights Watch. Security services detained at least 34 people, according to a list prepared by demonstrators. Human Rights Watch was able to verify independently the detention of 18 people.
"President Bashar al-Asad's recent calls for reform ring hollow when his security services still beat and detain anyone who actually dares to call for reform," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. "Instead of beating families of Syria's political prisoners, President al-Asad should be reuniting them with their loved ones."
A human rights activist who was at the demonstration described what happened:
When we got to the ministry, we could see that there were a lot of security services around. I saw five buses full of security members parked 300 meters from us. At first, an employee from the Ministry of Interior came out and told us that the families of the detainees would be allowed to present the petition to the minister. We asked for five minutes, as some families were still arriving. When a few families raised photos of detained relatives, the security services suddenly attacked us and beat us with black batons.
The daughter of a prominent political detainee told Human Rights Watch:
We had barely taken my father's picture out when men ran toward us and started beating us. They beat my mother on her head and arm with a baton. They pulled my sister's hair and beat her as well until my uncle managed to get her away. We started running away, but they followed us.
One of the people detained during the demonstration, who spoke with Human Rights Watch following his release, said that security services detained him with five others and transported them to the Mantaqa branch of Military Security. The six were: Mazen Darwish, a human rights activist and head of the Syrian Center for Media Freedom of Expression in Syria; Suheir al-Atassi, a prominent political activist; Naheda Badawi; Bader Shalah; Naret Abdel Kareem; and a boy in his early teens whose name was not known. Security services hit Shalah with a baton over his eye, causing bleeding.
At the Mantaqa branch, the detainee who spoke with Human Rights Watch saw four other detainees from the protest: Kamal Sheikho, Usama Nasr, Nedal Shuraybi, and Muhammad Dia' Aldeen Daghmash. The detainee said that security services interrogated each person separately and asked him for the password to his Facebook account. The person who spoke with Human Rights Watch said that as far as he knew, he was the only one released from the group detained at the protest.
In addition to the confirmed 10 detainees at Military Security, Human Rights Watch spoke with a relative of Kamal al-Labwani, a political activist serving a 12-year jail term, who provided details on the detention of seven members of their family: Omar al-Labwani, 19; Yassin al-Labwani, 20; Hussein al-Labwani, 45; Ammar al-Labwani, 24; Ruba al-Labwani, 23; Layla al-Labwani, 56; and Heba Hassan, 22. Their whereabouts are unknown.
One of the demonstrators told Human Rights Watch that she saw security services detain a young man from the al-Bunni family as he was trying to get into his car. The young man's first name is unknown.
"If President al-Assad is serious about reform, he should hold his security services to account," Whitson said. "Syrians deserve no less than the Egyptians and Tunisians who finally succeeded in forcing their political leadership to disband the feared state security services."
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The fate of the Arabs will be settled in Egypt, not Libya
If Egyptians can build a genuinely popular democratic system, all the dominoes in the region will eventually fall
Seumas Milne,
Guardian,
16 Mar. 2011,
Barely two months since the triumphant overthrow of the Tunisian dictator that detonated the Arab revolution, a western view is taking hold that it's already gone horribly wrong. In January and February, TV screens across the world were filled with exhilarating images of hundreds of thousands of peaceful demonstrators, women and men, braving Hosni Mubarak's goons in Cairo's Tahrir square while Muslims and Christians stood guard over each other as they prayed.
A few weeks on and reports from the region are dominated by the relentless advance of Colonel Gaddafi's forces across Libya, as one rebel stronghold after another is crushed. Meanwhile Arab dictators are falling over each other to beat and shoot protesters, while Saudi troops have occupied Bahrain to break the popular pressure for an elected government. In Egypt itself, 11 people were killed in sectarian clashes between Christians and Muslims last week and women protesters were assaulted by misogynist thugs in Tahrir Square.
Increasingly, US and European politicians and media hawks are insisting it's all because the west has shamefully failed to intervene militarily in support of the Libyan opposition. The Times on Wednesday blamed Barack Obama for snuffing out a "dawn of hope" by havering over whether to impose a no-fly zone in Libya.
But Saudi Arabia's dangerous quasi-invasion of Bahrain is a reminder that Libya is very far from being the only place where hopes are being stifled. The west's closest Arab ally, which has declared protest un-Islamic, bans political parties and holds an estimated 8,000 political prisoners, has sent troops to bolster the Bahraini autocracy's bloody resistance to democratic reform.
Underlying the Saudi provocation is a combustible cocktail of sectarian and strategic calculations. Bahrain's secular opposition to the Sunni ruling family is mainly supported by the island's Shia majority. The Saudi regime fears both the influence of Iran in a Shia-dominated Bahrain and the infection of its own repressed Shia minority – concentrated in the eastern region, centre of the largest oil reserves in the world.
Considering that both Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, home to the United States fifth fleet, depend on American support, the crushing of the Bahraini democracy movement or the underground Saudi opposition should be a good deal easier for the west to fix than the Libyan maelstrom.
But neither the US nor its intervention-hungry allies show the slightest sign of using their leverage to help the people of either country decide their own future. Instead, as Bahrain's security forces tear-gassed and terrorised protesters, the White House merely repeated the mealy-mouthed call it made in the first weeks of the Egyptian revolution for "restraint on all sides".
It's more than understandable that the Libyan opposition now being ground down by superior firepower should be desperate for outside help. Sympathy for their plight runs deep in the Arab world and beyond. But western military intervention – whether in the form of arms supplies or Britain and France's favoured no-fly zone – would, as the Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan argues, be "totally counter-productive" and "deepen the problem".
Experience in Iraq and elsewhere suggests it would prolong the war, increase the death toll, lead to demands for escalation and risk dividing the country. It would also be a knife at the heart of the Arab revolution, depriving Libyans and the people of the region of ownership of their own political renaissance.
Arab League support for a no-fly zone has little credibility, dominated as it still is by despots anxious to draw the US yet more deeply into the region; while the three Arab countries lined up to join the military effort – Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the UAE – are themselves among the main barriers to the process of democratisation that intervention would be supposed to strengthen.