UNITED NATIONS, March 24 -- Syrian President Bashar Assad threatened former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri with "physical harm" last summer if Hariri challenged Assad's dominance over Lebanese political life, contributing to a climate of violence that led to the Feb. 14 slayings of Hariri and 19 others, according to testimony in a report released Thursday by a U.N. fact-finding team.
Now Assad is being openly criticized in the press.
Except the author of this piece is not Lebanese, but Syrian, writing - at serious risk - from Damascus. Signing himself as Hakam al-Baba, this journalist goes on to identify himself as someone who has worked for the past 20 years for a Syrian state newspaper, Tishrin. And like the Lebanese who for the past five weeks have been tearing down posters of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, Mr. al-Baba of Damascus is saying he has had enough.
In biting metaphor and with blunt fury, he describes how, under 42 years of Baathist rule, Syria's media has performed as a tin pot press. Reporters and editors have been required to stage Orwellian stunts in which the cruelties and depravities of the Baath Party are described as glorious deeds, in which "their corruption is turned into achievements, and their profligacy into profits." Mr. al-Baba reminds his audience of the days before Baathist tyranny, when Syria had hundreds of lively magazines and newspapers instead of a few orchestrated, official ones. He calls for a press in Syria that would be free to "learn and make mistakes, get it right, fail and succeed" and write the truth instead of trumpeting on cue the party line.
On the ground in Damascus, Syrian blogger Ammar reports on his interrogation and the growing signs of stress from the regime.
For ours is not simply a system where the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing, it is a system where the thumb, or the middle finger if you like, does know what the other fingers of the selfsame hand are doing. And so it goes. In order to assure yourself that you have true deniability, you have to grant too much autonomy to the worst most ignorant and sadistic elements in the system.
Yes. Yes. These days are coming back, just when we thought and hoped they were gone never to come back. Few of us might end up going first to this cross, but all shall soon follow. It does not take a prophet to predict this.
No. This is not a comforting thought. Nothing about this is comforting. Comfort has no place here. But then, when the noose tightens, comfort is not exactly what’s at stake.
Will the recent uprising in Lebanon and now the revolt in Kyrgyzstan inspire the Syrians to rise up and overthrow Assad?
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