Syria: Has the Regime Turned a Corner Against the Protests?

A supporter of Syria's President Bashar al-Assad holds aloft a photograph of the president at Hamidiya market in Damascus April 30, 2011.

Khaled al-Harin / Reuters

As bright spring days gradually turn hot and muggy, the consensus in Damascus is that the protest movement has been badly burnt. The activist Facebook group Syrian Revolution 2011 put out an order for a general strike across Syria on Wednesday calling for "mass protests" and the closure of all schools, universities, shops and restaurants, "not even taxis." But there was no apparent strike on Wednesday morning in central Damascus.

The mucky market was bustling with veiled women shopping for groceries and plucky boys in tattered jeans shouted out prices for their wares. Battered yellow taxis swiveled past large green buses brimming with kids in school uniform, their brows sweaty and their eyes filled with boredom. Damascus had resumed its regular life, seemingly oblivious to the fact that Syria has been the focus of the world's attention for over two months.(See photos from the protests in Syria.)

Syria's government has cracked down ferociously after demonstrators — bolstered by the ouster of both the long-ruling despots in Egypt and Tunisia — called for the end of president Bashar al Assad's regime. On Wednesday, after long prodding, the U.S. slapped sanctions on the Assad government for human rights abuses. Washington's actions may be too late — if sanctions had any chance for success at all.

The demonstrations in Egypt and Tunisia were bolstered after police and army brutality increased sympathy for the protesters, inspiring thousands more to flock to the cause. It is not the same in Syria. Even as the government repression grew uglier, most sources reached by TIME report that the turnout for street protests is significantly smaller than in past weeks. The fear among anti-government sympathizers is that the violence in Syria appears to be working. In an interview with the Syrian newspaper al Watan published on Wednesday, Assad said that Syria has now "overcome the crisis." On the streets of Damascus, many say they agree.

Indeed, many activists are either in prison or too scared to assemble. Sports stadiums and government buildings are being used for improvised prisons as police arrest thousands of protesters, according to Syrian human rights organizations. A Syrian student, who said two of her classmates have gone missing, told TIME that anyone either protesting or documenting the demonstration risks arrest and torture. "You could be walking along the street and never get to where you're going," she says, chuckling slightly, as if the horror of her statement was only tolerable in jest.

Syria's ubiquitous secret service has always been effective at tapping calls, employing neighbors to spy on each other and reading emails. A Korean student who studied Arabic here says that during a long phone call he had with his parents back in Korea the line went dead and a gruff man's voice cut in. "Speak in English, please," the mysterious voice asked politely.

Observers here say the regime has fostered a culture of paranoia to deter people from further civil disobedience, contributing to Wednesday's failed strike. During the recent tumult, unprecedented numbers of people went missing — around 8,000 according to local human rights groups — and activists are petrified to communicate over the phone.

Widespread fear has made it impossible to judge the mood among Syrians. Talking politics is taboo and speaking out against the regime can lead to jail time. Many people say they fear the unrest could cause sectarian strife, such as in neighboring Lebanon and Iraq. Some middle-class Syrians say they fear losing prosperity brought by the president, who opened the country to foreign investment when he ascended to power in 2000. If the president fled, they say, the economy would be crippled by populist demands for socialist policies.

A Syrian journalist, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal, said such pro-government rhetoric is mostly lies told by people to protect themselves. "Everyone hates the government, everyone. They are just too scared to say it," she said when asked why people continue to say they support the government. She believes that the anti-government movement, now battered and bruised, is weighing whether it is feasible to continue to protest when the military is willing to use live ammunition consistently against demonstrations. "I don't think the President will leave anytime soon, but nobody wants what is going on now."

For those still demonstrating, violence is guaranteed. Armed with anything from wooden batons to assault rifles, the plain-clothes secret police, or mukhabarat, have set up positions in key areas around the capital preventing many protests from even starting and augmented security measures confine people to their neighborhoods, or even their houses.

Radwan Ziadeh, Washington-based Syrian dissident and visiting scholar at the Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University, says state security is much more brutal than that of Hosni Mubarak, the ousted President of Egypt. "[The Assad government] has a lot of experience with brutality," he said. Western observers in Damascus agree that the extensive use of indiscriminate violence from the start of the uprising in Syria has managed to deter many from joining the protests. Human rights groups say that between 700 and 850 people have been killed so far.

Residents from Homs, one of Syria's most restive cities, say the army is using tanks to shell parts of the city and that the police are breaking into people's homes. Similar rumors trickle out of other towns around the country, but the government's refusal to allow most foreign journalists into Syria and imposed communication blackouts make it virtually impossible to corroborate any reports. Ziadeh insists the military is now occupying every city in Syria. He told TIME that in Douma, a suburb on the outskirts of Damascus, more than 100,000 people were demonstrating a few weeks ago. "Now you don't see anybody," he said.

To justify the vicious crackdown, the Syrian government casts the recent unrest as an armed uprising by criminal gangs and "extremist terrorist groups" rather than a popular movement for extensive change against an authoritarian regime. The state news agency, SANA, regularly publishes articles naming "rioters," who have turned themselves in to the authorities in return for amnesty.

Reports of machine gun fire in Homs and shelling in the nearby town of Tel Kelakh filtered out on Wednesday, evidence at least that, despite the repression the government still had to impose order on Syrians who have not given up protesting. "There are fewer numbers," dissident Ziadeh admits, "but everyday, they continue to protest."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2072376,00.html#ixzz1Nj8lvoeR

Faith in the Arab spring

New beginning A villager in Sol looks over a Coptic church that Muslims helped rebuild after it was destroyed in May by extremists

Photograph by Yuri Kozyrev for TIME

When President Obama stepped into the State Department on May 19 to deliver his long-awaited speech on the Middle East, he did so amid fears that the Arab Spring was devolving into a Summer of Discontent. Egypt was sagging under a weakening economy and escalating crime; NATO's efforts in Libya were stuck in neutral; the Syrian government was boasting that its rebellion was over. Sectarian tensions were roiling Bahrain and Syria, and a wave of church burnings in Cairo had spawned a week of deadly violence between Muslims and Christians.

In his speech, Obama confronted these religious struggles head-on. "In a region that was the birthplace of three world religions, intolerance can lead only to suffering and stagnation," he said. "For this season of change to succeed, Coptic Christians must have the right to worship freely in Cairo, just as Shia must never have their mosques destroyed in Bahrain."
Beyond their political implications, the religious dimensions of the Middle East uprisings have always been central, particularly to the West. Ever since 9/11, the West and Islam have been locked in a chilly standoff. The relationship was captured by Harvard professor Samuel Huntington's lightning-rod phrase "the Clash of Civilizations." Huntington's thesis, which was roundly trashed when it was published as an article in 1993 but became a best seller in book form following Sept. 11, was that Islam taught Muslims to be hostile to freedom, pluralism and individualism.

At first blush, the Arab Spring seemed to render Huntington's idea deader than ever. In up to 20 Islamic countries, Muslims marched in the face of bullets, tanks and water cannons, demanding the exact human dignities that parades of commentators had assured the American public Muslims didn't want. If anything, the uprisings of 2011, coupled with the death of Osama bin Laden, raised the tantalizing possibility that the West and Islam, which came to the brink of a Holy War in the past decade, might finally be able to build a Holy Peace. Could the Clash of Civilizations be giving way at last to the Convergence of Civilizations?

In recent weeks, the news from Egypt has suggested the answer is no. The downfall of the dictator Hosni Mubarak seems to have unleashed all kinds of pent-up religious hatreds. The latest explosion of violence began in the dusty Cairo slum of Imbaba on May 7. Rumors circulated that a Christian woman who had converted to Islam to marry a Muslim man had been kidnapped and was being held captive in the St. Mina Church. Muslims, many from the ultra-conservative Salafi sect, began marching on the facility. Coptic Christians, who make up about 10% of the country, hurried to defend the church. Thousands gathered, brandishing makeshift weapons and hurling insults. Street fighting broke out, and by the time the melee ended the following morning, 15 people had been killed and more than 200 wounded, and three Coptic churches were in flames.

Episodes like this one, reported around the world, fit into a narrative of extremist Muslim aggression and intolerance that has dominated American public discourse since Sept. 11. But what this story line misses is that a powerful new narrative has emerged from the Middle East in recent months that, for the first time in a generation, poses a serious threat to the fundamentalists' appeal. And that narrative can also be told from the recent sectarian events in Egypt. It is a story of the rise of a moderate coalition and its counter-attack against extremism.

The best example of that story unfolded two hours south of Cairo in the tiny village of Sol, in Helwan governate. A place of dirt-lined streets on the border of the desert, Sol was the site of the first church burning in the days after Mubarak's fall. Rumors played a large part in this conflict too: a Christian man had been in a romantic relationship with a Muslim woman, a domestic dispute broke out within the woman's family over her actions, and two people were killed, including her father.

After the funerals, a crowd of Muslims went looking for the Christian man, who they heard had sought refuge in the church. When word spread that someone found evidence that black magic was being performed on Muslims inside the church, the crowd set the building ablaze. It was exactly the sort of violence Mubarak had warned about for years: Keep me in power or sectarian divisions will rip apart the country.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2074093,00.html#ixzz1Nj83tAo4

The Specter of Civil War Grows in Yemen as Saleh Backs Out of Peace Deal

Updated: May 23, 2011. 3:30 p.m. Eastern Time

Filthy water sloshed through the streets of Sana'a on Monday as a fierce rainstorm swept over the capital. But the rolling of thunder was soon competing with the booming of heavy artillery and the rat-tat-tat of machine gun-fire as security forces in the east of the capital battled with fighters from Yemen's most powerful tribe.

The prospect of civil war seemed to rear its head even more insistently as the republican guard of President Ali Abdullah Saleh used bullets and rocket propelled greandes to pound the residence of Sadeq al-Ahmar, leader of the Hashid tribe and staunch supporter of the opposition. A stray missile thudded into the nearby Yemenia Airlines headquarters setting it ablaze while hundreds of journalists scrambled for cover in the basement of the state-owned Saba News Agency office as the violence raged on into the afternoon.

The tribal-military standoff then began to spread its way throughout the city. In retaliation for the assault on their leaders abode, armed Hasid fighters began encircling and attacking government buildings. Smoke billowed from the interior minister after a horde of men apparently fired anti-aircraft missiles at it. Tribal mediators eventually managed to stem the gun fire but not before seven soldiers and two civilians had died in the fearsome clashes.

The fighting was the fiercest yet between the pro- and anti-Saleh camps and came a day after President Saleh backed away from a promise to sign a Gulf-States-brokered deal that would end his 33 years in power. The stalemate prompted regional leaders late Sunday to abandon their efforts at mediating a solution to Yemen's crisis.

Sunday was also supposed to have been a day of celebration in Yemen, marking the 21st anniversary of the unification of country's north and south. But with Saleh once again reneging on an apparent agreement and the tribal fighting, no one was in the to celebrate. On Sunday, hundreds of thousands of Yemenis had come out onto the dusty streets of the capital Sana'a, only for their deafening calls for the president's departure to be thwarted once more by Saleh who, for the third time in two weeks, refused to sign the deal.

Despite complaining that it was as a "mere coup operation," Saleh had promised to sign the Gulf plan, which would see him exchange power for immunity, on Sunday. But in characteristic fashion, he balked at the last moment, claiming that he wanted the opposition who had inked the deal the day before to re-sign it at a public ceremony at his palace. He also suggested that the result of the impasse could be civil war — and that if that happened, it would be the fault of the opposition parties. "The opposition coalition will be held responsible if they escalate street protests and drag the country into a civil war ... they will be held responsible for the blood that has been and may be shed during the next days," Saleh said in a speech on Sunday.

Opposition officials refused to attend the palace ceremony because they'd already signed the deal; they claimed that Saleh was intent on forcing them to sign an amended version at the last minute.

"We are ready to go to the moon if he is really serious. But it is becoming clear that he is backing away," said opposition spokesman Mohammed al-Sabri, addressing Saleh's insistence that the opposition attend the signing.

According to the state news agency Saba, Saleh phoned the Gulf leaders Sunday night to "renew his readiness to sign the initiative." But it was too little, too late. Hours after the call, the Gulf mediators announced they were bailing on their monthlong effort to ease the President out of office, in a move many fear may be the end of the road for a diplomatic solution to Yemen's mounting political tumult.

Sunday had started ominously. Riled by the news that their President might be being forced from office, thousands of gun-toting regime loyalists — many of them tribesmen from the surrounding countryside — flooded into the capital in a convoy of flag-adorned SUVs and Toyota pickup trucks. At first they tried their hand at civil disobedience: setting up roadblocks, forcing shops to shut and scrawling pro-Saleh slogans on opposition members' houses. Then they begin hounding the diplomats involved in the negotiations. The motorcade of the Chinese ambassador and the convoy of the Gulf Cooperation Council's secretary general, Abdullatif bin Rashid al-Zayani, were both set upon by armed men flinging water bottles and chunks of paving slabs.

The climax to the loyalists' efforts came when a horde of 400 tribesmen armed with traditional daggers and rusty Kalashnikovs encircled the U.A.E. embassy. The siege lasted three hours before the diplomats inside, including al-Zayani and the U.S. and British ambassadors, were taken in military helicopters to the safety of the President's palace.(See scenes from Yemen.)

"The Gulf deal is a coup, an attempt to overthrow our democratically elected President," said Ahmed al-Sowfi, a tribal leader from the province of Amran, who stood blocking the entrance to the embassy with a Kalashnikov slung over each shoulder. "Ali Saleh has stood by this country for three decades. If he leaves, there will be chaos in Yemen."

Meanwhile, a few miles north of the embassy, an estimated half-million antigovernment protesters were staging their biggest pro-democracy rally since unrest broke out three months ago, filling a 6-mile (10 km) stretch of motorway with tents, banners and makeshift restaurants. Raising the specter of a broader conflict, they protested under the watchful eyes of soldiers and tanks sent by Major General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, a former Saleh confidant who joined the opposition.

"We knew from the start [Saleh] would have to be dragged from his palace kicking and screaming. It's protests, not political negotiations, that will force him out," shouted Hasan Abutalib, a young protest leader perched on the rung of a lamppost who was filming the crowds on his mobile phone.

With the Gulf-mediated efforts for Saleh's departure all but dead, analysts say the U.S. may have to reconsider its options. Saleh's deal-dodging antics provoked a staunch reaction from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who accused the President of "turning his back on his commitments and disregarding the legitimate aspirations of the Yemeni people."

The U.S.'s relations with the embattled Yemeni ruler have grown increasingly shaky in recent months. Saleh has on numerous occasions expressed his frustration with the U.S. and its role in Yemen, and he recently accused the U.S., along with Israel, of "fomenting unrest in the Arab world."

Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen expert at Princeton University, suggests the U.S. should take a stronger stance on Yemen. "In terms of U.S. national-security interests, it is better that Saleh goes as soon as possible," he wrote on his blog Waq al-Waq. "The longer this dangerous stalemate goes on, the worse it is for Yemen and U.S. national security. It is time for the U.S. to get off the bench and start playing, really playing."

But demonstrators in Yemen maintain that anything more than covert assistance from the U.S. would prove catastrophic. "This is our battle. We call on America to denounce Saleh and nothing more. [Americans] have caused us enough trouble by propping up Saleh all these years as it is," said protest leader Abutalib as he tossed a Yemeni flag into the roaring crowd.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2073460,00.html#ixzz1Nj74gRvO

2011 (Feb) BAHRAIN YAMAN EGYPT UPRISING