{"id":6728,"date":"2010-06-24T02:10:07","date_gmt":"2010-06-24T06:10:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/joshualandis.com\/blog\/?p=6728"},"modified":"2010-06-24T02:10:07","modified_gmt":"2010-06-24T06:10:07","slug":"news-round-up-25-june-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/joshualandis.com\/blog\/news-round-up-25-june-2010\/","title":{"rendered":"News Round Up (25 June 2010)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Radwan Ziadeh, who runs the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies, has written a report published in Washington this month by the Transitional Justice in the Arab World Project, entitled, “Years of Fear<\/em>.”\u00a0 He argues that as many as 17,000 Syrians may have been “disappeared” during Hafez el-Assad’s rule; the 117-page document contains heart-breaking accounts of disappearances and extra-judicial executions, and descriptions of the apparently vain 30-year wait of sons, wives and parents for the return of men who were almost certainly killed in the early 1980s.<\/p>\n

Robert Fisk has written a interesting synopsis<\/a> of his findings.<\/p>\n

This does not disqualify his report, but he warns readers in his preface that “for security reasons, we withheld the names of those interviewed and have changed some facts to disguise their identities. Similarly, we have scrambled [sic] the details of many human rights activists and former detainees whom we interviewed.” This does not, to put it mildly, bestow total confidence on the report. The Syrian authorities will no doubt seize upon this to debunk its contents. So, reader, you have been warned.<\/p>\n

Years of Fear covers the three-decade rule of Hafez el-Assad, Syria’s former air force commander whose long battle to maintain his Alawi rule and whose ferocious struggle against violent Islamist enemies clogged the fetid prisons of Syria with thousands of political prisoners. Using security forces who were often corrupt, he confronted an ever more violent sectarian guerrilla movement whose first major assault came on 16 June 1979 when an army captain, Ibrahim al-Yusuf, led the massacre of Alawi students at the Aleppo artillery school.<\/p>\n

A subsequent assassination attempt on the president prompted Rifaat’s Defence Brigades’ assault at Tadmor in which up to a thousand Muslim Brotherhood prisoners were machine-gunned to death in their cells. By 1980, there was open war between the regime and its opponents. Law 49, of 7 July 1980, mandated capital punishment for those who did not renounce their Brotherhood membership in writing, and a Ghadaffi-style assassination campaign against overseas opponents was ordered.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Hama uprising in February 1982, in which the old, rebel-held city was virtually destroyed by tank and shell-fire, caused up to 15,000 deaths, according to Ziadeh’s report \u2013 some put the figure at 20,000. What Ziadeh oddly fails to mention is the underground fighting in Hama in which girl suicide bombers hurled themselves against Syrian troops, and previous violence in the city in which Islamists slaughtered entire families of Baath party officials. There was nothing exclusive about Syria’s mass-murderers.<\/p>\n

Ziadeh believes that in the early Eighties and later, up to 25,000 men went missing, swallowed into interrogation centres and prisons. “Most such cases occurred before 2000,” the report says. “Many detainees have been released during the past few years.” A credit to Bashar al-Assad, no doubt.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Carsten Wieland<\/strong> writes, “Here is an article of mine — The present context of syria\u2019s foreign policy change in the region and stagnation at home<\/a>,” that might be of interest to you and your blog.”<\/p>\n

Wieland makes a number of policy recommendations for the US, such as encourage peace negotiations between Syria and Israel and helping Syria’s economic development. These are encouraging. Unfortunately,\u00a0 Israel has stated clearly that Syria must give up the notion of getting back the Golan for peace. Syria is just as emphatic about getting back the entire Golan. And so long as Syria and Israel remain in a state of war, the US will insist on imposing economic sanctions on Syria and naming it a terror supporting state, rather than helping it develop economically.<\/p>\n

Two additional recommendations are:<\/p>\n