Syria and the Arab Spring: Defending Human Rights

(L-R) David Keyes, Robert Rifkind, Radwan Ziadeh, Robert Goodkind

The Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights (JBI) held a panel discussion  on Syria on June 21, featuring speakers Radwan Ziadeh, a visiting scholar at George Washington University and founder and director of the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies in Syria and David Keyes, director and co-founder of CyberDissidents.org and executive director of Advancing Human Rights.

 

E. Robert Goodkind, chairman of the JBI Administrative Council, opened  the meeting, recalling Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech in April: “the long Arab winter has begun to thaw. For the first time in decades, there is a real opportunity for lasting change, a real opportunity for people to have their voices heard and their priorities addressed.” 

 

In the past six months, popular protest movements seeking an end to oppression have broken out in countries across the Middle East and North Africa.  So far opposition movements against oppressive governments in Tunisia and Egypt have remained largely non-violent, but it remains to be seen whether transitional regimes will fulfill their promises to ensure greater human rights protection for all citizens. Some regimes have violently cracked down against protesters but have faced little in the way of international condemnation. 

 

Since mid-March, Syrians have turned out in increasing numbers – first to call for the right to freedom of expression and an end to corruption and abuse by security forces, but ultimately for the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad.  The Syrian security forces have been accused of committing horrible atrocities against mainly peaceful protesters, including widespread arbitrary arrests, extrajudicial executions, and wide-scale torture.

 

While the US government and UN Human Rights Council have condemned the violence in Syria, the international community has been muted in response to the Assad regime, and few have called for the Syrian dictator to give up power.  The UN Council remains deadlocked over a weak draft resolution that does not even begin to approach the scope of the resolution imposing a no-fly zone and other protective steps in Libya.

 

Robert S. Rifkind, JBI Administrative Council member, moderated the panel discussion. He began by asking whether the series of demonstrations for democracy and the toppling of long-time autocratic leaders in the Middle East, dubbed the “Arab Spring,” were now reaching a dry summer spell where they faced serious obstacles in some place as some of the dictators refused to step down. Rifkind noted that one good thing to come out of the tumultuous events was an improvement in the UN Human Rights Council, whose members were forced to get in step with the dramatic events in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and Libya. The Human Rights Council acted to suspend Libya’s membership, and backed the appointment of a special rapporteur on Iran to investigate the crackdown on dissent there.

Radwan Ziadeh

Radwan Ziadeh, a leader of the Syrian human rights movement, said that at least 1,500 people have been killed by government troops firing on demonstrators. He cautioned that this figure was incomplete, as no independent investigators or domestic or foreign news crews have been able to function for long in Syria. The world was shocked by the brutal murder by government troops of Hamza Al-Khatib, the 13-year-old Syrian boy who had demonstrated in the square. Last week, four women were raped; at least 17 people have disappeared.  Ziadeh contrasted these appalling statistics with the more successful revolution in Egypt, where in 17 days, from January 25 to February 13, at least 250-300 people were known to be killed. He said that the relatively lower death toll and success in toppling President Hosni Mubarak, who had been in power 22 years, was due to CNN and other foreign media providing 24/7 coverage. “This is something that is missing in Syria,” he explained.

 

Ziadeh recalled Hannah Arendt’s designation of the two pillars of totalitarian society -- terror and the police -- as an apt description of the Syrian situation. The government used arbitrary arrests and murder to keep people terrorized and undermined the one feature of Syrian society that manages to survive, human solidarity. Numerous people have been arrested; there have been 2,200 detained in Dara alone, including many members of an extended family, kept in a cinema converted to a detention center.