Siria (Continuación)

MundoOriente Próximo,

La revuelta siria ha entrado en un callejón sin salida. Cuando está a punto de cumplirse el primer aniversario del levantamiento popular, el régimen ha decidido jugarse el todo por el todo y emplear su artillería pesada para tratar de aplastar las protestas que tienen su epicentro en la ciudad de Homs. Su propósito no es otro que someter la revuelta de manera definitiva y dar una lección que quede grabada a sangre y fuego en la población, tal y como hiciera hace 30 años en Hama.

Sin embargo, el presidente Bachar el Asad yerra tanto en el diagnóstico como en el tratamiento de la crisis siria, ya que si algo ha quedado meridianamente claro en este último año es que a más represión más movilización de la calle.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

He debido colarme de rondón en la cabeza del presidente sirio pues es una fortaleza inaccesible. Antes de llegar siquiera a aproximarse es menester superar al menos siete barreras. Alta seguridad. Miedo y desconfianza. Al igual que su padre, Hafiz, guarda las distancias. Se cuenta que Hafiz el Asad mandó fusilar a los siete soldados que habían de supervisar la entrada de las personas que tenían cita con él. A Hafez le gustaba jugar al ajedrez con un amigo de la infancia. Cada tarde, el amigo se hacía registrar siete veces antes de acceder al salón de juego. Un día, a fuerza de verle, le dejaron pasar sin realizar su tarea.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

Y ahora, Siria. Muchos juzgaron, hace un año, que al hilo de la primavera árabe comenzaba una nueva era no sólo de democracia y libertad sino también de paz en Oriente Medio. Pero tal periodo no ha llegado y no llegará en breve plazo. La situación en Siria es mala. Han sido asesinadas cinco mil personas, tal vez más, y los disturbios pueden convertirse en una guerra civil en toda regla. Cunde la preocupación en la diplomacia estadounidense y europea: ¿qué podría hacerse para mejorar la situación y detener el derramamiento de sangre? Parece estar descartada una intervención militar; Estados Unidos y la OTAN han aprendido la lección...…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaMundoOriente Próximo,

Two senior Russian officials, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Mikhail Fradkov, the director of Foreign Intelligence, have just been to Damascus.

Their mission was not to nudge Bashar al-Assad from power and offer him exile in Russia. Rather, the talk was about dialogue with the opposition, offering a referendum on a new constitution, and the Arab League resuming its “stabilizing” mission. Russia, for its part, would stand firm alongside China at the U.N. Security Council, preventing a formal condemnation of the Syrian regime, any outside military intervention, or any sanctions against it.

Coming so late in the game, the attempt at reconciliation is bound to fail.…  Seguir leyendo »

InternacionalONUMundoOriente Próximo, ,

Rather a lot of megaphone diplomacy followed the recent UN vote on Syria. Confusion and anger flowed from British and western media. So why did Russia and China veto the UN security council draft resolution on Syria? As Chinese ambassador in the UK, I feel it is timely to give a more measured explanation of why China voted no. Also, I want to explain how together we can, must and should give peace a chance in Syria.

Since day one of this crisis, China has been watching the situation very closely. We have consistently urged all sides to stop violence, avoid civilian casualties and restore order in the country.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo, , ,

The public debate in America and Israel these days is focused obsessively on whether to attack Iran in order to halt its nuclear weapons ambitions; hardly any attention is being paid to how events in Syria could result in a strategic debacle for the Iranian government. Iran’s foothold in Syria enables the mullahs in Tehran to pursue their reckless and violent regional policies — and its presence there must be ended.

Ensuring that Iran is evicted from its regional hub in Damascus would cut off Iran’s access to its proxies (Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza) and visibly dent its domestic and international prestige, possibly forcing a hemorrhaging regime in Tehran to suspend its nuclear policies.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

Almost one year after anti-government protests began in Syria, a disaster of enormous moral and strategic proportions is fast approaching. Full-scale civil war is now likely. And a multifront, conventional and possibly unconventional war ignited by events in the Levant is also increasingly plausible.

However, many in the West, in some Arab governments and even in the Syrian opposition still think a “controlled collapse” of Bashar al-Assad’s government is possible.

According to this view, increasing pressure from all around will, at some point, fracture the government and its supporters both at home and abroad. Any resulting death and destruction, as well as regional blowback, will be within acceptable limits.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

While Russia and China were using their veto to abort a UN security council resolution against the Syrian regime, the news of a massacre in Homs came thick and fast. In an unprecedented escalation, the Syrian regime sought to exploit the international hesitancy to have a bloody showdown with its opposition.

This came after Syrians had observed for the first time in 30 years the anniversary of the massacre carried out in Hama in February 1982. It is regarded as one of the most gruesome events in Syria's modern history. On that occasion, former president Hafiz al-Assad decimated most of the city of Hama with aerial bombings and tanks.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

The United States has closed its embassy in Damascus amid the Syrian ruling junta’s increasingly violent crackdown. As China defends its veto this weekend of a U.N. resolution that might have amounted to nothing more than strong condemnation, the Assad regime, buoyed by continuing Russian and Iranian political and logistical support, including arms shipments, is escalating its murderous rampage. Its goal is to crush the rebellion by brute force; meanwhile, international confusion regarding what can or needs to be done precludes any international effort to protect the protesters.

In Deir Ezzor Province in the northeast, Idlib Province along the border with Turkey and Hama and Homs Provinces in central Syria, loyalist troops travel back and forth between restive communities, taking turns pounding each of them in the hope of snuffing out the rebellious spirit of the inhabitants.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo, ,

As the death toll in Syria has climbed to perhaps 7,000, proponents of humanitarian intervention are asking, quite reasonably, why the West does not intervene as it did in Libya last year. Not only was Libya’s dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, ousted with relatively few Western casualties, but the NATO campaign also set a precedent for successful humanitarian intervention.

In the 63 years since the United Nations adopted a genocide convention in the wake of the Holocaust, world leaders have failed to prevent the deaths of millions, from Biafra and Cambodia to Rwanda and Darfur — not just because they have lacked the political will to intervene, but also because of the norm of genocide itself.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaMundoOriente Próximo,

Russia has been steadfast in its diplomatic support for the embattled regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, even as Assad becomes ever more isolated within the Arab League and the international community.

The Kremlin sent a strong message earlier this month when its aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, anchored off the Syrian port of Tartus. Then last week, Moscow said a draft resolution introduced at the U.N. Security Council by the Arab League calling on Assad to step aside “crosses our red lines.”

Russia’s support for Syria dates back to the days of the Soviet Union. The continuing partnership can be attributed to several factors — historic ties, economic interests and geopolitics.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

Drones are not just for firing missiles in Pakistan. In Iraq, the State Department is using them to watch for threats to Americans. It’s time we used the revolution in military affairs to serve human rights advocacy.

With drones, we could take clear pictures and videos of human rights abuses, and we could start with Syria.

The need there is even more urgent now, because the Arab League’s observers suspended operations last week.

They fled the very violence they were trying to monitor. Drones could replace them, and could even go to some places the observers, who were escorted and restricted by the government, could not see.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

For months now, it has been clear that no peaceful, even satisfactory, resolution of the conflict in Syria is possible without external intervention. Paradoxically, too many Syrian civilians have been tortured, wounded, and killed to stop the demonstrations seeking the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad. The victims’ families, friends, and neighbors simply will not accept the Assad regime’s continuation in any form. So what will happen?

One possibility is that the regime will greatly escalate the killing. If it kills ten or 20 times as many as have died thus far, perhaps it will succeed in creating so much terror that the protests will stop.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

La crisis siria ha entrado en una fase de estancamiento perjudicial que puede prolongarse durante la mayor parte del año en curso. Presiones externas y desafíos internos han continuado y continúan caracterizando la situación. Es evidente que el régimen no ha podido sofocar la revuelta y es muy improbable que lo consiga en lo que resta de año. Pero la oposición –tanto en el exilio como el grueso de ella en el interior del país– parece asimismo incapaz de unirse y cohesionarse o de ampliar el alcance de su radio de acción y de poner a punto nuevas medidas de presión para reforzar sus posibilidades de hacer frente al régimen a fin de desgastarlo y debilitar sus recursos coercitivos.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

Tema: El régimen sirio continúa desmoronándose sin que existan expectativas de que una intervención externa o una rebelión armada puedan acelerar su caída y poner fin a la represión, que ya ha causado más de 4.000 víctimas mortales.

Resumen: El destino del régimen sirio está sellado desde que se enrocó en una espiral de represión sin sentido pero su caída no está tardando días sino meses porque la presión internacional se ha ido aplicando con cuentagotas y doble rasero. Quienes intervinieron en Libia abiertamente para cambiar el régimen, están ahora esperando a que el régimen se caiga solo y han dado tiempo y oportunidades al gobierno sirio a sabiendas de que había optado por la represión en lugar de por las reformas y de que no tenía intención de abandonar el poder, a pesar de las ofertas de asilo recibidas.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo, ,

Seven years ago, I stood in the chapel of a monastery in the Syrian desert and stared up at a wall of frescoes from the 13th century.

Nearby, a burly man in a gray habit was explaining the paintings to a family visiting from a neighboring village. “That’s Mariam, may peace be upon her,” he said, pointing up. He moved his hand toward the bearded portrait of a man. “And that’s Ibrahim al-Khalil, may peace be upon him.”

Though it may seem like a mundane story, it was anything but ordinary. The visitors, who had climbed a flight of some 350 stairs to arrive there, were Muslims.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

The notion of a modern political awakening in the Arab world was first whispered more than a decade ago in Syria, when an assortment of intellectuals, artists, writers and activists lit the spark of what would become known as the Damascus spring. Having risked carefully crossing the regime's red lines in the last years of Hafez al-Assad's reign, they continued to push the boundaries after his son Bashar inherited power in July 2000, willing themselves to believe that he would support a gradual transition to a more pluralistic political system.

The Damascus spring was abruptly cut short with the Syrian regime's usual brutal methods; by 2001, civil society forums had been forced shut, and the main protagonists were charged in state security courts and given long jail sentences.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

'Be careful what you wish for" will be scribbled on the totalitarian tombstone of the Assad regime. For eight months Bashar has squirmed to justify abominable crimes against peaceful protesters calling for long-overdue reform by obsessively rehashing that he is at war with "armed gangs". These "bugs" were out to punish him for his "steadfast stance", he announced to that zoo of appointees that goes by the brazen misnomer of parliament. His official media then went into overdrive as there was a lot to cover up, since mass graves were being uncovered with women and babies in them.

We Syrians have been witness to everything ghoulish in this year of our revolution, which is set to stand as one of history's rousing exemplars of human courage.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

Bashar el Asad es un presidente que no lucha por su reelección. No. Lucha para no morir. No es de esas personas que reconocen sus errores y ceden el poder a un sistema democrático. El poder. Lo heredó de su padre Hafez, un dictador tranquilo que reinó durante más de tres decenios convirtiendo a Siria en un estado policial, asesinando a unas 20.000 personas en Hama (2 de febrero de 1982). Bashar y uno de sus hermanos matan cada día a ciudadanos desarmados que salen a las calles a manifestarse pidiendo lo que los ciudadanos tunecinos y egipcios reclamaron antes que ellos: dignidad, libertad, justicia, todo ello bajo el vocablo de la democracia.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

During the first 25 years of its existence, until Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970, the Syrian republic was a weak unstable state, an arena in which regional and international rivalries were played out. The first Assad reversed this state of affairs by turning Syria into a comparatively stable and powerful state, a player in regional and international politics.

This was part of the unwritten pact between the regime and Syria’s urban population. Stability, prestige and a leading role in Arab nationalist “resistance” (to the United States and Israel) made up for the regime’s authoritarianism and corruption, and the hegemony of the minority Alawite sect.…  Seguir leyendo »