The Acceleration of a Crisis

On August 25 over 440 bodies were found at different locations across Syria. According to CNN, the weekend death toll toped 600, ending a week of triple-digit deaths every single day. 21,00 people have died since the conflict began 16 months ago, that number is climbing more and more rapidly. Syrian Army forces regularly use mortars, helicopters, planes, tanks and large guns against the opposition. House-to house raids and executions in dissident neighborhoods are becoming increasingly common, with children and other unarmed civilians regularly found among the victims.

One major advantage to the oppositions is the increasing rate of defections. The New York Times estimated the number of defected soldiers to be 10,000 by last October, though current numbers are impossible to estimate. A Turkish official told the Times that 20-30 military defectors were crossing the border every day. This doesn't include those who have crossed Jordan and Lebanon’s borders or the multitude who have chosen to stay in Syria and fight back against the regime.

Members of the Free Syrian Army gather in Idlib after five
days of shelling.

In March 2011 protest against President Bashar al-Assad and his governing regime. These demonstrations were almost exclusively non-violent, though Assad’s forces responded violently. Police and Military have used live fire to disperse crowds of protesters and often attack homes and neighborhoods were protesters are believed to be. Slowly neighborhoods began organizing small defense forces who have since evolved to become a large part of the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA). Both the Syrian Armed Forces and the FSA have escalated  their tactics over the last year, though Assad’s Armed Forces have far more access to advanced military equipment and munitions. Many Syrians have given up on the peaceful protest and now hope only in a successful coup of Assad’s regime. A powerful blog regarding what is happening in Syria can be found here.

Al-Jazera reports that 26 military and security officials, 9 diplomats, 4 members of parliament and 3 members of the cabinet have defected from the government. Most notable was Prime Minister Riyad Farid Hijab, who was appointed to the post in June but has been a part of President Assad’s Ba’ath party government since 1998.

At a press conference in Jordan the former Prime Minister encouraged the Syrian army to “follow the example of Egypt's and Tunisia's armies [and] take the side of people.” He also said that President Assad’s regime was nearing collapse on both economic and moral grounds. He said that there were many more government officials looking for an opportunity to leave and join the opposition. This position was echoed by Egypt’s new president Mohamed Morsi at the Non-Aligned summit in Iran this week, prompting a walk-out from the Syrian delegation. 

Government forces have been shelling Aleppo heavily over
the last few weeks. Destruction and death fuel anti-Assad
anger, compelling many to flee the country or take up arms
against the regime. 

While abstaining from military intervention, the United States has been involved in a few ways. As a part of international sanctions against Assad’s regime the US treasury has frozen official’s financial assets. After Hijab’s defection and proclamation of support for the opposition his assets were released and all sanctions were lifted off of him. This may serve as an incentive for other officials to defect.

The United States has also presented a small presence on the ground in the conflict to provide training in civil administration to rebel groups who know little about administering the neighborhoods and towns they now control. Keeping utilities running and managing a limited budget are essential to keeping the ‘hearts and minds’ struggle for popular support. 

This is a major struggle for the Free Syrian Army: to not only defeat Assad’s forces on the ground, but to do so without loosing their status as a desirable alternative. There have been accusations of human rights violations against the rebel army (such as killing prisoners of war). It’s clear that the social legitimacy for Assad’s leadership has be lost in all but a few communities, but the legitimacy of the FSA is also in question. 

In spite of increased violence, most Syrians still seek a safe homeland and
legitimate government. In Daraya-a center of recent violence-people gathered
today for a non-violent protest and help up flowers to show their hope for a
peaceful end to the violence.

I hate to admit that this post is overcrowded with the many complex parts of the Syrian conflict, and that many important issues have gone unmentioned, but the events there are far to big to fit into one post. Please, take this as little more than a brief preface; to be followed by some much more articulate-and helpful-post in the future. Thanks for reading.

How to Compress the Indefinite

I started writing this back in April, and chose not to publish it until later. It is the story of me speaking to a classroom about my time in the Middle East, and while I wrote it I discovered it was as much about this blog as the classroom I talk about it in the article. The publishing date has been modified. Enjoy.

A few months back myself and two other Americans who had lived in Palestine were invited to speak with a class of fellow students about the conflict. Tone it down, their professor told us. Don't use any strong language or reveal your biases. They don't really understand it.

I couldn't help but queston how well the professor understood the conflict when I saw his assigned reading: a 1938 social commentary by written by Ghandi. The students were given no context on the conflict through which to interpret this document which was written about a very different Palestinian conflict that the one that exists today. The other was the essay Next Year in Mas'Ha by Starhawk that reads much more like journal entry than a historical document; a great article, but still difficult to digest without a better understanding of the conflict. I hoped they had some other knowledge of what was going on in the promised land, but doubted it would be the case.

Then there was the question of what to tell the class. Come tell my class about the conflict and your experience was the only direction I had. Well, understanding the conflict should take a whole undergraduate education at least, and synthesizing personal experience takes a lifetime or more. I went to Palestine and came back to the United States. I've talked to everyone from Palestinian Socialist revolutionaries to Tibetan monks to Israeli girls I met in a bar, and they all said a lot of things that were interesting and mind-blowing and offensive and boring. I am overwhelmed with a cornucopia of experience and life, all relating to this conflict in Palestine and Israel. I am also overwhelmed by how much I don't know and the guilt of inadequacy when it comes to representing the people who took me in in Palestine.

I collected my sources and drew up a short outline of what I was hoping to share with the class. A brief history. A personal anecdote. A grave story of tragedy and something to make the class laugh. It seemed inevitable that my 20 minutes in the spotlight would be contrived and cheap.

I did find some encouragement, and not where I'd expected it. In the Starhawk's essay that'd been assigned to the class I read a powerful reminder of my time in Palestine. Starhawk is an Israeli working for peace, during the second Intifada she wrote about her time in a Palestinian community,

"The Israelis who came were mostly young. They are anarchist and punks and lesbians and wild-haired students, and it strikes me that the mayor of Mas'Ha and the village leaders in a very socially conservative society might actually have more in common with the Orthodox Jews who hate them than with these wild, social rebels. But the village accepts them with good grace and a warm-hearted Palestinian welcome. One woman is from the group 'Black Laundry', which requires a somewhat complicated three-way translation of a Hebrew play on words. she explains that it is a lesbian direct action group, and asks our translator if that's a problem. 'Not for me,' he says with a slightly quizzical shrug, and the meeting goes on."

Reading this reminds me of the Palestinians who invested in me while I was there. I was given homes to stay in, food, and shared culture. People were incredibly vulnerable with me as they shared their lives and stories. The people I met there trusted me with their families, their jail time, the bullet wounds in their bodies and the hopes they had for the future. They trusted me to represent them for the rest of my life, standing up for justice and peace in their home. I am both crippled and honored by the weight of it.

When I showed up in class, I gave a brief history. I tried my best to explain the dichotomies of the conflict and of the lives of those people I was representing. I made everyone laugh once or twice, just to make sure they were still listening. They didn't look as bad as punk-lesbian-wild-haired-Israelis, and I grew a little less concerned with whether or not they knew enough to ''understand it." I knew my Palestinian and Israeli friends would be glad they were hearing those stories I'd been entrusted with. The students seemed to care, which was all I could really say for myself in the face a hundred years of occupations and wars.

As I spoke to the class, it felt like everyone I'd met in Palestine was sitting just behind me, watching me tell their stories. I hope I don't let them down. 

The Syrian Uprising: Internal Collapse and Asserting Democracy

I've been wanting to publish a post on the internal conflict in Syria for a while now, but have been daunted by the prospect. I don't intent to get my readers completely up-to-date on this rapidly deteriorating situation-that can be found at al-Jazeera's website and many others'. I do hope to shed a little light on the most violent and tragic stage of the Arab Spring.

The city of Homs has been bombarded with tank and mortar attacks
 for months, even though the vast majority of protest are peaceful and
the Free Syrian Army there has only small arms.  Photo  MSNBC. 

The basics are this: as many as 500 children have died. Total death estimates range between 11,000 and 17,000, including protesters, combatants and civilians. The violence is everywhere, but has primarily been focused on towns away from the nation's center where opposition is strongest. The opposition is embodied in both the non-violent activist movement, which dominates the streets and webpages, and the Free Syrian Army, which is small but very professional and is largely made up of defectors from the President Assad's military forces. Many high-level military officers have defected to join the Free Syrian Army, and have succeeded in collecting support from all over the globe.

Protests against Assad's regime began well over a year ago, with violence escalating rapidly. Since the beginning a complete media blackout of the country has been enforced by Assad's military and police forces. Many journalist have been arrested. Some have been tortured and some have been killed.

Soldiers of the Free Syrian Army drilling in the town of Qusair.
Journalist are welcomed by the Free Syrian Army, who can go out
 of their way to accommodating them. Photo  www.trust.org 

Last week Assad's government held general elections which were largely boycotted. In opposition towns shops were kept closed on election day. This came during the UN-orchestrated ceasefire which has succeeded in slowing but not ending the violence. UN special envoy to Syria, Kofi Annan, said himself that this ceasefire may be the last chance to avoid civil war.

With this many deaths, with an organized opposition, and with growing international support for the overturn of Assad's regime, it seems that we may have already arrived at civil war; a point of hot debate in the media and among political minds.

I don't know much about the fine line between civil war and insurgency, but this I do know: Assad has lost the authority to govern his people and to use the monopoly of violence over them. They have rejected this fundamental aspect of government and are rejecting other aspects of the government's legitimacy as well, such as the elections. By reclaiming violence as their own tool, and turning it against Assad, they've asserted their independence from his dictatorship.

There are some people who are loyal to Assad and would reject the authority of the Free Syrian Army's interim government in the event of a successful coup d'état. There are others who would prefer to watch the whole thing on T.V., who lack faith in any party and will not participate in the formation of their country. Still, Syria has reached a point of no return. When a dictator uses tanks and mortars against his own citizens, it is time for new government to be established. If he had not ceased to rule with legitimacy, his people would not be turning against him, and if the bulk of the injustice was done by the opposition (as Assad claims) it would not be Assad's troops enforcing the media blackout.

Marie Colvin was killed in the Syrian town of Homs on Feb 22 of this year in a mortar shelling that many suspect intentionally targeted where she and other journalist were staying. Their targeted attack is not supprising, especially when on of her last reports included her saying “It’s a complete and utter lie they’re only going after terrorists. The Syrian Army is simply shelling a city of cold, starving civilians.” Photo and Quote The New Yorker

Palestine: an Introduction for Everybody

Since I came back from Palestine in November I've been looking for a way to explain the situation to people. Israel. Palestine. Middle Eastern climates-ecological and political-are about as tricky as it gets.

While I was there a friend of mine from Denmark showed me a pretty funny link to a show about an irreverent brit who travels through the region. He sees Israel, Palestine and Jordan: he saw all the countries we were able to visit. His adventure is comical an certainly worth seeing (perhaps even before reading the rest of this blog).

As comedians, it's obvious that the creators of this show didn't have political implications in mind. The paranoia promoted by the staged kidnapping and the flippant analysis of the wailing wall were both quite lacking-especially in a context where empathetic understanding is so gravely needed.

However, this does serve as a decent introduction for those who know very little about the region. Accessible and-I hesitantly admit-pretty damn funny, this is worth seeing. But I hope you do notice a few things as you watch it: The protagonist is most bothered by the barrier wall; you don't see any more Israelis after the he crosses the wall and almost no Palestinians before. This barrier is central to the conflict: it allows for the segregation and apartheid of Palestinians by Israel. Almost more importantly to the peace process, it keeps Israelis out of Palestine. When you don't know your neighbor, it's easy to vilify them.

Watch the clip, ask some questions, find out the answers. Hopefully I can help.

Listen to the Silence

On March 11 Army Staff Sargent Robert Bales left his military base in the Kandahar province of Afghanistan during the wee hours of the morning. He entered civilian homes in the small Afghan village of Panjwai and murdered 16 people. The bodies were found the next day with bullet holes, stab wounds and severe burns since Robert had apparently attempted to pile up some of the bodies and burn them. Nine of the victims were children; three were womyn.

A family member weeps, showing the evidence of
the massacre to western media sources. With such an act
of vulnerability, it seems he must have been hoping
something would change. 

After a few days of silence on behalf of the military, Robert Bales's identity was released to the public. Immediately detailed reports on Robert  filled the US media discussing his distinguished but grueling four tours of service, a head injury in a Humvee rollover, the poor psychological track record of his home base in Washington and even his family's financial and domestic troubles. His picture has appeared in most news papers, and outrage against his actions has been meet with a great deal of concern for his (and other service men and womyn's) mental health.

We can assign blame lots of places. It can rest one Robert personally, on the military machismo tradition that discourages people under combat stress from seeking help, or on any of a thousand factors within the military or government policy. But the fact remains the same: 16 Afghan civilians were murdered without reason by a US soldier. Laura King of the Los Angeles times phrased it best:

"In American minds, the moral distinction between the accidental and the deliberate, between the carefully judged risk and the deranged act, is incalculable. But for Afghans, the result — the shrouded bodies, the wailing relatives, the bite of shovels into dusty ground — speaks to the numbing sameness of unexpected and violent death."

Her article was one of the few in mainstream American to acknowledge a sad truth. No matter how awful this incident seems to us, it's normal for Afghans. Last year an average of 5 civilian non-combatants died each day. Blame the Taliban, blame the drug trade, blame the religions. Five more people died today. Robert Bales, his wife and two children, and me. There's five.

Afghans clean up the sight where Bales piles up the bodies
of his victims and burned them. The family of the deceased
will live here long after the US military is gone.

Yet no matter how atrocious the deed, or how horrific the war, condemnation alone is never constructive. Will this lead to better psychological screening and treatment in the US military? To a certain extent, I'm sure it will, but that doesn't address the real issue. The important question is, will this incident lead to a change in the relationship between the US occupying force and the Afghan people? Hopefully. Afghan president Hamid Karzai has demanded immediate and serious changes to what is going on in his country, including the withdrawal of foreign forces form rural areas and the withdrawal of all private security forces from Afghanistan by Wednesday.

As Karzai's cabinet grows increasingly conservative towards foreign military presence and Afghans rally in protest against occupation around flash-points such as the Qu'ran burning last month, the US withdrawal date of 2014 seems to be getting further and further away. But for many Afghans disengagement can't come soon enough and a strong government has trouble growing under complete occupation.