industryterm:chemical-weapons

Not Just for the Sake of Syrians, but for Our Sake

Precisely the Arabs in Israel, who are fighting discrimination and oppression, must not stutter when it comes to the injustices perpetrated across the border

Odeh Bisharat Apr 10, 2017 12:16 AM
read more: ▻http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.782651

What can the Arabs in Israel do for their Syrian brethren? They have no army, no diplomatic clout, no logistical capabilities that could allow them to offer civilian support. The only thing that remains is moral support – words. “You have neither horses nor treasure to give … so let the words rejoice if circumstances be grim,” said the poet Al-Mutanabbi. But the Arab leadership in Israel has failed in the realm of words as well.
The truth is that even if the Arabs in Israel manage to give verbal support to Syria’s citizens, that will not change the balance of power at all between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, or between Syrian President Bashar Assad’s murderers and the fanatics backed by Qatar. In the situation we’re in, the battle over what position should be taken toward Syria is a battle over the moral image of Arab society in Israel, over its attitude toward the terrible massacre going on across the border.
>> Israeli Arab party fails to condemn Assad’s gas attack in Syria, slams U.S. strikes <<
And if in the hard days of the chemical-weapons assault on Khan Sheikhoun almost none of the leaders of Arab society in Israel saw fit to condemn the Syrian regime, that’s cause for concern. Even those who did condemn it, by the way, did so weakly, to the point where it could not be said whether the statements were condemnation or commentary.
Condemnation of Assad produces furious responses from his supporters, as if he were Mother Theresa, censured out of nowhere. But Assad was part of a bloody regime even before the appearance of ISIS and the Nusra Front. On June 26, 1980, when Hafez Assad waited on the steps of the presidential palace to welcome an African guest, two bombs were thrown at him, miraculously missing their target. Revenge was quick to follow. The next day, June 27, at dawn, a group of some 60 soldiers, led by Muin Nassif, deputy of Rifaat Assad, the president’s brother, boarded helicopters and flew to the Tadmor Prison in the heart of the desert. There, the soldiers broke up into smaller groups and opened fire on the prisoners locked in their cells. Five hundred prisoners were murdered in cold blood. That story appears in Patrick Seale’s biography of the senior Assad.

#Syria #Palestine #Israel

Does Anyone in Syria Fear International Law? - The New Yorker
▻http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/does-anyone-in-syria-fear-international-law

Merci Elisabeth Vallet.

http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Taub-Does-Anyone-Syria-Fear-International-Law-1200x630-1472679765.jpg

The horror of Syria’s war is in the millions of pictures that are too gruesome to circulate—charred limbs stacked outside hospital wards, bloated bodies rotting in sniper alleys, a toddler plucked from the rubble without a head. It is in a group of relatives trying to carry the sixty-pound corpse of a man who died of hunger—the boiled grass he’d been living on could no longer sustain him—but struggling under his weight, because they, too, are starving to death. It is in a generation of orphans, of children who never learned to read but can tell you the difference between the sounds of shelling and those of air strikes. It is in the intentional bombing of hospitals and clinics, the targeted assassinations of medical workers, the forced displacements, the chemical-weapons attacks. It is in a death toll so high, and so impossible to verify, that the U.N. stopped counting two years ago.

#syrie #justice_internationale

“Bashar Al Assad: An Intimate Profile of a Mass Murderer”

▻http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115993/bashar-al-assad-profile-syrias-mass-murderer

One recurring theory about Assad, which the regime has perhaps subtly encouraged, holds that he is not really running his country, but is in thrall to a shadowy set of figures that varies according to whom you’re talking—in some versions, it is his father’s old circle; in others, the Alawite elite. (This theory was especially appealing to the Western governments who once hoped that high-level defections could help weaken Assad, and perhaps even supply his replacement.) Most of the former regime officials I spoke to rejected that idea. “This is a kind of one-man show,” says a former regime official. “The system will not collapse as long as Assad does not collapse. Any other person is replaceable.”

Under the deus ex machina set in motion by Russia, Assad has until the middle of 2014 to facilitate the removal and destruction of all of Syria’s chemical-weapons stockpiles and manufacturing capabilities. Even though this agreement does nothing to threaten Assad’s hold on power—Moscow can veto any U.N. punishment for the regime’s failure to comply—it has been widely celebrated. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which is overseeing the process, won the Nobel Peace Prize. Assad joked in front of reporters from a Lebanese newspaper that he should have received the award himself.

When I asked one former regime official about what will happen next, he suggested the following scenario: International chemical weapons inspectors are operating out of the fortress-like Four Seasons Hotel in Damascus. Assad knows that a few of these inspectors will be Western intelligence agents. Syrian operatives will figure out who they are and quietly approach them with tips: a known terrorist is in this province; we have pictures; we’re fighting Al Qaeda, just like you. “And I will not be surprised at all if the American and Syrian intelligence agencies work together again,” says one defector. “If not today, tomorrow. If not directly, indirectly. The door will be open.”

The last time Bashar Al Assad stood for reelection in Syria, where the presidential term lasts for seven years, was in May 2007. He had no credible opponent and won with 97.6 percent of the vote. Instead of his father’s Pyongyang-style extravaganzas, Bashar celebrated with a more postmodern spectacle: an exquisitely orchestrated “uprising” of support, part Roman triumph, part faux Orange Revolution. Crowds of people danced debkeh in the streets with choreographed spontaneity, waving torches and posters of Bashar and singing: “We love you, yes! We love you!”

Syria’s next presidential election is scheduled for May. In an October interview with the German newspaper Der Spiegel, Assad played coy about whether he will seek a third term. “I cannot decide now whether I am going to run,” he said. “It’s still early, because you have to probe the mood and will of the people.” But he seemed to like his chances. “Who isn’t against me?” Assad said. “You’ve got the United States, the West, the richest countries in the Arab world, and Turkey. All this and I am killing my people, and they still support me! Am I a Superman? No. So how can I still stay in power after two and a half years? Because a big part of the Syrian people support me.” Besides, Assad added, “Where is another leader who would be similarly legitimate?”

Syria, Assad, and the History of Chemical Weapons : The New Yorker
▻http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/08/syria-assad-and-the-history-of-chemical-weapons.html

Un bon rappel,

One of the first tweets I saw about the news said that Syria now had its “Halabja”—a reference to the chemical-weapons attack on the insurgent Kurdish town of Halabja by Saddam Hussein’s military in 1988, which killed as many as five thousand civilians. At the time, Saddam was a tacit ally of the West, fighting a gruesomely bloody conflict against neighboring Iran, in an earlier version of the lethal Sunni-Shiite split which has now made Syria its central battleground. Saddam initially denied responsibility for Halabja, although it later emerged that his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid—or, as his enemies knew him, “Chemical Ali”—had carried it out, just as he had many other chemical attacks in the war from 1980 to 1988, in which as many as a million Iranians and Iraqis died. The reaction of the Reagan Administration, which had been providing Saddam’s military with information of the Iranian troop concentrations from AWACS surveillance in order to assist his missile-targeting against them, was initially to side with Saddam by suggesting that Iran had also used chemical weapons in the fighting. It was a shameful attempt at disinformation. Before long, when the facts of the attack became obvious, the U.S. position was amended.

The Halabja episode is an example of the nettlesome moral politics that arise whenever there are allegations of chemical-weapons use.

Voir aussi ▻http://seenthis.net/messages/142500