Archive for February, 2012
28 Feb
Syria: citizens from across country risk life to help Homs
Residents from Damascus and Aleppo told the Daily Telegraph of the secret operations to bring aid to those trapped in the bombardment.
Fearing punishment by the regime for helping the opposition, the medicines have to be hidden on the journey, explained Sana, 31, an Aleppo resident who has taken it upon herself to help.
“I travel by public minibus, hiding small amounts of medicines and money at the bottom of my bag,” said Sana, who has a nine year old son.
The road from Aleppo to Homs is strewn with checkpoints of the much feared Mukhabarat intelligence service. Stopping every vehicle, they compare identity cards against the now extensive list of people wanted for joining the Syrian opposition. Convoys of buses carrying Syrian troops are seen on the highway, along with military refuelling vehicles. Tanks are stationed strategically on bridges and in scrubland.
28 Feb
Syria votes in a referendum for a new constitution
Syrians voted on a new constitution in the face of opposition calls for a boycott and further bloodshed as Washington warned of civil war and urged troops to disobey orders to shoot. A portrait of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad defaced with red paint See this clip : they all voted YES 28 Feb EXCLUSIVE: A detailed document obtained by Mother Jones appears to identify a vast group of Syrian dissidents targeted by Bashar al-Assad’s regime.Syria Hit List Targets Thousands —By Hamed Aleaziz | Mon Feb. 27, 2012 8:01 AM PST
 Syrian protesters in May 2011 Syria-Frames-Of-Freedom/FlickrA 718-page digital document obtained by Mother Jones contains names, phone numbers, neighborhoods, and alleged activities of thousands of dissidents apparently targeted by the Syrian government. Three experts asked separately by Mother Jones to examine the document—essentially a massive spreadsheet, whose contents are in Arabic—say they believe that it is authentic. As Bashar al-Assad’s military continues a deadly crackdown on dissent inside the country, the list appears to confirm in explicit detail the scale of the regime’s domestic surveillance and its methodical efforts to destroy widespread opposition. 28 Feb The Syrian referendumMonday, February 27, 2012 Look at this man. You’d think he was the president of a thriving democracy and that he was busy on the campaign trail. Who is he kidding? Does he think the entire world is stupid? Whilst this photo was being taken, sixty Syrians were killed in Homs by his militias. In the video below he says that his regime will succeed on the ground and “in space”, wonderful…
From Maysaloon
27 Feb (02-23-12) Kafar Zayta | Hama | (+18) AbdelHameed Al-Bakour Severely Tortured by Assad Forces27 Feb Mustafa Khalifa. Al-Qawqa’a [The Shell].Book Review: A Memoir-Novel of Tadmur Military Prison Khalifa_img01 Mustafa Khalifa. Al-Qawqa’a [The Shell]. Beirut: Dar al-Adab (http://adabmag.com/books), 2008. By Shareah Taleghani In 2001, following the release of several hundred political prisoners, the Syrian government ordered the closure of its most notorious detention center—Tadmur Military Prison. Located in the desert near the ancient site of Palmyra and originally built by the French Mandate authorities, Tadmur has been described as a “kingdom of death and madness” by Syrian poet Faraj Bayraqdar and the “absolute prison” by dissident Yassin al-Haj Salih. The abject conditions of torture, daily degradation, and arbitrary execution which prisoners experienced there were the subject of intense scrutiny by both international and local human rights organizations throughout the 1980s and up until its doors were finally closed almost eight years ago. The site of a massacre of suspected members of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1980, Tadmur, according to a 2001 report by Amnesty International, was and is “synonymous with suffering”. In the recent proliferation of contemporary Syrian prison literature, most narrative accounts of prisoners’ experiences of surviving the conditions of Tadmur have been circulated in the form of testimonials and memoirs. Aside from a website dedicated to testimonies of former Tadmur prisoners, Muhammad Salim Hammad’s prison memoir Tadmur: Shahid wa-Mashhud [Witness and Witnessed] recounts in linear and chronological fashion his experience of detention and torture at the prison as a suspected member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Faraj Bayraqdar’s own poetic prison memoir Khiyanat al-Lugha wa al-Samt [The Betrayals of Language and Silence] (2005) dedicates an entire chapter to what he calls “Tadmuriat”—brief, disjointed fragments of descriptions of terrifying events and moments he witnessed while detained at the infamous prison—moments that appear to escape the possibility of representation because they are “beyond surrealism”. Mustafa Khalifa’s recently published work al-Qawqa’a [The Shell] (2008) is one of the first novels dedicated to the story of a detainee’s imprisonment in Tadmur. Detained himself from 1982 to 1994, the author presents the story of a seemingly apolitical protagonist who returns to his homeland after studying film in Paris and is arbitrarily detained. Musa is arrested upon arriving at the airport, brutally tortured at an interrogation center of the military security service, mistakenly placed with detainees who are members of or suspected members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and then sent to the “desert prison”. He will not learn what precise crime he had been accused of until close to the time of his release. Like many prisoners, Musa discovers and masters the skill of oral composition and memorization. He has no paper and no pen. But … read on here 
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