Syria: Why is the world just watching?

Protesting against the Syrian regime must be a prompt for action. // Credit Getty Images

The saying goes:

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”.

This adage seems particulary pertinent to the Syrian crisis, as the world seems to be doing nothing.

Of course, words are juggled around — “catastrophe”, “brink of civil war”, “it’s bleak” — and condemnation offered, but none of this seems to instigate a transition from ineffectual words into positive action.

As the world acknowledges the latest massacre in Syria, in Qubair, we are all asking when the next bloodbath will occur.

But it is almost as if we are birds on a wire, tweeting away, saying “what a bad man”, but still comfortably perched.

On Sunday Bashar al Assad, a medical doctor, outrageously likened his actions to surgery in a speech to the Syrian parliament:

“When a surgeon in an operating room … cuts and cleans and amputates, and the wound bleeds, do we say to him your hands are stained with blood?”.

“Or do we thank him for saving the patient?”

The fact that bona fide Syrian surgeons in Homs such as those from Hand in Hand for Syria, a UK-based charity that provides medical aid to Syria, are tirelessly operating on civilian casualties caused by Assad’s troops makes the injustice of such words even more galling.

Dr Mousa al Kurdi had the experience of teaching a younger Bashar al Assad as a medical student and, when we sit down to talk about the conflict, is forthcoming in his description of Assad as a “monster”.

Al Kurdi, a Syrian gynaecologist living in Britain believes that what the Western world is actually viewing is “showing only a tiny proportion of what is happening”.

He witnessed the atrocities of Baba Amr and believes that any comparison between the Assad regime and other regimes in the region is false.

“This regime is unique”, he says.

“Firstly, Assad is trying to get all the religious minorities on side, pressurising the Alawites to back his regime and turning it into a sectarian conflict which it never was. Secondly, by using torture against women and children, not just for interrogation, but merely for the “pleasure of punishment for defiance” and thirdly because of the regime’s flagrant “denial and blaming of the atrocities on the extremists, jihadist and Al Qaeda”.

Al Kurdi believes a political crossroads has been reached where we need to consider: “What will happen the day after the fall of the Assad regime? ”.

The question is crucial and needs to be answered before any immediate action can be initiated.

The fear from the West is that there will be a political vacuum, which extremists will promptly occupy.

Al Kurdi proposes that to counteract the potential threat of post-Assad extremism with the “formation of a new body, representative of all the major players from all the sects, an inclusive policy all Syrians except those who were involved in the killings or corruption”.

He argues that the SNC (Syrian National Council) needs to decide on a way to represent all Syrians in a National Conference for Syria and believes adopting such an inclusive policy will have “profound positive effects” and “will reassure the region and the world that the interim period following the fall of the regime will be peaceful and cooperative instead of violent and chaotic”. This would, he argues, negate the ability of extremists to exploit the political or the security void.

The proposition is that the Syrian National Council would formulate a National Conference for Syria (NCS) with representation from the SNC, uprising groups on the ground, the Syrian Free Army, the internal opposition and all  religious and ethnic minorities as well as intellectuals.

This National Conference for Syria would act as a parliament, for an interim period of 18 months or so and would have functional capabilities such as to select the “National Transitional Government, decide the constitutional Declaration for the interim period, overseeing the general election for Members of Parliament and of the future President” as well as other functions.

“There is a credible alternative, which is representative,” he says.

There is a common misconception that the Syrian uprising can bring down the regime by itself but Al Kurdi states categorically:  “This is not Egypt; in Egypt the army was on the side of the protesters, the army didn’t kill people like in Syria”.

“Why is the world just watching?”  he asks; I don’t know for sure whether his question is directed at me or in my audience, whether it’s just rhetorical or meant to be answered.

Why then? Perhaps a combination of many factors — a lack of understanding, the dehumanisation of war and a whole host of historical reasons that have bred a fear of mis-action — have lead to today’s inaction.

One thing is for sure, though: this paralysing procrastination by the international and regional community, which allows “good men to do nothing“ and  “ this evil to flourish”  leaves us all with blood on our hands.

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• bassil-urdogan

   THEY DID THEMSELEVES:
  Sixty-two years on, what really happened at Deir
  Yassin on 9 April remains obscured by lies, exaggerations and
  contradictions. Now Ha’aretz, a liberal Israeli newspaper, is seeking to
  crack open the mystery by petitioning Israel’s High Court of Justice to
  release written and photographic evidence buried deep in military
  archives. Palestinian survivors of Deir Yassin, a village of around 400
  inhabitants, claim the Jews committed a wholesale massacre there,
  spurring Palestinians to flee in the thousands, and undermining the
  long-held Israeli narrative that they left of their own accord.
  Israel’s opposing version contends that Deir Yassin
  was the site of a pitched battle after Jewish forces faced unexpectedly
  strong resistance from the villagers. All of the casualties, it is
  argued, died in combat.
  In 2006, an Israeli arts
  student, Neta Shoshani, applied for access to the Deir Yassin archives
  for a university project, believing a 50-year embargo on the secret
  documents had expired eight years previously. She was granted limited
  access to the material, but was informed that there was an extended ban
  on the more sensitive documents. When a lawyer demanded an explanation,
  it emerged that a ministerial committee only extended the ban more than a
  year after Ms Shoshani’s first request, exposing the state to a legal
  challenge. The current embargo runs until 2012.
  Defending
  its right to keep the documents under wraps, the Israeli state has
  argued that their publication would tarnish the country’s image abroad
  and inflame Arab-Israeli tensions. Ha’aretz and Ms Shoshani have
  countered that the public have a right to know and confront their past.
  Judges, who have viewed all the archived evidence
  held by the Israeli state on Deir Yassin, have yet to make a decision on
  what, if anything, to release. Among the documents believed to be in
  the state’s possession is a damning report written by Meir Pa’il, a
  Jewish officer who condemned his compatriots for bloodthirsty and
  shameful conduct on that day. Equally incriminating are the many
  photographs that survive.
  “The photos clearly
  show there was a massacre,” says Daniel McGowan, a US retired professor
  who works with Deir Yassin Remembered. “Those photos show [villagers]
  lined up against a quarry wall and shot.”
  In
  1947, the United Nations proposed a partition plan that would divide
  Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state, with Jerusalem an international
  city. The Arabs fiercely opposed the plan and clashes broke out as both
  sides scrambled for territory before the British mandate expired. In
  April 1948, the Hagana, the predecessor of the Israeli army, launched a
  military operation to secure safe passage between Jewish areas by taking
  Arab villages on high ground above the road to Jerusalem.
  Irgun and the Stern Gang, breakaway paramilitary
  groups, drew up separate plans to take the strategic Deir Yassin in a
  pre-dawn raid on 9 April 1948, even though the villagers had signed a
  non-aggression pact with the Jews and had stuck to it. What happened
  next is still under debate. In his book The Revolt, Menachim Begin, a
  future Israeli prime minister, recounts how the Jewish forces used a
  loudspeaker to warn all the villagers to leave the village. Those that
  remained fought.
  “Our men were compelled to
  fight for every house; to overcome the enemy they used large numbers of
  hand grenades,” wrote Mr Begin, who was not present at the battle. “And
  the civilians who had disregarded our warnings suffered inevitable
  casualties. I am convinced that our officers and men wished to avoid a
  single unnecessary casualty.”
  Mr Begin’s
  account, however, is challenged by the recollections of survivors and
  eyewitnesses. Abdul-Kader Zidain was 22 years old in 1948, and
  immediately joined a band of 30 fighters from the village to fend off
  the surprise Jewish offensive, even though they were clearly
  outnumbered.
  “They went into the houses and they
  shot the people inside. They killed everybody they saw, women and
  children,” said Mr Zidain, who lost four of his immediate family,
  including his father and two brothers, in the attack. Now a frail
  84-year-old living in a West Bank village, he says he remembers
  everything as if it were yesterday. Survivor testimonies are supported
  by Mr Pa’il, whose detailed eyewitness account was published in 1998.
  Awaiting reassignment, he went to observe the attack as part of his
  remit to keep the Irgun and the Stern Gang in check.
  After the fighting had wound down, Mr Pa’il described
  how he heard sporadic firing from the houses, and went to investigate.
  There he saw that the soldiers had stood the villagers in the corners of
  their homes and shot them dead. A short while later, he saw a group of
  around 25 prisoners being led to a quarry between Deir Yassin and
  neighbouring Givat Shaul. From a higher vantage point, he and a
  companion were able to see everything and take photographs. “There was a
  natural wall there, formed by diggingy. They stood the prisoners
  against that wall and shot the lot of them,” he said. Mr Pa’il described
  how Jews from neighbouring Givat Shaul finally stepped in to stop the
  slaughter.
  In the ensuing confusion and anger
  over the killings in Deir Yassin, both sides released an inflated
  Palestinian death toll for very different reasons: the Palestinians
  wanted to bolster resistance and attract the attention of the Arab
  nations they hoped would help them; the Jews wanted to scare the
  Palestinians into flight.
  After the dust had
  settled, Mr Zidain and the other survivors counted the missing among
  them, and concluded that 105 Palestinians had died in Deir Yassin, not
  the 250 often reported. Four Jews were killed. But the damage was
  already done. The reports from Deir Yassin led to a total collapse of
  morale, and many historians regard the incident as the single biggest
  catalyst for the Palestinians’ flight. By UN estimates, 750,000
  Palestinians had fled their homes by the end of the 1948 War of
  Independence, roughly 60 per cent of Palestine’s pre-war Arab
  population.
  Mention Deir Yassin these days to
  most young Israelis and it will fail to register. Not far from the Kfar
  Shaul hospital, two teenage boys shake their heads at a question on Deir
  Yassin. Never heard of it, they say.
  “Most
  Israelis treat the subject with total silence,” says Professor McGowan.
  “They no longer deny it, they just don’t talk about it.”
  The decision on whether that silence will now be
  broken remains in the hands of Israel’s courts. “This was a big and
  important event in our history here. It was the first village we took
  and has a lot of meaning in the war that came after,” says Ms Shoshani.
  “We have to deal with our past for our own sake.”

• ricardo lion

    Your English improved.  Congratulations!

• bassil-urdogan

   Sixty-two years on, what really happened at Deir
  Yassin on 9 April remains obscured by lies, exaggerations and
  contradictions. Now Ha’aretz, a liberal Israeli newspaper, is seeking to
  crack open the mystery by petitioning Israel’s High Court of Justice to
  release written and photographic evidence buried deep in military
  archives. Palestinian survivors of Deir Yassin, a village of around 400
  inhabitants, claim the Jews committed a wholesale massacre there,
  spurring Palestinians to flee in the thousands, and undermining the
  long-held Israeli narrative that they left of their own accord.
  Israel’s opposing version contends that Deir Yassin
  was the site of a pitched battle after Jewish forces faced unexpectedly
  strong resistance from the villagers. All of the casualties, it is
  argued, died in combat.
  In 2006, an Israeli arts
  student, Neta Shoshani, applied for access to the Deir Yassin archives
  for a university project, believing a 50-year embargo on the secret
  documents had expired eight years previously. She was granted limited
  access to the material, but was informed that there was an extended ban
  on the more sensitive documents. When a lawyer demanded an explanation,
  it emerged that a ministerial committee only extended the ban more than a
  year after Ms Shoshani’s first request, exposing the state to a legal
  challenge. The current embargo runs until 2012.
  Defending
  its right to keep the documents under wraps, the Israeli state has
  argued that their publication would tarnish the country’s image abroad
  and inflame Arab-Israeli tensions. Ha’aretz and Ms Shoshani have
  countered that the public have a right to know and confront their past.
  Judges, who have viewed all the archived evidence
  held by the Israeli state on Deir Yassin, have yet to make a decision on
  what, if anything, to release. Among the documents believed to be in
  the state’s possession is a damning report written by Meir Pa’il, a
  Jewish officer who condemned his compatriots for bloodthirsty and
  shameful conduct on that day. Equally incriminating are the many
  photographs that survive.
  “The photos clearly
  show there was a massacre,” says Daniel McGowan, a US retired professor
  who works with Deir Yassin Remembered. “Those photos show [villagers]
  lined up against a quarry wall and shot.”
  In
  1947, the United Nations proposed a partition plan that would divide
  Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state, with Jerusalem an international
  city. The Arabs fiercely opposed the plan and clashes broke out as both
  sides scrambled for territory before the British mandate expired. In
  April 1948, the Hagana, the predecessor of the Israeli army, launched a
  military operation to secure safe passage between Jewish areas by taking
  Arab villages on high ground above the road to Jerusalem.
  Irgun and the Stern Gang, breakaway paramilitary
  groups, drew up separate plans to take the strategic Deir Yassin in a
  pre-dawn raid on 9 April 1948, even though the villagers had signed a
  non-aggression pact with the Jews and had stuck to it. What happened
  next is still under debate. In his book The Revolt, Menachim Begin, a
  future Israeli prime minister, recounts how the Jewish forces used a
  loudspeaker to warn all the villagers to leave the village. Those that
  remained fought.
  “Our men were compelled to
  fight for every house; to overcome the enemy they used large numbers of
  hand grenades,” wrote Mr Begin, who was not present at the battle. “And
  the civilians who had disregarded our warnings suffered inevitable
  casualties. I am convinced that our officers and men wished to avoid a
  single unnecessary casualty.”
  Mr Begin’s
  account, however, is challenged by the recollections of survivors and
  eyewitnesses. Abdul-Kader Zidain was 22 years old in 1948, and
  immediately joined a band of 30 fighters from the village to fend off
  the surprise Jewish offensive, even though they were clearly
  outnumbered.
  “They went into the houses and they
  shot the people inside. They killed everybody they saw, women and
  children,” said Mr Zidain, who lost four of his immediate family,
  including his father and two brothers, in the attack. Now a frail
  84-year-old living in a West Bank village, he says he remembers
  everything as if it were yesterday. Survivor testimonies are supported
  by Mr Pa’il, whose detailed eyewitness account was published in 1998.
  Awaiting reassignment, he went to observe the attack as part of his
  remit to keep the Irgun and the Stern Gang in check.
  After the fighting had wound down, Mr Pa’il described
  how he heard sporadic firing from the houses, and went to investigate.
  There he saw that the soldiers had stood the villagers in the corners of
  their homes and shot them dead. A short while later, he saw a group of
  around 25 prisoners being led to a quarry between Deir Yassin and
  neighbouring Givat Shaul. From a higher vantage point, he and a
  companion were able to see everything and take photographs. “There was a
  natural wall there, formed by diggingy. They stood the prisoners
  against that wall and shot the lot of them,” he said. Mr Pa’il described
  how Jews from neighbouring Givat Shaul finally stepped in to stop the
  slaughter.
  In the ensuing confusion and anger
  over the killings in Deir Yassin, both sides released an inflated
  Palestinian death toll for very different reasons: the Palestinians
  wanted to bolster resistance and attract the attention of the Arab
  nations they hoped would help them; the Jews wanted to scare the
  Palestinians into flight.
  After the dust had
  settled, Mr Zidain and the other survivors counted the missing among
  them, and concluded that 105 Palestinians had died in Deir Yassin, not
  the 250 often reported. Four Jews were killed. But the damage was
  already done. The reports from Deir Yassin led to a total collapse of
  morale, and many historians regard the incident as the single biggest
  catalyst for the Palestinians’ flight. By UN estimates, 750,000
  Palestinians had fled their homes by the end of the 1948 War of
  Independence, roughly 60 per cent of Palestine’s pre-war Arab
  population.
  Mention Deir Yassin these days to
  most young Israelis and it will fail to register. Not far from the Kfar
  Shaul hospital, two teenage boys shake their heads at a question on Deir
  Yassin. Never heard of it, they say.
  “Most
  Israelis treat the subject with total silence,” says Professor McGowan.
  “They no longer deny it, they just don’t talk about it.”
  The decision on whether that silence will now be
  broken remains in the hands of Israel’s courts. “This was a big and
  important event in our history here. It was the first village we took
  and has a lot of meaning in the war that came after,” says Ms Shoshani.
  “We have to deal with our past for our own sake.”

• bassil-urdogan

   go back to where did you come from .

• ricardo lion

    Did you write all this?  Your English improved again.
    Deir Yassin?  One Jewish terrorist act, in fact, revenge for the thousands of Muslim Arab terrorist acts.
    But back to the subject:  Arabs killing Arabs in the judenrein Muslim Arab hereditary bloody dictatorship of Syria.
    I wish the Arabs more freedom, more democracy and less Islam.
    Amen (Hebrew word).

• Lela2

  I can hear Michael Jackson’s voice already.

• bassil-urdogan

  Why Israel wanted Assad to go?
  Assad help Hizoalah and hizboAlah attack Israel.
  if Assad goes,Hizoallah goes,Isreal get rested.
  Think well ,west undeZionist Presure by the Need of the Gold.

   

• http://profile.yahoo.com/63JMOAQMHRXCH3KHPNDI62LH7M Hanadi

  Great blog, interesting insights from Dr Al-Kurdi. When the Jews were massacred by Hitler, we said never again. When the Bosnians were killed by the Serbs we said never again. How many Syrians have to die for the world to learn the lesson?