This is a propaganda war, a diplomat in Damascus told the BBC’s Paul Danahar, “you can’t take anyone at face value now”.
The war of words over the Syrian revolution has been brutal, and for some, fatal. Revolutionaries and Assadists have tried desperately to control the narrative, with Bashar Al-Assad admitting on Russian TV that he was losing the propaganda battle.
From the beginning of this uprising reporters have feared that the regime was targetting journalists — they were set up as legitimate targets as soon as the government accused some of being part of the international conspiracy against Syria. The regime arrested and threatened journalists from Al Jazeera, which it believes is supporting the uprising. Before its Damascus bureau was shut, there were regular pro-regime demonstrations outside and staff faced regular harassment in attempts to silence them. Syrian authorities barred members of the station from entering the city of Daraa, where the uprising began on 15 March last year. Officials also pressured Syrian employees of the station to quit, and told journalists that they could not appear on air or communicate with Al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Qatar.
Earlier this month, Alex Thomson, chief correspondent at the UK’s Channel 4 News, accused four fighters (two armed) of forcing his convoy into onto a blocked road in the middle of “no-man’s land” near the city of Al-Qasyr, where the regime was shooting. He speculated that the FSA wanted to land Assad with an international diplomatic incident, similar to that which followed the killing of Marie Colvin in Homs. Thomson’s team had a lucky escape.
The day after Thomson made his accusation, a Qatari member of the now disbanded Arab League monitoring mission, Nawaf Al Thani, accused the FSA of leading him into a trap to be killed in the city Zabadani, which is close to the Syrian-Lebanon border. That day, Al Thani was travelling with CNN reporter Nic Robertson who also reported on the incident, but didn’t blame the FSA.
Despite Al Thani’s support for the British reporter’s claims, some revolutionary activists were outraged, accusing Thompson of exaggerating the story for career gain. As the chorus of anger grew, Thompson stood by his story, saying that he merely reports reality.
Of course, the Assadists are milking this for all it’s worth. Iran’s Arabic-language state broadcaster Al-Alam (and its sister station Press TV) ran Thompson’s accusations, although I can’t quite remember them discussing his reporting of the graphic Houla massacre, where he suggested that the government had been lying.
Both the revolutionaries and the Assadists are reporting half-truths, often picking and choosing the stories or accusations favourable to their version of events. That is understandable. What is unforgivable is the way that some broadcasters and publishers have bought the opposition or regime line wholesale and uncritically.
“There’s almost no one condemning the regime, for example, whilst simultaneously questioning the dominant opposition narrative,” complains Jillian C York. “Those who dare search for truth are immediately labelled as being on one side or the other.”
That search for the truth has been hampered by the Syrian government’s refusal to allow international journalists into the country during most of the uprising. Reporters were forced to choose between YouTube videos uploaded by activists, or the regime’s increasingly ludicrous propaganda. The revolutionaries’ strategy was far more sophisticated, immediate and effective. A senior Western official told the BBC World News Editor that their tactics were “brilliant,” if sometimes misleading.
But is that surprising? The revolutionaries have an agenda. Citizen journalists are not supplying the international media with footage to further their own careers – they are doing it to tell the world about the horrors taking place on their doorstep. When they use mobile phones to film demonstrations, they put themselves in the firing line – they are active participants in the revolution, not outsiders looking in.
With an official ban on journalist visas in place, handfuls of brave reporters have managed to sneak across the border to report on the massacres that the government did not want them to see. The revolutionaries are often desperate for a voice, and have escorted journalists into the country and protected them once they were in the war zone, often at considerable risk to themselves.
Journalists — reporters sneaking across the border, and brave citizen journalists living under siege — are at the heart of this story. They are Bashar Al-Assad’s greatest fear. His father crushed the uprising in Hama in 1982 because the world was not watching. Back then, news of the killing of at least 10,000 people did not reach the outside world for weeks.
This time, things are very different, and it is the reason that Syrians are being threatened with death for simply daring to tell the world what is happening.
The regime knows it can still outgun its opponents on the battlefield. But on screen, it has already lost the war.
Sakhr Al-Makhadhi is a British-Arab journalist who has lived and worked in Damascus. sakhr.co.uk
Vladimir Putin’s inauguration on 7 May was marked with mass protest actions, arrests and clashes with police, which have continued for the last two weeks and seem unlikely to stop.
Since the inaguration ceremony, protesters have been holding an anti-Kremlin action in Moscow’s Chistye Prudy boulevard, in defiance of authorities. Opposition figures Alexey Navalny and Sergei Udaltsov were sentenced to 15 days of administrative arrest for allegedly not following orders from police. Eventually, protesters convinced police they had the right to camp in their home city. The police forbade them from using tents, sound-amplifying equipment and told them to keep off the lawns.
The camp was attended by several hundred people: different political groups, representatives, and politically active citizens, who don’t support a particular party or movement. They rejected opposition leaders, such as Sergei Udaltsov, Alexey Navalny, Ilya Yashin and Ilya Ponomarev as authorities and established a people’s assembly — a collective self-government institution where all the protesters decide organisational issues.
The camp on Chistie Prudy has become known as Occupy Abai, after Kazakh poet Abai Kunanbaev, whose monument stands in the centre of protest camp. It has became a masterpiece of self-organisation, to the pride of Moscow anarchists, who were widely represented in opposition camp. Special work groups made sandwiches and tea, cleaned the camp territory and scheduled lectures, mainly about protest movements.
Notable Russian writers and poets gathered thousands of people to march through Moscow boulevard ring against mass detentions during Putin’s inauguration and his presidency, in support of OccupyAbai.
But this week the situation changed. Basmanny court ruled that the camp must be removed from Chistye Prudy by Moscow central district prefecture within less than 24 hours. The police broke up the camp at 6 am, when no journalists were around and protesters were asleep. Tens of people were arrested when they said they didn’t want to leave the camp. According to them, policemen took away protesters’ food, water and the box with the cash donated by their supporters, which contained up to 250 000 roubles (around £5000 GBP).
The protesters roamed to another central square, Kudrinskaya, where they again were attacked by the police, who claimed protesters didn’t have special permission to share food and water with each other. Tens of people were arrested, including Khimki forest defence leader Evgeniya Chirikova. Opposition activist Ilya Yashin was sentenced to 10 days of administrative arrest. The others stayed, fearing riot police can arrest them any time.
The district’s municipal deputies from United Russia and the Communist party blocked attempts from local opposition deputies to legalise the protesters’ camp at Barrikadnaya by granting it the status of a festival.
Meanwhile United Russia deputies in State Duma prepared a bill, which will toughen the fines for those who break rules of holding rallies. Such charges are often brought against Putin’s protesters in Moscow courts. Hundreds of people protested against the bill in front of State Duma building, but didn’t seem to convince United Russia deputies.
Alexei Navalny and Sergei Udaltsov, who were arrested during peaceful protest actions on 9 May, are considered prisoners of conscience by Amnesty International. “These people were persecuted for having realised their right to express themselves,” – the organisation head in Russia Sergei Nikitin said to Interfax news agency. The other protesters are persecuted for the same reason, but they are not famous enough to be considered political prisoners by world human rights organisations.
Following an inauguration ceremony on Monday, Vladimir Putin is once again Russia’s president. After an absence of four years, Putin won a third term as president in controversial elections in March.
But as former President Dmitry Medvedev retook his role as Prime Minister — finalising the Putin-Medvedev job swap — Moscow was filled with thousands of policemen who blocked all central streets and central underground stations.
Putin’s opposition were also out in force. The opposition held a sanctioned march on Sunday which they believe drew a crowd of approximately 100,000 protesters in Bolshaya Yakimanka street in the centre of Moscow (some Russian news reports estimated the crowds at 20,000 people, while police said there were 8,000 people present).
The march — the largest since anti-Putin protests last December — was meant to end at a protest rally on Bolotnaya Square, but the square was blocked by metal detectors that prevented people from entering it quickly. As protesters spent what seemed like an eternity queuing up to pass through the detectors, their outrage grew. Losing hope, some sat down in the middle of the street while they waited to enter the square.
Then the protest stopped being peaceful.
Members of a radical youth group threw smoke bombs at the police, triggering mass arrests and beatings. Protesters then began throwing stones and asphalt, which hit journalists, policemen and fellow protesters.
Hundreds were arrested during the fray, including opposition leaders Sergei Udaltsov, Alexey Navalny and Boris Nemtsov. One photographer fell to his death while attempting to photograph the clashes.
Most of the arrested were released next day, but over 100 young men arrested during the protest have now been drafted into the military.
On the day of their release, protesters returned to the streets to walk peacefully with white ribbons — symbols of the latest protests — on Moscow’s central boulevards. Once again, the police blocked protesters, and attempted to force the crowds towards underground stations to go home. Protesters wandered around the boulevard in a bid to thwart the police’s attempt to disperse crowds and find a safe place to peacefully protest Putin’s return to power. Protesters finally settled in near the presidential administration. Police quickly move in to arrest protesters who remained near the building, including journalists from Kommersant, the Moscow Times and the Dozhd TV channel. RFE/RL Russian service reporters were threatened by policemen, who forced them to stop using video cameras, but managed to escape. Hundreds of arrests were made.
Leading human rights activist, Lev Ponomarev, who was arrested on 7 May for walking on a boulevard with a white ribbon, told Index that he congratulates Putin on establishing a Nazi regime on the day of his inauguration. He said the clashes between protesters and the police showed that “the Putin regime stopped pretending to respect human rights, particularly freedom of expression”.
The capital of Russian opposition moved from Moscow to the southern city of Astrakhan last week. More than 5,000 people came out in support of ex-mayoral candidate Oleg Shein, who has been on hunger strike for over a month in protest against mayoral election results. The protest rally was the largest since those held in Moscow in time leading up to and following the presidential election.
While no protests were held in Ashtrakhan against Vladimir Putin’s controversial win, Oleg Shein’s loss has triggered a political crisis. The mayoral elections took place at the same time as the presidential election, 4 March. Shein’s supporters claim that he was the victim of a fraudulent election, and some have even joined him on hunger strike. Shein has garnered support from opposition leaders in Moscow and other Russian cities, who spent last week rallying support for the former candidate, and joined him at the 14 April rally.
Even though Astrakhan police blocked the city centre and pro-Kremlin youth gathered to provoke the crowd, Shein’s supporters still rallied together peacefully. The group of 5,000 marched while chanting “Shein is our mayor”, “one for all and all for one”, “freedom to political prisoners”, and “we are the power”. Three activists were arrested for attempting to pitch tents in front of municipal buildings, but were released after a couple of hours.
“Astrakhan hasn’t seen such mass protests since mid 1990s,” Oleg Shein told journalists, adding that “mass protests against elections have broken the boundaries of Moscow and Saint-Petersburg.” According to Shein, people in Astrakhan have quickly lost their fear, and now believe that they can influence the government. Tens of people gathered to protest publicly in support of Shein a week before the rally. Russian opposition leaders Dmitry Gudkov, Ilya Ponamarev, Alexey Navalny and celebrities such as TV host Ksenia Sobchak and actor Maxim Vitorgan helped encourage citizens to be brave enough to support Shein.
The protesters have vowed to remain in Astrakhan’s streets every Saturday until new mayoral elections are held. Russian Central Election Committee head Vladimir Churov has already agreed to watch video footage from polling stations, where fraud allegedly took place. Today Oleg Shein will reveal whether or not Churov has confirmed his allegations. Yesterday, Shein filed a suit against the election results, but remains on hunger strike because he does not believe that the Russian judicial system is impartial.
