Hundreds Of Syrian Refugees 'Return Home

Those of you who read the old JATYK thread may remember my posts from a Syrian blogger - below is her latest. If you wish to read her earlier blogs - http://mlleaubergine.com//?s=Syria

Bashar the Benevolent and the “Slippers” Speech
Posted by Jeanette ⋅ 21 June 2011

And here I thought throwing things at the TV happened only during the Super Bowl.

But this is exactly what happened to Bashar al-Assad yesterday during his Syrian State of the Union address, derided worldwide as a 70-minute waste of everybody’s time and prompting this slipper-throwing response from a family who lives in one of the very cities in which Bashar claims “armed gangs” reside and that he and his thugs tried to “liberate.”

When he knows perfectly well that the only person with armed gangs at his disposal is him and these brutal killers, called the Shabiha, are even more feared than the police, security, or military forces, organizations that under the Assad regime kind of run together, given that they operate with the same goal:

Crush the opposition using any means necessary or unnecessary. There’s no such thing as going too far.

This speech of Bashar’s is known in the Syrian social media community as the laugh-out-loud “Slippers” Speech − the name perhaps an unintentional nod to Nixon’s “Checkers” Speech − and since in the Middle East putting the soles of your feet in front of someone is extremely rude and dismissive, all kinds of people posted all kinds of videos of themselves on YouTube, abusing Bashar’s televised face with all kinds of footwear.

Even one little boy slapping his sandal on the screen of his living room TV, shouting, “Out! Out! Out!”

We couldn’t agree more.

Besides accusing the usual suspects − Islamists, Jews, Americans, other foreign saboteurs, miscellaneous terrorists, and the ubiquitous armed gangs − for making Syria look bad all over the world, Bashar leveled an unexpected and hilarious accusation: the pro-democracy protesters have next-generation mobile phones with 5-pixel cameras!

Uh, Bashar, you do remember that your cousin Rami Makhlouf owns Syriatel?

Thus, since Rami has recently devoted himself to charity work, a shocking development that requires its very own forthcoming post, your regime is currently being funded by these very mobile phone customers.

I suppose you could always call Apple Customer Service and tell them enough already with those iPhone feature upgrades.

But Bashar’s real concern is with the high quality − and copious volume − of videos of arrests, abuse, and torture committed by the Assad regime’s agents of crime. Right, the ones getting millions of downloads every day worldwide. The YouTube workaround to the regime’s media blackout is working better and better and even though mainstream news sources still always caveat these videos with “unable to verify because Bashar won’t approve our journalist visas,” it’s become more and more accepted that these amateur videos represent what’s really going on in Syria.

Certainly more so than official Syrian TV, whose audience, ordinary Syrians say, is limited to Assad apologists, since they provide the stories anyway and like to hear themselves talk.

But one word in Bashar’s speech really scared me: he called the Syrian people “germs.” Does that make anyone else but me hearken back to exactly this time of year (April-July) in 1994 and the “cockroaches” in Rwanda?

And we all know how that story ended: in genocide. And we also know why Western governments never used that term at the time: because calling something a genocide made them legally and morally obligated to do something about it.

Best to call it a “conflict.”

In just over 3 months, upwards of 1 million Rwandan Tutsis were slaughtered and countless more injured, displaced, or “disappeared.” It took until 2008 for Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, the monstrous leader of the paramilitary group Interahamwe with its 600,000 machetes, who orchestrated that ethnic cleansing, to be convicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

(The Interahamwe simply moved its operations to the Congo and nowadays is just a “terrorist organization.”)

Early on, if you’re a dictator running scared and have little else to work with because starting to distribute machetes would be way too obvious, the path of least resistance is to become a conspiracy theorist. Or, as one activist described it, attribute “plots and plots” to “a few” (hundred thousand, in cities, towns, and villages all over the country, in case you haven’t noticed) troublemakers who are sick and tired of your brutality and lies.

The plot to embarrass me in front of my friends in Moscow and Tehran. The plot to reduce my nest egg to, oh, £20 billion. The plot to make me miss the Cannes Film Festival.

The plot to force my oldest son Hafez, named after his notorious grandfather, to get a real job when he grows up.

Speaking of YouTube, Bashar, you should take a look at the videos posted during ‒ immediately after, at the very latest ‒ your speech. Big demonstrations. Everywhere. On a weekday!

We’d be happy to run down the list for you, but we don’t have time. We’ve got even more protests to go to tonight…to protest your absurd new amnesty offer.

While the mass arrests continue − at Aleppo University, the head of the department of Mechanical Engineering was reportedly turning his students in to authorities, which might be good motivation to change majors − as do imprisonments, torture, and threats to the families of the so-called “criminals,” the pro-democracy demonstrators have more than proven their point to Bashar, whose rambling 3rd speech to the nation since mid-March sounded to more than just Syrians an awful lot like Mubarak’s swan song before he resigned as Egypt’s President.

The Syrian public has no intention of letting Bashar off the hook. He’s done, and he knows it.

It’s only a matter of time, and how much more death and destruction he causes on his way out the door to join Asma − Bashar’s glamorous wife, about whom I wrote an unflattering 4-part series this month − in exile.

Bashar’s own father once said: history shows us that no power, no occupation can last forever, that − as summarized in a translation from Arabic − “resistance and revolution expel it out of service.”

Somehow he thought that notion applied to every regime except the House of Assad.

Here’s a message from the brave Syrian activists of every age, ethnicity, religion, and social status, who are out on the streets protesting every night and every weekend, putting their lives on the line to expose to the world the real Bashar, not the fake reformer Bashar the West tried to make themselves believe in for far too long.

You heard it online first: “Our next reply to this criminal is falling him down and suing him.”

Jeanette's global outlook: her latest post on the state of play in Syria


Latest Post

The Hizb of the Devil (“The Devil’s Party Faithfull”)
Posted by Jeanette ⋅ 1 July 2011

Rami Makhlouf, never again do we want to hear your name and the word “humanitarian” in the same sentence. “Generosity,” either.

Rami, Syrian dictator Bashar’s al-Assad’s cousin, owns 40% of Syriatel, the largest mobile phone network in Syria, among numerous other business interests. On June 16, he surprised the world by declaring he was done with making money.

“I will not engage in any new projects that can generate personal gain and I will devote myself to charity and humanitarian work,” said his press release.

We feel your pain: once you get into the billions, all those zeros are really hard to keep track of. (FYI, the expatriate Syrian financiers and attorneys who read this blog cannot wait to audit you.)

I hear you’re putting up your 40% stake for an IPO. Let’s see: I have a choice between your IPO and Facebook’s?

Anyway, there’s a big difference between giving away and giving back. This money is not yours to give, Rami…because you STOLE it from the Syrian people.

The only charitable act we’re interested in from you, Banker of Assad, is surrendering yourself to the ICC for immediate trial for conspiracy to commit crimes against humanity.

Rami has lots of free time for his new charitable endeavors because, same as with a few dozen other regime associates, the EU slapped him with sanctions and a travel ban. The USA sanctioned him back in 2008, for judicial tampering and “improperly benefiting from and aiding the public corruption of Syrian regime officials.”

Since it was impossible to figure out where Syria’s governmental finances ended and Rami’s began.

Obviously I’m the target of unfair sanctions, says he, because it’s my bad luck to be related to the President.

Poor you.

With the octopus called Makhlouf, its tentacles have tentacles because Rami’s brother Hafiz heads up the General Intelligence Directorate.

To put this in perspective for Americans, let’s imagine a scenario in which General David Petraeus, incoming Director of the CIA, and Timothy Geithner, Treasury Secretary (who let’s say had kept his day job as CEO of Citibank and held majority stakes in Verizon, Exxon-Mobil, Amgen, and Delta Airlines), were brothers, appointed to these unmerited lifetime jobs by their unelected cousin President Barack Obama, all without Congressional approval.

“Reviled,” “hated,” “feared,” “despised,” “symbol of corruption,” “thief,” “opportunist”… There’s just no end of adjectives and adverbs used to describe Rami…and that’s just in the English and French press!

No surprise, then, that one of the first things protesters did in Dara’a was to burn down his offices. Rami has come to symbolize everything that’s wrong with the Assad regime, with letting one family run a country that benefits only them and their inner circle.

Ammar Qurabi, head of the Syrian National Association for Human Rights: “It (Rami’s vow of poverty) is a step designed for media consumption only.”

Causing serious foreign policy journalists worldwide to collapse in hysterical laughter.

What a turnaround from early May, when Rami told the New York Times, while promising to blame Syria’s pro-democracy protesters for destabilizing Israel: “What I’m saying is don’t let us suffer (speaking of the Assad regime), don’t put a lot of pressure on the president, don’t push Syria to do anything it is not happy to do.”

Then he added, ominously, “They should know when we suffer, we will not suffer alone.”

Reckless statements that forced your cousin to throw you under the bus, even though he not-so-secretly agreed with them.

“God forbid anything happens to this regime,” says Rami. God forbid they stay in power, says everybody else.

“Hizb” in Arabic means party, as in political party, but I’d interpret the title of this post as “The Devil’s Party Faithful,” Assad loyalists who ‒ out of die-hard fidelity and blatant self-interest ‒ carry out the regime’s directives while the President keeps his hands clean.

Sort of. Until Bashar started avoiding UN chief Ban Ki-moon’s phone calls.

“Stop killing people,” was Secretary General Ki-moon’s softball request. Or I promise I’ll write you a nasty letter.

Reem Haddad, media shill extraordinaire, was fired a few weeks ago. But here she’s back, like the proverbial bad penny, on the Syrian evening news. I guess Bashar couldn’t find anyone else willing to claim, with a straight face, that all those Syrian “guests” were merely visiting their mothers on the Turkish side of the border and will be returning any day now…to their looted homes, dead farm animals, and torn up olive groves.

I don’t know the perfect word for this in Arabic, but in English we don’t have one, so we borrow from Hebrew: “chutzpah.”

Among other implications, utterly shameless.

Speaking of shameless, even as Bashar’s brother Maher places military forces with 500 meters of the Turkish border, causing refugees to run across to the other side in the middle of the night, or risk being shot, the regime is pleading for people to return to their homes in the border towns. The armed gangs that have been terrorizing you are now gone, they say.

Wisely, people refused.

Because some who already tried that quickly returned to Turkey to warn their neighbors: if you go home, the Army will be there to “welcome” you. By arresting you.

And it appears the Hizb of the Devil might have some foreign players, too.

Latakia local news, June 12.

The Latakia port manager was reportedly fired from his job…all because he wanted to know exactly what was in those shipping containers being lowered from an Iranian ship with no flag.

This, after rumors went around the Turkish refugee camps that Iranian soldiers were already in Syria. We kept seeing these strange guys traveling around with the military, but wearing civilian clothes. They didn’t speak Arabic and had beards, which aren’t allowed in the Syrian army.

Whoever they are, they must be contract hires of the joyfully brutal Maher al-Assad, who heads the Syrian Army’s 4th Armored Division and Republican Guard. This psychopath poses for photographs with people he just killed.

Maher is what organized crime calls “the muscle.” He’s the guy who takes people for walks from which they never return. His nickname in the UK press is “Thug-in-Chief” and Turkey is pressing Bashar to fire him.

Problem is, you can’t fire your brother, although some people reading this post would really like that option.

Assad had a father, who had a brother, who had his own network of followers, the first hizb of the first devil, whose favorite pastimes included bombing schools, playgrounds, and hospitals in Lebanon, targeting almost exclusively Christian children.

I know some of these Lebanese children, who luckily survived uninjured to adulthood. But there’s just no fixing the injury of memory − of childhood friends and family members who weren’t so lucky − and there’s just no relaxing, even today, knowing that “they who do the devil’s handiwork” continue to act with impunity outside the borders of Syria, on orders from Assad headquarters in Damascus.

Ask expatriate Syrians in London who’ve been demonstrating against the regime. The Syrian Ambassador to Great Britain, nefarious subject of a prior post, is in deep trouble with the Foreign Office for having his staff take photos of demonstrators: to intimidate them, and their families in Syria.

Monsieur l’Ambassadeur, 8 Belgrave Square, London: people who’ve already withstood being humiliated, beaten, shot at, tear gassed, and maybe arrested are not that easy to intimidate.

Meanwhile, it’s another Friday morning in Syria and Bashar the Eternal Liar is lying about the weather! He warns the Syrian public that the forecast is high 30s Celsius today (38 degrees Celsius = 101 degrees Fahrenheit), to discourage them from protesting after Friday prayers.

It’s far too hot, and probably unsafe (hint), to be out there marching in the direct sun. Go home and drink some tea. You’ll feel better (and so will I).

Long-term, probably not. “Finally,” tweeted someone, “they kindle the fire in hell for Assad.”

Thanks LL - that is a fascinating piece.

bb1 wrote:Thanks LL - that is a fascinating piece.

Se writes quality, bonny, not quantity with quite a long time between each offering. I'll continue to post her pieces here as and when she makes a new post. LL