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The utter tragedy that is Syria

The media has moved on from reporting much of what is happening in Syria.   It is a tragedy of monumental proportions - as this piece in The New York Review of Books makes so clear.   True it is that journalists are effectively barred from entering the country, but there are ways and means of, for example, "harnessing" the local community to filter information to the outside.    Even with any jamming we live in an age of widespread technology.

"In the face of the current uprising, now in its eighteenth bloody month, Bashar Assad has ordered a sustained use of heavy weaponry against his own people that may be unmatched by any state in modern times. The gory internecine wars in Bosnia, Chechnya, and Sri Lanka saw governments behave with similar savagery, but against what they claimed were separatist revolts. In trying to crush an inclusive, nationwide, and initially peaceful pro-democracy movement that from its inception was unquestionably backed by the vast majority of Syrians, the Assads’ army has wreaked devastation akin to that in Grozny or Jaffna or Sarajevo, only across swathes of a country with a far larger population, devastating scores of villages, dozens of towns, and all three of Syria’s biggest cities.

Aleppo and Homs have been worse hit, but Damascus itself has hardly been spared. Perhaps nothing better expresses the wantonly destructive nonchalance of Syria’s government than its stationing of big guns atop Mount Qasyoun, the barren, 3,700-foot-high ridge that looms above the Syrian capital, and where Cain is said to have slain Abel. Regularly in the past two months, these cannons have sent shells soaring high over the city center to crash into its mostly Sunni-populated suburbs.

Statistics have consistently failed to capture the scale of Syria’s tragedy. The widely cited current death toll of around 20,000 may not seem large by the standards of modern conflict. Yet this is a conservative estimate of numbers that are accelerating very fast, with more people killed in July alone than in all of 2011. Tens of thousands more Syrians have been injured, while even larger numbers have suffered while under arrest. For many if not most, this has meant often shockingly extreme forms of torture in a detention system whose systematic cruelty has been extensively documented.

The conflict has so far displaced at least 1.5 million Syrians internally, aid workers privately estimate. Many have been uprooted more than once, fleeing to sanctuaries that have then also come under government attack. Some can be seen trudging by roadsides, or sleeping in parks in the safer parts of Damascus or Aleppo. Most remain invisible, housed by relatives or helped by the numerous local charities that have proliferated in wartime. But thousands of Syrians have also fled abroad. The UN’s current figure of 150,000 counts only those who have officially applied for refugee status, but with just one of Syria’s neighbors, Jordan, claiming to host that number alone, the actual total of Syrian refugees is likely to be closer to half a million.

The scale of suffering reflects the fact that the Syrian government, uniquely among countries swept up by the Arab Spring, represents not merely a corrupt and oppressive ruling clique. It baldly represents the interests of a small, fearful, well-armed, and organized sectarian minority, set against the wishes of a majority that has remained inchoate, politically divided, and powerless. The fact of this polarization, long elaborately disguised by hollow pageantries, has only become clear to many Syrians now that the underlying nature of the state has been exposed and the violence implicit in the country’s neocolonial power structure has been made dramatically explicit."

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