THE ARAB WINTER Posted by Philip Gourevitch in The New Yorker
In Syria, over the past nine months, agents of President Bashar al-Assad’s security apparatus have killed more than five thousand citizens, according to the United Nations. That’s an average of about twenty citizens a day since March, when peaceful demonstrators took to the streets to protest the Assad family’s forty-year dictatorship and the slaughter began. Videos uploaded to the Internet at the time showed throngs of defenseless men, women, and children, many of them waving olive branches, scattered by gunfire. Some videos showed Assad’s men (there are seventeen distinct security forces at his service) hunting down stragglers; other videos showed fallen bodies, bleeding and dead; and later, when people gathered to bury those bodies, there were more videos, of Assad’s forces opening fire on the funerals. There is no independent press in Syria, and foreign reporters are rarely allowed in, but as the protests and the crackdown continued through the summer and fall, the videos kept coming, denying the state the power it gets from invisibility. Shot on cell phones, the clips convey the terrifying pandemonium in the streets and linger insistently on its aftermath: a relentless array of cadavers—heads and torsos punctured, ripped, smashed, and spilling—memorialized in forensic close-up.
So the whole world watched, and the whole world knew. The gore made the protestors’ case against Assad so unambiguous that in November the Arab League, which had always defended him, suspended Syria from membership, imposed economic sanctions against the regime, and demanded that he end the crackdown. When Assad went right on killing, the League threatened to take its case against him to the U.N. Security Council, unless he agreed to withdraw all armed forces from cities and towns, to release all political prisoners, to allow peaceful protest to proceed unhindered, to grant the international press free and full access to the country, and to accept an observer mission to monitor his compliance with these conditions.
But Assad’s word is meaningless. In anticipation of the Arab League monitors’ arrival this week, the death toll in Syria increased sharply, as his tanks rolled through restive cities and towns, bombarding residential neighborhoods. There were reports of air strikes, too. Hundreds are believed to have been killed in the past fortnight—the bloodiest days since the strife began—and many more were wounded, or imprisoned, or both (torture and rape are standard operating procedure in Assad’s reign of terror). In a rare report from the Syrian frontlines, a reporter from Der Speigel described the scene in Homs, the country’s most embattled city, writing that government snipers were hunting civilians indiscriminately in broad daylight.
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