A lot of people still think that the upcoming Baath conference will be bringing with it some serious positive change. They still think that President has it in him. The absence of immediate alternative to the current regime and its President continue to inspire some hope in them that things are bound to take a turn for the better. This regime and this President simply have no choice but to brig about some change.
Category: Democracy & Human Rights
Syria Faces Pressures to Democratize
Syria is under intense international pressure. It was forced to withdraw its troops from Lebanon in April; Washington accuses it of supporting insurgents in Iraq. In the second story of a series on the prospects for democratic change in the Middle East, a look at whether the regime of Syrian President Bashar al Assad can survive. Continue reading “Syria Faces Pressures to Democratize”
A Heretical Closure!
Many of laborers involved in the process of renovating our building are actually denaturalized Kurds, that is, descendants of Kurdish citizens that have been stripped away of their Syrian citizenship as a result of the 1962 census and the manipulations that took place at that time. In other words, they belong to the very group of people whose basic rights my team and I at the Tharwa Projectare supposed to be busy defending, and are actually doing so, to the best of our restricted abilities. Continue reading “A Heretical Closure!”
Syria Squeezed: Are We Free Yet?
… What is going on now is a lot of testing of “red lines,” as everyone in Damascus seems to call them. People are saying things and publishing things. But many of them, like al-Bounni and Ammar Abdulhamid, who heads the minority-rights Tharwa Project, are engaged in a harrowing pas de deux with the government. Al-Bounni and Abdulhamid are both barred from leaving the country. Intelligence officials have interrogated Abdulhamid three times since January. Al-Bounni has seen his siblings and friends thrown in jail for peaceful political speech. No one testing the limits knows when the next crackdown might come or what will provoke it. Continue reading “Syria Squeezed: Are We Free Yet?”
The Ammar Abdulhamid Archive 