In February 1982 Syria’s murderous president, Hafez al-Assad instructed his younger militant brother Rifaat al-Assad to surround the rebellious northern town of Hama with tanks and artillery. The town was then protesting against the secretive regime of the Assad family. Rifaat al-Assad ordered the Syrian army to open fire on Syrian citizens. When the firing stopped approximately 20,000 lives were lost. This event has been described as “the single deadliest acts by any Arab government against its own people in the modern Middle East". The vast majority of the victims were civilians.
As a working journalist in western Europe I didn’t hear about this atrocity until 1991 when I visited Damascus on my way to Iraq’s Kurdistan. Such was the successful cover-up through Hafez al-Assad’s denial of information service to the outside world.
From the video "No one does it like you" Gemeente museum, The Hague 2011 by Marcel Dzama
The current paranoid Assad family of president Bashar al-Assad, his wife Asma al-Assad and his younger murderous brother Mahar, who is currently conducting a siege of the northern rebellious town of Jist al-Shughour, are a reincarnation of this evil, a “Trio of Repression, Murder and Dictatorship.”
It used to be said the first causality of war is the truth. By shutting the flow of information, Assad’s Trio of Repression has assumed the world will forget or become disinterested in Syria. A gross miscalculation in the new information era.
They believe free societies will again ignore events happening in Syria by using the same denial of information to the world which was used by the father, Hafez al-Assad to crush Hama 30 years past.
Addiction to power and privilege may have now detached them from the realities of moral leadership just as it did the father but the realities of the Arab spring will not go away. Information services are here to stay and it is this service to the world which will crush the Assad family in Damascus.
Once the world picks its side, and it has already done so, then the “Trio of Repression” will be outlawed, hunted down and paraded before the international courts at The Hague.
As a working journalist in western Europe I didn’t hear about this atrocity until 1991 when I visited Damascus on my way to Iraq’s Kurdistan. Such was the successful cover-up through Hafez al-Assad’s denial of information service to the outside world.
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Syria Calling, there is a denial of information service. Above picture from "A Game of Chess" Gemeente museum, The Hague. by Marcel Dzama.  |
The current paranoid Assad family of president Bashar al-Assad, his wife Asma al-Assad and his younger murderous brother Mahar, who is currently conducting a siege of the northern rebellious town of Jist al-Shughour, are a reincarnation of this evil, a “Trio of Repression, Murder and Dictatorship.”
It used to be said the first causality of war is the truth. By shutting the flow of information, Assad’s Trio of Repression has assumed the world will forget or become disinterested in Syria. A gross miscalculation in the new information era.
They believe free societies will again ignore events happening in Syria by using the same denial of information to the world which was used by the father, Hafez al-Assad to crush Hama 30 years past.
Addiction to power and privilege may have now detached them from the realities of moral leadership just as it did the father but the realities of the Arab spring will not go away. Information services are here to stay and it is this service to the world which will crush the Assad family in Damascus.
Once the world picks its side, and it has already done so, then the “Trio of Repression” will be outlawed, hunted down and paraded before the international courts at The Hague.
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