"What’s the Deal With Syria?" by Megan Assman

            If you have turned your TV or radio to any news station lately, there is a good chance that you have heard at least a mention of the crisis in Syria.  I have been extremely intrigued about what all the fuss is about so when my professor in my Governments of the World class said that we had a chance to do a blog assignment, I decided that it would be a great opportunity to learn more about an important historical event that is currently happening. I had heard bits and pieces of the story, but I feel that unless a topic is not thoroughly researched, an opinion cannot be formed.

As Syria marks the one-year anniversary of the country’s uprising against the regime of President Bashar Assad, an estimated 7,500 people have died since the regime launched a brutal crackdown on protesters. Although Syrian activists have improved their protesting techniques of leaking photos and videos of the violence, horrible deaths, torture, and broken families to the mainstream media in the outside world, Syria’s future is still extremely uncertain.

Syria was a latecomer to the Arab Spring, a series of protests, demonstrations, and riots in the Arab world that began in December of 2010.  When Syria initially joined the Arab Spring movement the protesters did not demand that President Bashar Assad resign from his position, but instead they focused on voicing their opinion on their lack of basic freedoms that the citizens of the country were experiencing.  Security forces responded to these protests with excessively brutal force.  They shot tear gas and live ammunition into the crowd and ended up killing and severely wounding several protesters.  As anger and unrest grew due to the deaths of civilian’s, protests spread to other cities.  Assad, trying to calm the citizens, offered a series of new policies.  Officials who participated in violence would be fired, some political prisoners would be released, and the overall welfare of the citizens would be better epitomized.  The regime, however, tried to claim its innocence and blame foreign agents for the unrest in Syria.  

The violence in Syria reached a whole new level at the end of 2011.  As many as 40 people were being killed every day and the outrage continued to grow against security forces.  Loosely organized members of the Free Syrian Army staged attacks against security forces.  In December and January, two separate bombings took place in Syria’s capital, Damascus, and dozens of people were killed.  The regime blamed Al Qaeda in an effort to get public support of the regime’s crackdown and they did not stop there.  In February 2012, Assad’s regime launched an assault on the city of Homs.  Hundreds of innocent people were massacred over the course of several weeks as bombs and rockets rained down on the city.

After the events in Homs, many believed the country was destined for a civil war.  The majority of Syria’s population are Sunni Muslims, but there are also a significant number of Christian, Shia, and Alawi groups. President Assad just happens to be part of the Alawi group and Alawites “just happen” to hold many key positions in government. 

International response to the terrible events in Syria has been harsh to say the least.  President Barack Obama has called on President Assad to step down from his position and end the crisis and the chief of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, has described what happened to the citizens of Homs as “unacceptable before humanity.”  The President of France, Nicholas Sarkozy, has called Assad a murderer and many other leaders across the world have said the same.  The U.N. Security Council proposed a resolution to the problem by resignation of President Assad and 13 of the Security Council’s 15 members approved, but this decision was vetoed by China and Russia. 

I am interested to see what the future holds for Syria.  Writing this blog piece has been an awesome way for me to learn more about the crisis in Syria through research and I hope that it has been an interesting read for you as well.

Sources:

http://miami.cbslocal.com/2013/09/05/understanding-the-crisis-in-syria/

http://www.usatoday.com/interactive/2759693/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-23863012

 

4th Wave of Democracy? by Cole Meunier

Syrian Rebel Fighters in Aleppo

Samuel Huntington believed that democratization came in spikes over periods of time. For example the first spike came with the French and the American revolutions. For every spike to occur you must also have a fall, for instance in the 1920’s and 1930’s in Europe with fascism. You may be wondering, what does this have to do with anything, but this involves the world still today. Some would even say that a fourth spike may be happening now in the Middle East and Northern Africa, or you may have heard it as the Arab Spring.

With the Arab Spring being the fourth democratic wave and the French and American revolutions being the first means that there are two others. The second wave came post WWII with Japan, Germany and Turkey. Following this peak, Turkey fell away from democracy during a military coup in the 60’s, along with many Latin American countries. This led to the next wave of democracy in the 1970’s with Spain, Greece and Turkey back to Democracy. With a rise in democracy, it led to another reversal in the Balkans during the 1990’s. This then leads to the fourth and most current wave of democratization, with the Arab Spring.

The Arab spring started in late 2010 to the beginning of 2011. It  began due to the lack of human rights,  and abuse of dictatorships, along with many other factors. The citizens began to start protesting due to the issues. Many of the younger citizens became more internet savvy and were able to set up many protests through social media. This led to many countries filtering and censoring the internet even more than they may have already. In some cases countries such as Libya, Egypt and Syria have had full internet shutdown for periods of time to help stop the spread of the democratic ideologies. This would only make the riots even more important in the eyes of the rioters.

16 countries have witnessed large numbers of their citizens protesting, including four countries which successfully forced their leaders from power including; Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, and Libya. This then leads to a whole new problem where the people now choose the new government. Tunisia had this problem after 14 January 2011 when president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was taken from power after very large political protests. All current members of the government were ousted and banned from ever going back, regardless of whether they were later elected or not. Mohammed Ghannouchi then became the prime minister. With protests still continuing the prime minister stepped down and democratic elections were held in October. On the 23^rd of October citizens of Tunisia voted in a 217 member constituent assembly which was now in charge of creating a brand new constitution. The moderate Islamist party won the election with 37% of the vote. This now gave the Arab Spring a flagship country about what could happen with the democratic revolution. With a state like this I believe that it has influenced many others and motivated other Arab revolutions.

As was said before, Tunisia wasn’t the only country to oust its leader but that it was the first to succeed, giving hope to many other states. Egypt started its revolution just 11 days after Tunisia ousted its leader. Egypt’s revolution was very similar to Tunisia, and ended up electing Mohammed Mursi as the first democratically elected president through the Supreme Constitutional Court, by judges within the government. Not all countries were as lucky to go through a revolution so smooth and non-violent. Countries such as Libya and Syria were plunged into civil war.

The Syrian protests began around the same time as many of the other countries around mid-January 2011. On the 6^th of March, 15 children were arrested by Syrian security forces, which spawned an even larger amount of protesters. By mid-April hundreds of thousands of protesters began gathering in the main square of Homs. This worried the president Bashar-al-Assad, and on the 31^st of July he sent tanks into many cities to quell the uprising. This led to one of the biggest days of the uprising with an unconfirmed amount of 136 citizens killed. Bloodshed would continue even to this day, 18 months from the beginning of the uprising with the total number of deaths rising beyond 20,000 total, along with over 100,000 refugees in Turkey and tens of thousands in Jordan, testing the capabilities of these countries to provide support in these quantities. This has led to international talks with the U.N. about foreign intervention. This strategy did work in Libya where NATO Forces proceeded with a no-fly zone, but it is unknown whether it will work against Syria due to its larger military force, as the number of defecting officers is much lower than other states, therefore keeping domestic support.  Along with the no-fly zone in Libya it also had a large number of military defectors. Unless this occurs in Syria, I believe that any revolution will be crushed by a military take over.

With all of the refugees flooding into the surrounding states, I feel that these governments will be the most pressured to act rather than states from afar. If Syria were to have foreign intervention, Turkey will more than likely be the state that would intervene solely, at least in the beginning. They are the one of the few states that are involved now due to the fact that mortars are landing on their soil and killing Turkish civilians. And rightfully so I believe that they should at least to protect their own territory, but as for ousting Bashar al-Assad, I believe this is in the hands of the Syrian people.

It may still be too early to tell if the Arab Spring truly is the fourth wave of democratization, but only time will tell.

All information on this blog was found on:

www.cnn.com

www.aljazeera.com

www.bbc.co.uk