Skip to main content

Home/ Arab-spring/ Group items tagged Russia

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Ed Webb

Russian Arms for Syria No Threat to Protesters - Lavrov | World | RIA Novosti - 0 views

en.rian.ru/...173941569.html

Russia Syria arms military US USA

shared by Ed Webb on 11 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • in contrast to Moscow “our U.S. colleagues are supplying countries of the Persian Gulf region with the very type of arms that could be used against peaceful demonstrators."
Ed Webb

Syrian opposition: united, peaceful, and not Islamist. - By Michael Weiss - Slate Magazine - 0 views

www.slate.com/...all

Syria arabspring analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 20 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • The Henry Jackson Society, the London-based foreign-policy think tank where I work, has spent the last several weeks investigating the Syrian opposition and talking to key figures in six major cities in upheaval. The evidence suggests that this revolution is the most liberal and Western-friendly of any of the Arab Spring uprisings. That it's also the least supported by the West is a tragedy.
  • The six oppositionists we spoke to in Syria all regarded the revolution as a confessionally and tribally unified endeavor. The sectarianism, they said, was wholly on Assad's side. Even Kurds have marched under the Syrian flag, something unthinkable in years past. Indeed, May 27 was nicknamed "Azadi Friday" for a Kurdish word meaning freedom, underscoring the solidarity that exists between Syrian Arabs and a long-oppressed tribal minority. The oppositionist in Hama, Syria's fourth-largest city, assured us that Christians had joined in Friday prayers at the Great Mosque in that city. "Druze, Sunni, Alawite and Kurd—we will never stop," echoed our source in Homs, in western Syria.
  • Signed by 150 oppositionists both inside Syria and in exile, the statement echoes the demands of the coordinating committees but also addresses how to transition Syria from a totalitarian dictatorship to a pluralist democracy. It's explicitly based on the Eastern European, Latin American, and South African models
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • the Syrian army is a good place to seek out independents—most of the officer class is Sunni, rather than Alawite like Assad and his cabal. One oppositionist in Deraa told us that the army is popularly seen as more a cat's-paw of the regime rather than an ideological extension of it:The army has no clue what is going on. They think we are armed people, and they are working under the guidance of shabbiha and the security forces. We have started to notice and hear of splits, and the longer we drag this out, the more apparent it becomes, because you can't be at war with Salafists in every city in your country and not have contact with your family or the outside world for several months. There will be a point that someone [from the army] will say, "That is it, enough! This has to stop."
  • t doesn't mean that Syrian Islamists pose no threat to the opposition or to whatever government might emerge if and when Assad is ousted. But it demonstrates their political weakness relative to their brethren in Egypt and Tunisia. Assurances from non-Islamists as to the makeup of the opposition might be mistaken for special pleading; but clear victories in their wrangles for representative power are more definitive
  • Islamists can neither be excluded from, nor can they dominate, the political scene in Syria
  • the head of the Deraa Baath Party has been arrested and tortured.
  • Let Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah make the mistake of shirked solidarity
Ed Webb

The Arab spring is still alive | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...arab-spring-still-alive

MENA ArabSpring Libya Sudan democratization opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 27 Jun 19 - Cached
  • Some have attempted to make the Arab spring ‘unknowable’ as a socio-political phenomenon, all the better to obscure the intentions of its subjects and justify counterrevolution. But the reality is that its aims of establishing freedom and democracy in a region run by decades-old systems of tyranny exists beyond its popularly accepted timeline
  • In almost every national situation where counterrevolution has triumphed, it has been allowed to do so without any hindrance by the democratic West – in fact, in many cases it’s with direct or indirect support from it
  • There was never any true support for democracy from those who pretended to be its bastions and patrons, all while powerful foreign anti-democratic forces, such as Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, mobilised viciously on the side of counterrevolution to crush nascent democracy
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The proponents of democracy in Sudan suddenly found themselves up against a familiar enemy. The Transitional Military Council (TMC), backed by the UAE and Saudi Arabia, moved from a conciliatory relationship with the protesters to murdering them.
  • the TMC and its backers in Sudan know that no amount of dead Sudanese is enough for the world to do anything. All they have to do is glance over the border towards Egypt and observe as Sisi’s counterrevolutionary regime is showered with support from Europe and the US
  • To cut several long stories short, if Haftar was to take Tripoli tomorrow and overthrow the GNA, the world would not do a thing about it. In fact, Europe would rejoice, while the US, which mainly follows Saudi Arabia on these things, would likely swiftly accept the status quo.
  • though the realities of the horror of the counterrevolution are not to be balked at, the continuing situations in Libya and Sudan prove that the simple struggle for freedom and democracy persists in the region
1 - 4 of 4
Showing 20▼ items per page