(al Jazeera source)
The Syrian Revolution is not going away as some writers would suggest. Despite employing various tactics of State repression ranging from shutting down the Internet, demonizing the opposition as radical Islamists, controlling the media, closing off the country to foreign journalists and unleashing the military as a domestic Gestapo pursuing mass-arrests, beatings and murders, revolutionary forces struggling for transformation are anything but defeated. In fact, the Syrian Revolution has just gotten a big boost because leaders of the long-oppressed Kurds of Syria, numbering several millions by many estimates despite the Syrian government's treating them as invisible men and women, has now officially joined ranks with the revolution, as noted today by al Jazeera:
Representatives of Syria's Kurds, the largest ethnic minority in the country, today called on all opposition forces inside and outside the country to join together to form a single political body responsible for overseeing a transition from dictatorship to democracy.The large number of Kurds beyond Syrian borders, will also, of course, take note of Hammo's call for solidarity."We demand the toppling [of] the security regime and an end to the monopoly of the Baath Party's rule," said Ismail Hammo, head of the Kurdish Yakiti Party, one of 12 Kurdish parties which issued the joint statement today in the north-east city of Qamishli in the name of the National Kurdish Initiative.
"We want a new constitution and acknowledgement of the diversity of Syrian people politically, socially and ethnically."
As Al Jazeera reported earlier this week, debate has been raging among Syria's Kurds over whether to throw the full weight of their community behind the uprising against Assad. Hammo said:
This coalition and other opposition parties share the aspiration for democratic change with the people in the street. Until now there have been no tools and both internal and exiled opposition programmes have been vague - so this initiative is necessary.He also called for the regime to stop violence against protesters, release all political prisoners and end the army's intervention in civilian affairs.
Hammo dismissed the call by the regime for a national dialogue as an attempt to buy time: "It is clearly that, because they have not even stopped the violence." (source)
Meanwhile, on the all-important info-wars front, protesters inside locked-down Syria AND among the Syrian diaspora, estimated at some 18 million people globally, are strategizing how to counter and circumvent the Assad Regime's media and communications black-outs and propaganda narratives. Again, al Jazeera has a good piece on this from their ongoing investigative program, Listening Post:
As the violence in Syria continues the mainstream media presence on the ground is becoming increasingly scarce. That is because the Assad regime is doing its best to contain the story by locking journalists up - or out of the country.But -- like in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya -- there is still a reliable source of information coming out via social media. Yet unlike those countries, most of the videos, images and stories are being aggregated from outside of the country by a group of Syrian activists who have managed to circumvent the government's crackdown on the media.
Our News Divide this week looks at one of the biggest existential threats to the Assad regime - the opposition news network that is being fed information from within the country and spreading it online. (source)
Here is the Listening Post video covering these developments in the first half of its broadcast:
As these two developments show, revolutionary forces pressuring Syria are not ebbing, but adapting and expanding. The Assad Regime can only delay the inevitable, not prevent it, not even, at this point, if they attempt to repeat the Hama-style massacres of 1982 executed by the Hafez al-Assad regime.
