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| A visualization of the death toll updated in May, depicting 7,069 people |
The uprising in Syria has all stemmed off of one root, human rights. The people feel that the government has taken the power out of their hands and corruption has lead to the abuse of the freethinking civilization. The seed of destruction as it were, has risen due to the instatement of a state of emergency, or to place a simpler term to paper,the emergency law. This law “gave the government a free hand to arrest people without charge and extended the state's authority into virtually every aspect of citizens' lives”says an article from Aljazeera. A state of emergency is generally put in place to give the government added authority in defending and strengthening itself and its people during periods of man made or natural disaster and will suspend constitutional protection for the sake of this cause. According to Michael Walzer, author of Just and Unjust Wars, the country’sabilities towards protection “extends not only to the lives and liberties of individuals but also to their shared life and liberty, the independent community they have made, for which individuals are sometimes sacrificed.” So implementing this law, although taking away the rights of the citizens, can be a useful tool in rebuilding that country into the area they once knew her as. For the Ba’ath party, the Arab nationalist group whom has a monopoly over Syria,the rationale used to implement this law was that they felt Syria to be in danger from Israel and other militant groups and I believe they were correct in implementing this strategy of defense.
Syria has been in conflict with Israel four separate times, three of those times falling within a patterned time period of each other, that being in 1967, ’73, and ’82. Some may ask as to how they were justified in implementing this law in 1963 when conflict arose in serious proportions some four years later, but to this inquiry there is an easy response. The War of 1967, better known as the six-day war, was a huge success on the side of Israel, taking over parts of Egypt, Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights from Syria. The war was so swiftly won due to the enormous effort put forth by an Israeli spy by the name of Eli Cohen. He was able to rise through the Syrian government to achieve intelligence as to the whereabouts of rough and difficult terrain, the types of weapons used by the Syrian defenses, and he was even able to plant trees as markers for aerial attacks. Cohen eventually got as high as the Chief Advisor to the Minister of Defense and was third in line to succeed as President of Syria. He was caught and hung on May 18th, 1965 but the information that he was able to transfer to Israel was enough to set them up for a large attack in the Six-Day War and previous bombings before then. Cohen first moved to Damascus, the capital of Syria, in 1961 and suspicions grew in Syria of a high-level leak soon after and they implemented the emergency law and strengthened their efforts towards the eventual finding of Cohen, all this information to be found at his website elicohen.org. Unfortunately, the state of emergency was not lifted at that time and the abuse of power was soon to follow.
The clearest starting point of this abuse was the Hama Massacre in 1982, where an army patrol team was investigating the city of Hama and came across the hiding guerrilla commander Umar Juwwad and fighting erupted between Islamic insurgents and the Ba’ath party. These parties have been fighting for control of the area for sometime and the Islamic insurgents,that being the Muslim Brotherhood, were fighting for the idea that religion,specifically the writing in the Qur’an, were to be inseparable from life and government, the Ba’ath party, as I mentioned previously, were fighting for Arab unity. On the day subsequent to the encounter, the Syrian government called for surrender of the city and warned that anyone remaining in the city would be treated as a rebel. They then bombed the center of the city, allowing for ground troops to infiltrate and search for surviving insurgents. They then proceeded to torture and execute these rebels and suspected more to be hiding beneath the city in a series of tunnels. Under the orders of Hafez al-Assad, the Syrian president at the time, the soldiers pumped diesel fuel into the tunnels and blocked the exits of those channels with tanks and other military forms of resistance and ignited the fuel burning many. It has been estimated that between 10,000 and 25,000 were killed, most of those being civilians and is said to be “the single deadliest act by any Arab government against its own people in the modern Middle East” by author Robin Wright.
After this event, the grip of the government began to tighten as they realized that the power was all in their hands and put forth attempts to ensure that their reign was not to be challenged. They began putting censors on anything thatwasn’t pro-government and put those against their rule in jails, where it is said they were tortured. An estimated 2,500 to 3,000 of these political prisoners were never tried. There were of course no protests allowed unless they too were pro-government and on January 30th 2012, 28 protesters were shot and killed in the midst of an anti-government crowd. The violence however stops not there and the current death toll is estimated at around 7,000,according to The Huffington post.
The emergency law was lifted on April 19th, 2011 but the protesters are not done there and are noted saying that the lifting of the “emergencylaw is long overdue, but there are a host of other laws that should be scrapped, such as those giving security forces immunity from prosecution, and giving powers to military courts to try civilians,” according to Aljazeera.com. This shows that there is much more for these people to fight for and much more on the side of the government that is up for reform, and as the crowds grow in size, so do their supporters.
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