Justice!
The loathsome and brutal Alawite regime of Syrian President Bashar al Assad has resulted in a reflection of his father's regime before him, when the Sunni majority Muslims of the country rose up in revolt against their sectarian oppressors. Except that President al Assad has exceeded his father's death count by tens of thousands of victims. Over 60,000 Syrians have died in the conflict.Well over a million Syrians are internally displaced; hundreds of thousands have become desperate refugees in Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon. Children have been tortured and murdered. Countless women have been raped. Women and children have been slaughtered, along with civilian men and the elderly. The country is in utter turmoil. Government artillery strafes cities and towns.
Who should prevail? A murderous tyrant who, if he survives and is enabled, after all is said and done, to continue his rule contemptuous of human rights. Or the forces of the insurgency who have themselves engaged in human rights violations, and who value the expert violent intervention on their behalf of battle-hardened al-Qaeda-associated Islamist militias?
A further bloodbath of a slaughter is certain to ensue regardless of which side it is that eventually prevails. The regime has the considerable weight of Russia, Iran (Republican Guard) and unofficial/official Lebanon (Hezbollah/Hamas) counter-weighting the sympathy toward the rebel Sunni Syrian movement by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and NATO.
How does one compare 60,000 dead to the figure of 800 dead? Egypt's Arab Spring event that turned into a convenient Islamist Springboard event hadn't the lasting power of Syria's. President Hosni Mubarak was convinced to set aside his presidency and his aspiration for a dynasty in the finer interests of Egypt's stabilization and future, at the behest of the military which had always supported him, one of their own.
Rumblings of eventually hauling Bashar al-Assad before the International Criminal Court are heard now and again. His murderous onslaught of his own people still pales in comparison to the Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and his janjaweed militias' bloodthirsty assault on Darfurian villagers, where even greater numbers were killed, raped, displaced and al-Bashir still greeted as a hero by the Arab League, despite the charges of genocide and crimes against humanity levelled against him by the ICC.
Yet the most populous Arab country in the Middle East, which lost an estimated 800 people during the controversial and chaotic challenge in Tahrir Square to the ongoing dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak continues to seek the death penalty for its former President. There has been no proof, no evidence that he ordered the killing of protesters. He was aware of the clashes, but the melees that resulted in deaths cannot necessarily be laid at his feet.
His fate is the object of revenge; an especially viral emotion particularly acute among Arabs and Muslims in particular. The current Prime Minister, Muslim Brotherhood's Mohammed Morsi, made additional legal action leading presumably to a more lethal punishment for Hosni Mubarak than merely life imprisonment, an election pledge which gained him additional popularity among the electorate.
An Egyptian appeals court overturned that life sentence ostensibly for directing the killing of protesters. If most Egyptians had their way they would have opted for simply hanging the man for having ruled over them for 40 years. In comparison to what Egyptians are now undergoing; hugely increased crime, a growth of the poor class as the former middle class joins them, a faltering economy and political instability, things were good then, despite the complaints of rising food prices; now there is scarcity as well.
And the best evidence that the government can find to implicate their former president to the satisfaction of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafists and the leftists (one item on which all seem to agree) is raising the issue of gifts received from the Al Ahram government newspaper to the president directly; gifts like gold pens, designer neckties, leather bags, shoes, gold jewelery and expensive watches?
Labels: Conflict, Crime, Crisis Politics, Egypt, Justice, Sudan, Syria
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, January 15, 2013
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