Friday the protesters stayed home
On Wednesday, I warned that the fascist regime of Bashar al-Assad planned to confront any protesters who showed up in Damascus on Friday. That was enough. Remembering how his father gassed an entire city in 1982, on Friday - and on Saturday too - the protesters stayed home. A weeklong online campaign failed to galvanize the kinds of mass protests that have rocked Tunisia and Egypt in recent weeks. In fact, no one showed up Friday and Saturday for what were to be "days of rage" against the Syrian president's iron-fisted rule.What could go wrong?
By Saturday afternoon, the number of plainclothes security agents stationed protectively in key areas of the old city of the capital, Damascus, had begun to dwindle.
"The only rage in Syria yesterday was the rage of nature," wrote Syrian journalist Ziad Haidar, in reference to a cold spell and heavy rain lashing the country.
But it was more than just the weather that kept Syrians at home. A host of factors - including intimidation by security agents and President Bashar Assad's popular anti-Israel policies - kept Syria quiet this weekend.
"Syria has its own set of peculiarities that make it quite different from Egypt and Tunisia," said Mazen Darwish, a journalist who headed the independent Syrian Media Center until it was closed down in 2009.
A major difference is that Assad - unlike leaders in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Jordan - is not allied with the United States, so he is spared the accusation that he caters to American demands.
Labels: Bashar al-Assad, Politics, Syrian regime change, World Politics
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:18 AM
1 Comments:
The Assad dictatorship has proven to be surprisingly durable - its a true totalitarian as opposed to a mere authoritarian regime.
Don't look for a Cairo Spring to emerge in Damascus in the foreseeable future.
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