Defector Testimony provided further evidence that attacks on Syrian protestors Explicitly State-Ordered

The author with a sign

8 soldiers and 4 security agency members were interviewed

The people said they participated in the government crackdown

Those interviewed were in Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan

Recent reports from five Syrian defectors told Human Rights Watch that they received explicit orders to shoot at protesters.

One member of Syria’s security agencies, referred to locally as mukhabarat, was deployed in Homs, Syria’s third largest city, on April 19, when Syria’s security forces violently dispersed one of the biggest gatherings of protesters attempting to stage a sit-in in the central Clock Tower Square. He told Human Rights Watch that Colonel Abdel Hameed Ibrahim ordered the soldiers to fire on unarmed protesters and that the soldiers complied, killing dozens of people:

The protesters had sat down in the square. We were told to disperse them with violence if needed. We were there with air force security, army, and shabbiha [armed supporters of the government who do not belong to security forces]. At around 3:30 a.m., we got an order from Colonel Abdel Hameed Ibrahim from air force security to shoot at the protesters. We were shooting for more than half an hour. There were dozens and dozens of people killed and wounded. Thirty minutes later, earth diggers and fire trucks arrived. The diggers lifted the bodies and put them in a truck. I don’t know where they took them. The wounded ended up at the military hospital in Homs. And then the fire trucks started cleaning the square.

A conscript who was a member of the Presidential Guard recounted how he was deployed on April 18 to Harasta, a suburb of Damascus, to quell a protest:

They gave each one of us a Kalashnikov [rifle] with two magazines, and there was more ammunition in the vehicles. They also gave us electric tasers. They told us we were being sent to fight the gangs because security services needed reinforcement. We were surprised [when we got to Harasta] because we couldn’t see any gangs, just civilians, including some women and children, in the street, and members of the mukhabarat firing at them. I was in a group with five other soldiers from my unit. We received clear orders to shoot at civilians from the Presidential Guard officers and from the 4th military battalion, although normally we don’t get orders from other units. One of the officers who gave orders was Major Mujahed Ali Hassan from 4th battalion; his military vehicle license plate is 410. The exact orders were “load and shoot.” There were no conditions, no prerequisites. We got closer to the demonstrators, and when we were some five meters away, the officers shouted “fire!” At that moment, the five of us defected and ran over to the demonstrators’ side throwing our weapons to them while running away.

The interviewed defectors reported that they were generally deployed in mixed teams of army personnel and often plainclothes mukhabarat and shabeeha. Two soldiers reported incidents where their units had opened fire on armed mukhabarat and shabeeha wearing civilian clothes after mistaking them for anti-government gangs. A first sergeant (Raqeeb Awwal) said the army opened fire in the coastal town of Bayda on members of security services wearing civilian clothes because they mistook their identity. Other defectors reported that security services later dressed in army clothes to avoid such shootings.

A conscript trained as a sniper was deployed in Izraa, a town of 40,000 near Daraa, on April 25, three days after security forces had shot 28 protesters over a 48-hour period; he told Human Rights Watch:

I was in Squad 14 (Firqa 14) of the 4th Regiment. We were around 300 soldiers deployed to Izraa. I had heard so much about foreign armed groups that I was eager to fight them. But then General Nasr Tawfiq gave us the following orders: “Don’t shoot at the armed civilians. They are with us. Shoot at the people whom they shoot at.” We were all shocked after hearing his words, as we had imagined that the people were killed by foreign armed groups, not by the security forces. We realized that our orders were to shoot at our own people.

A soldier who was deployed for a month in Daraa before defecting on June 1 said:

“We received orders to kill protesters. Some military refused the orders and were shot with a handgun. Two were killed in front of me, by someone in the rank of lieutenant (muqaddam). I don’t know his name. He said they were traitors.”

A sergeant  posted in the southern town of al-Hara, near Daraa, described the orders his squad received when the army circled the town:

 

“Snipers were on rooftops. Their orders were, ‘If anyone goes out on the street, detain or shoot.’ I recall watching a guy go out to smoke outside and then being shot and killed by a sniper.”

All defectors told Human Rights Watch they were led to believe that they were fighting armed gangs paid by outside actors.

“We were told that there are terrorist groups coming into the country with funding from Bandar Bin Sultan [a prominent Saudi prince who served until 2009 as Saudi’s national security chief], Saad al-Hariri [a former Lebanese prime minister], and Jeffrey Feltman [US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern affairs].”

Military commanders often communicated this information during daily briefings to soldiers, referred to as “nasharat tawjeeh.”

“Each morning we had guidance briefings. They would tell us there are gangs and infiltrators. They would show us pictures of dead soldiers and security forces.”

A member of the mukhabarat posted in Homs reported that he and his colleagues “received leaflets that there are infiltrators and salafists in the country and that they needed to stop them. In the flyers, they said Bandar Bin Sultan and Saad Hariri had paid those infiltrators.”

Regular soldiers were not allowed to watch television in private to avoid any of them watching TV channels that aired anti-government information.

Officers could watch television but only Syrian state television and Dunya TV, a pro-government channel owned by Rami Makhlouf, a cousin and close ally of President Bashar al-Asad.

Every night they used to summon us in a stadium-like place in the military barrack and make us watch Dunya TV from a big TV screen. It was all scenes from Daraa showing people killed by what they reported as foreign armed groups. Officers would repeatedly tell us that there is a “foreign plot” going on in Daraa.

Watching Dunya TV every night between 20:00 and 22:00, we had the firm belief that there is a foreign conspiracy against which we need to fight and protect our people.

Libya resumes college funding for students in U.S. | The Enquirer | battlecreekenquirer.com

Libya resumes college funding for students in U.S. | The Enquirer | battlecreekenquirer.com.

About 2,000 Libyan students who attend U.S. colleges are getting a one-year reprieve in financial support after Libya resumed funding that was halted when the U.N. froze about $30 billion of that country’s assets, the organization that administers the funds said.

 

From Globe

Boundaries are old Shadows, and we live in the Dark @SabzBrach

This is a quick thanks to Joanne Michele, human rights activist, for her continued earnest and 100% volunteer work on OpAsylum. Joanne quoted Sagan, which brought to mind:

As the ancient myth makers knew, we are children equally of the earth and the sky. In our tenure on this planet we’ve accumulated dangerous evolutionary baggage — propensities for aggression and ritual, submission to leaders, hostility to outsiders — all of which puts our survival in some doubt. But we’ve also acquired compassion for others, love for our children and desire to learn from history and experience, and a great soaring passionate intelligence — the clear tools for our continued survival and prosperity.

Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain, particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of the small planet Earth. But up there in the immensity of the Cosmos, an inescapable perspective awaits us. There are not yet any obvious signs of extraterrestrial intelligence and this makes us wonder whether civilizations like ours always rush implacably, headlong, toward self-destruction.

National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars. Travel is broadening.

Carl Sagan

I thought this was relevant.

Gaddafi Makes Human Rights History

Gaddafi is the first person to be accused by the International Criminal Court chief prosecutor of “enforced disappearance”, a phenomenon made notorious by the Argentinian and Chilean juntas of the 1970s and 80s.

Thousands of political opponents and trade unionists disappeared but no bodies were found, so no murder or kidnap could be proved.

ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo, who made his name leading the case against junta leaders in his native Argentina, said he now has evidence that in Libya “the behaviour is abduction, torture and disappearance. This is a tool to establish fear.”

The ICC judges are to announce within days whether they agree to crimes against humanity charges against Gaddafi , who would join Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir on the international wanted list.

 

read more 

“Look, you have forgotten the cat” #africa. ok, #libya

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points. Woolf

Antonio Hirsch, World Map

An article caught my eye this morning on Governmentinthelab, by Daniel Berhane, The subject, the statistical relevance  is representative of the continued refusal to renegotiate ancient relationships between what essentially makes up the developed world, the former colonies, and the Greater Incorporated  Commonwealth of Whitey, Roy, and Viceroy.

It describes a report by Freedom House:  Freedom in the World 2011: The Authoritarian Challenge to Democracy,  ranking African nations on some gradient of  ‘free’  ‘partly free’ and ‘not free.’ I can’t elaborate much more on what the authors purported to resolve with their study’s summation. A critic cited within the article wastes no time attacking Freedom House as oblique:

“…its near-Manichaean characterization of countries as free, partially-free and not free.”

The real problem is not that the terms are too generic,  but that the report is more of  the same answers towards sufficiently describing the problem, a process never capable of exacting change unto itself.

In South Africa they wait hours in lines for AZT, with other Sub-Suharan nations  which are often unable to keep the condom dispensers full through the day they are filled.  As with the “twitter revolutions,”  Africans do not need us to tell them they are a trodden-on people.

Africa, (the Confederation of variously Coincident Euphemisms); Southeast Asia, much of Oceania; South America, Central America: Flint, MI….no time recently were any of them glimmering Golden(brown) Boys, and now shock us with inexplicable collapse.

We already expect to be talking about abject poverty and health concerns–think of the shots, quinine, other preparations required for certain overseas travel–the Media delivers the suffering, swept from our doorstep, gathered in neat packages of bitter Dickensian tragedy, paired with patronizing cultural pastiche. We gawk at their squalor and have the nerve to buy their silence with “philanthropy.’     No mystery.

I don’t want to shove this down anyone’s throat.

But, while you’re here– Look at these various, essentially randomly-queried google images, maps of global colonialism, global AIDS, other stuff. The first is from 1910–

Let a man get up and say, “Behold, this is the truth,” and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

Virginia Woolf Bernard in The Waves

Much of the globe is oppressed by desperate need. Nearly 2 million children under 14 years old are HIV positive in sub-Saharan Africa alone, many of whom are part of the 12 to 16 million orphaned by HIV infected parents.

With  ARVs and decent primary care, and early diagnosis, there is very little need that infected EVER has to mean symptomatic.

We have applied the boot, and are describing the tread.

This is a beautiful realization: we’ve described the problem sufficiently. For the hope, let’s try countermanding.  We can be about the business of healing this history-old lie that you and I are different.

“All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are ‘sides,’ and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot.”
— Virginia Woolf

 

Operation Asylum is a network-building initiative whose motivating and all-peremptory concern is the identification and protection of “at-risk” foreign nationals abroad; especially regarding migrants, students, expatriates and other transitory individuals whose homeland conditions warrant they be granted asylum status under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.

Our aim is to utilize already established frameworks for managing distributed resources, via Grid Computing, to

1. prevent corruption of valuable data for remote users who are in especially dire need of reliable information (when their access is usually most vulnerable);

2. encourage and enable continual extension of grid access with an eye towards hard-wiring into the periphery of the Web as a general purpose auxiliary, should native access be compromised.

Operation Asylum started as a brainstorming session among a half-dozen or so people in a “Tinychat” room, in discussion without much confident direction.

The question being ganged-up-on: How do we help an unknown (relatively small) number of Libyan nationals studying abroad, who faced imminent (I thought) deportation and ensuing persecution and/or forced conscription into the Libyan regular army. A chance personal reference (only describable as stark serendipity, really) introduced the project to Joanne Michele, women’s/human rights activist (likely Jedi), and she  served to calm immediate panic about looming, imminent deportation.

This allowed for thought and planning of long term solutions that might keep these expeditionary scholars where they -belong–in our colleges and universities, learning, being a part of discovery, adapting our knowledge systems and their appended ethos to a better fit of our deeply social proclivities.

We talk about this a lot, it could work.

Message to Libyan Students from the Canadian Bureau for International Education

CBIE is writing to provide an update on ongoing efforts to secure funding for the Libyan-North American Scholarship Program.

Last week an application was made to the UN Security Council 1970 committee requesting authorization for Libyan authorities to access funds necessary for the Scholarship Program from a particular frozen off-shore account. CBIE worked closely with the relevant government officials during this process and learned yesterday that the application has successfully passed the five-day non-objection period required by the UN Security Council. We anticipate that formal permits will be issued in the next few days.

The permit will allow Libyan authorities to request bank transfers, from the frozen off-shore account, on behalf of the 2500 students in North America who are sponsored by the Libyan North-American Scholarship Program.

Based on this new permit, the Ministry of Education and Scientific Research officials in Libya are making arrangements to transfer the necessary funds to CBIE. As well, it is our understanding that this past weekend Libyan Ministry officials made a media statement, confirming their intent to continue funding the Program and to transfer the required funds very soon.
We will continue to keep you informed of any new developments and hope to provide more concrete news very early next week.

Sincerely,

Canadian Bureau for International Education

 

op asylum

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love! -then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think, Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink. ~Keats

First, if anyone reading this is in contact with foreign nationals, living especially in areas of questionable guarantees of international law, but anywhere in the world outside of the country of their citizenship with a non-immigrant visa status, you will want your friends to be informed.

found this pic here http://flipsideflorida.wordpress.com/2011/02/06/chiaroscuro-redux/

“There are no nations! There is only humanity. And if we don’t come to understand that right soon, there will be no nations, because there will be no humanity.”

— Isaac Asimov

7000 thousand plus Libyans are now facing potential deportation upon expiration of student visas, as funding lapsed for those on home funded assistance with the freezing of Gaddafi’s assets. Many face threats to their freedom and physical threats from both official and  more auxiliary aggressors on Gaddafi’s long list of payed thugs. In countries where this is happening, we demand that reports made to authorities be absolutely guaranteed reprisal free.

some thoughts

It’s relatively easy for me to distill the relevant information from the webchat we had this evening—I can s simply locate my contributions and blue pencil them into oblivion. Not only was I privileged to be preempted by the very gracious and much more knowledgeable Joanne Michele in answering queries and/or responding to useful information, but additionally attended by a dozen or so conscientious friends who donated their time to the very noble task of checking their own awareness.

Not only did I in fact go into the meeting already greatly improved of mood and countenance for the new resources which Mrs. Michele has contributed (in addition to her effective assurance that, at least provided certain prerequisites, with any luck the Libyan college students abroad won’t be subject to return to a war shattered home and the threat of incarceration harm or death. I’ll say here that I consider forced conscription attempted murder, depraved indifference to the very basest non-derogable rights of the human.

A lot of good advice was given, and I am optimistic now for the fates of not just the limited number of Libyan students I had originally envisioned assisting, but for the prospect of a possible positive effect on the lives and futures of more than 7000 thousand Libyan students attending post-secondary institutions abroad. They all face a dubious fate. Their matriculation is the least compelling of the looming hurdles to an un abated pursuit of personal enrichment.

These are of the kind we need to concern ourselves in encouraging the individual facets, the modalities of “praxis” within a society.

While I think that to attempt to omnipotently  manipulate  global  events or wholly undo the consequences of past mistakes has as much promise as unscrambling an omelette back to yoke and whites with a pair of wooden spoons—descriptively it is not hard to recognize the expurgating  character of “types” of influence.

I think this may be unclear, I just mean to distinguish it from particular political or cultural agendas as anything like essential or even consistent (cultural norms become less and less normative for shorter and for shorter periods of time).

Excellent advice foreign nationals: don’t give up passport. Don’t guard it with your life, show it on request, but demand return

Demand documentation, signatures, and explanations of rights.

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
Case Postale 2500
CH-1211 Genève 2 Dépôt
Suisse.
Our telephone number:
+41 22 739 8111 (automatic switchboard).
Working hours are from 8:30 to 17:30 (7:30 GMT to 16:30 GMT) Monday to Friday

For partnership inquiries:
Fundraising Appeals Officer
Private Sector and Public Affairs Service
UNHCR Geneva
Telephone: (41) 22.739.8782
Fax: (41) 22.739.7395
E-mail: tremblay@unhcr.org

For press inquiries:
Associate Officer
Private Sector and Public Affairs Service
UNHCR Geneva
Telephone: (41) 22.739.7637
Fax: (41) 22.739.7395
Email: pouilly@unhcr.org

“A human being is a part of the whole that we call the universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This illusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature.”

— Albert Einstein