As the Syrian uprising enters its second year, hundreds of Syrians in Greece participated in the Global March for Syria, an initiative to take people form all over the world to the streets on March 15 in support of the Syrian people’s struggle. The campaign is explained in a video called “Against a Dictator” that has been widely shared online.

Men, women, children flocked Syntagma Square which brought to mind nothing but Homs’s clock square as hundreds of Syrian flags covered the sky and a make-shift clock tower, a replica of the clock tower in the centre of Homs was set up in the middle of Syntagma square, a rallying point for those in Syria’s Homs protesting for democracy.

Protesters stood to show their support and raise awareness on the situation in Syria. They had gathered to demand three things: an end to the slaughter and carnage of innocent people by Assad’s regime and called on the Greek government to recognize the National Syrian Council as the new representative body of all Syrians and to recall its ambassador form Syria.

They all gathered under the slogan, “We are Syrians and we want to overthrow the regime.” Together in loud voices they chanted “Free Free Syria”.

Eager to spread the message of freedom protesters performed a silent freeze flash mob leaving which could not go unnoticed by the passbyers. Later women with heated voices spoke against the killings and tortures of children in Syria while children sang songs and recited poems of the revolution.

Soon it got dark and Syntagma Square lit up with the hundred of candles to honor the people that have lost their lives in the Syrian uprising.

In other situations we could say “Happy first anniversary”, but surely this is not the case, says Syrian Jasmine. “We will continue to demonstrate until the Syrian people get their rights and freedom.”

In a move unthinkable a year ago, Syrians began taking to the streets in mid-March 2011 to call for political reforms, with the most significant demonstrations erupting on March 18. The protests spread as Assad’s security forces violently cracked down. More than 8,000 people have been killed ever since, while official data from surrounding countries and UNHCR’s own registration figures indicate that around 30,000 people have fled to neighbouring countries while significant numbers of Syrians are thought to be displaced inside Syria.

But the “Freedom fever” that has rocked the Middle East for the past year has shifted gender dynamics and challenged predetermined notions of women in the Arab world. Women in Egypt did not just take part in the protests; they were at the forefront of the revolution. Hungry for freedom and equality, bloggers such as Leil Zahra Mortada took momentous risks to keep the world up to date daily of the scene in Tahrir Square and elsewhere while Asmaa Mahfouz’s video “I go out to the street on January 25” was watched by millions on youtube, in which the activist explains why Egyptians should revolt. The New Opinion Workshop (NOW) estimates that approximately one-fifth of those taking to the streets in Change Square are women, which in and of itself represents a transformation in a country that ranked last in the 2011 Global Gender Gap report. Mubarak has been toppled but women are still, however, excluded from political participation in Egypt. During the parliamentary elections, there was not one even female candidate. Beside exclusion from national politics, they are still subject to torture, brutality and second-class treatment. It seems that their political activism has been limited to protests.

Ben Ali has been toppled and Tunisia’s interim government took over. Scheduled parliamentary elections were held on October 23, 2011. This election allowed voters, both women and men, to choose their representatives for a Constituent Assembly that will create a new constitution and political framework for Tunisia. The leader of the party An-Nahda pro-democracy party, which won 40% of the parliamentary votes, Rachid Ghannouchi, has pledged not to reverse the rights and freedoms Tunisian women have gained in the past. Tunisia’s first elections saw an unprecedented registered voter turnout of over 90%, with many women voting for the first time with women gaining 25% of the seats in the Constituent Assembly. It is important to note that According to UNESCO these women protesters are well-educated, with a literacy rate of 71%, outnumbering their men counterparts in universities.

In Yemen women have helped to create a pulsating civil society, something recognized internationally last year when Yemeni and women’s rights activist and journalist Tawakkol Karman was one of three women to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Yemeni activist Dalkis al-Lahabi said that the number of women activists had grown tenfold as a result of the uprising. “It brought the women back to the Yemeni civil and political society,” she said to NOW. They were also at the forefront of demonstrations calling for political and human rights reform, which led Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh signing a power-transfer deal in November 2011. But even in Post Saleh Yemen discrimination against women is still on the rise. Women who took part in last year’s protests were harassed, arrested and in some cases beaten for their peaceful activism.

A little bit north of Yemen, due to the media blackout since the uprising began in the country in March, it is still difficult to talk to women activists in Syria, many of whom are hiding. Some organized women-only protests, others in the mixed crowds and others on microphones to lead defiant chants at protests. Fadwa Suleiman, has gone from celebrity to revolutionary-freedom fighter, and finally to an escapee renounced by her own family. She’s now in hiding and has stated that if she’s caught she expects to be beaten, tortured, imprisoned, and killed.

How will the situation for Arab women develop? Will it progress or regress? No one has a clear picture about the future and no one had ever imagined that we would see the fall of three major dictators.  “Free and fair” elections are at least one step towards establishing a democracy and certainly not the last, though the West forgets this point far too often. Keeping up with an actually democratic political life remains a challenge in every liberal democracy, and as analysts argue, we should not expect the Middle East and North Africa to change in a year.

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Photo source: Facebook album titled “Women of Egypt” by Zahra El Mortada.

As the doors to freedom and democracy swing open in the wake of the Syrian Uprising, citizen journalists have taken smartphones in their hands, Tweeted about protests, and journalists followed their prerogative. “In repressive regimes, journalism has become a form of activism,” said Courtney Radsch, a former reporter with al Arabiya who is now programme manager for the Global Freedom of Expression Campaign at Freedom House.

After decades of media oppression, Syrian journalists inside Syria and in exile have gathered to announce the establishment of the Syrian Journalists Association (SJA) on February 20. “The establishment of the Syrian Journalists Union as a professional and independent union has been undertaken as a response to the revolution of freedom and honor that started last year according to Nouri AL Jarrah in an interview with Reuters.  He describes it as an act in solidarity with the Syrian people “taking part in the revolution against the oppressive regime.” The founding statement of the union criticized the existing journalist union, describing it as “a bureaucratic organization aiming to control the workers in the media field and pushing them under the control and service of the regime… siding with the oppression the regime continues for the peaceful demonstrations.” The new union criticized the “negative role of the existing journalist union and its silence against the ban of satellite channels from entering Syria, the oppression of journalists, and the extreme difficulty of carrying out their job under such circumstances.”

In Syria, the media is primarily owned and controlled by the government and the ruling Baath party, which assumed power in 1963. Over two hundred websites are banned by the regime for everyone, but a closed tight circle of the ruling elite. Criticism of the president and his family is not allowed, journalists practice self-censorship, and foreign reporters rarely get accreditation.  Though there have been developments in Syrian press freedom since Bashar al-Assad became president in 2000, the state continues to use the unending state of emergency law, suppressing freedom of expression and free access to information, to arrest media workers. Journalists and political activists risk arrest at any time for virtually any reason and are. According to the annual census by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) annual census of imprisoned journalists, Syria ranks as one of the world’s top jailers with 8 Syrian journalists behind bars with Iran being first.

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Photo: ology.com

This brings on the table the ongoing debate of the veto power and whether it should cease to exist. The most clear-cut response to that debate is that it is completely academic. Revising the UN Charter requires that such decision will have to win the approval of the veto-wielding permanent members and asking them to voluntarily give up some of their privileges. This will certainly not happen. So the reality is one: The veto is here to stay.

Ever since the establishment of the UN, year after year, the veto-wielding members, and in particular, China, the United States and Russia, have not failed to use, misuse or waste their Security Council power, allowing powerful nations to shape international peace and security. But by far, the worst offenders among the five are the United States (usually for resolutions against Israel) and China.

The UN has certainly failed to endorse its responsibility to protect Syria. “Action to stop Crimes Against Humanity should not be held prisoner to sectional political interests and convenient alliances. This veto will cost lives in Syria,” said Dr Simon Adams, Executive Director of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect.

The responsibility to protect is to some degree a statement of the evident. It is the duty of a government is to protect its citizens from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. But the importance of this principle is that the United Nations agreed in 2005 that the international community has to acknowledge its own responsibility to protect when a government is unable or unwilling to protect its people. This means that decisions on military intervention now have to be taken with recognition that the international community cannot now avoid taking blame by simply laying back and watching.

Violence in Syria has reached a level that’s impossible to ignore and arguments for why the so called Responsibility to Protect doctrine does not apply in the country but does apply in other cases like Libya are wearing thin. And it is much better to be done legally with regional backing than if it is done unilaterally by NATO, as in the case of Kosovo or in the case of the U.K and U.S in Iraq. Since the United Nations has accepted the responsibility to protect, the buck must stop here. Someone, somewhere must be willing to take action to stop and punish atrocities against civilians.

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Recently, these demands are expressed though Arabic hip hop and rap which seems to be gaining momentum in many Arab Spring countries including Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria and Bahrain. Hip hop and rap carry a message of sophistication that pushes them to break the barriers of fear and face the authoritarian regimes and long term rulers who seek to ridicule their demands.

In Tunisia, Hamada Ben Amor known as El General paid for his boldness with his freedom as he was arrested by the state after he released last November a critical song about former leader of Tunisia, Ben Ali, reaching audiences around the world through media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. The song was immediately banned in Tunisia, but Al Jazeera Television and other stations were still able to pick up on the El General story followed by other media outlets such as TIME magazine which ranked the 21-year-old man one of the 100 most influential people of the year as his song is credited for inspiring Tunisia to take to the streets. His music extended beyond Tunisia’s borders and inspired protestors in Bahrain and Egypt.

Demonstrators in Bahrain prepared to flood the streets with El General’s tunes to express their demands for change. Bahraini rappers talked in their songs mostly about the rationality of the Sunni- Shiite divide that served only the interest of the regime.

Egypt’s day of rage brought to the forefront a group of rappers like Ram Donjewan who composed the anthem of Egypt’s revolution by simply laying out the reasons why it was normal to revolt against the government. In order to stand against a regime and its repression claim a group of rappers “the Arabian Knightz” in their song “not your prisoner” they must overcome all the pit politics that paralyze people in their everyday lives not only in Egypt but also in the entire region.

Libya is another country, which has seen a very fast rise in its hip-hop scene. In Libya, artist Ibn Thabet adjusts a code for the Libyan youth in which his music captures the anger and frustration of young Libyans that have lived decades of repressive rule under Gaddafi.

Meanwhile, Syrian rappers are staging their own uprising in their country. A search on YouTube for Syrian revolutionary rap results in thousands of videos and songs. Little is known about the artists or their way of working because secrecy is needed to prevent artists who criticize the government from being arrested. In some cases, governments as has happened in the past, have co-opted hip hop, popularity by supporting and exclusively giving National TV airtime to artists with pro-regime lyrics.

Each of these songs which include no managers, record labels or copyright are distributed via social network sites like Youtube, Twitter and Facebook, all stand in solidarity with the revolutions sweeping the Middle East and North Africa.

Material from the Centre for Mediterranean, Middle East and Islamic Studies (CEMMIS) was used for parts of the story.

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As the government continues to ban many forms of social media and foreign reporters from entering Syria, the people of Syria still find ways to get their stories out. The mobile phone has proven highly effective in fueling the Syrian uprising. In a repressive country like Syria, cell phones can enable protesters to communicate, rally support for uprisings and film events of the revolution making its users what are often referred to as citizen journalists.

Many still remember the 1982 Hama massacre, when there was no such a thing as citizen journalism and social media networks, the government killed 10.000-40,000 according to Amnesty international in a few weeks. It also managed to hide the massacre from the world for a long period of time.

But this is no longer possible. It’s been almost ten months since the “Arab Spring” fever hit Syria and the same government is reported to have killed more than 5,250 people, a number far lower than the 1982 death toll. They carried forward the rallying cry into Syria last March, using mobiles to document their own protests and inspire an ever-growing number of Syrians to join the movement. In Syria’s case the mobile might indeed be mightier than the gun; only the process seems bloodier.

Through the use of mobile phones Syrians have risked their lives to film crackdowns on protesters by the government’s armed and security forces. The images of tortured and mutilated bodies have undoubtedly made their contribution in heavily censored Syria as they provide some of the only images of the struggle there. These videos are uploaded on websites such as Facebook and YouTube to keep the world informed of events during this difficult time in many parts of the country. In fact, according to a study conducted by the World Bank mobile phones appear as the most predominant and most rapidly growing form of communication in developing economies throughout the world. This is mainly due to its vast network, its ubiquity and to inexpensive mobile service in emerging countries.

And while smartphones like the iPhone may be another hot topic, they are out of the economic reach of most due to their high cost. The Syrian opposition has launched an iPhone app called Souria Wa Bas which roughly translates to Syria and that’s all to disseminate news and information according to Mobile online Portal. This application broadcasts breaking news, videos, photos and even jokes about the incumbent regime. This application is not likely meant to reach only the people in Syria but also people abroad. Shortly after this application was released, the German Association Press reported that the Syrian government had banned the use and import of iPhones in Syria.

Mobile technology is providing opposition groups a unique and unprecedented opportunity to disseminate news and propaganda about their cause, something that previously would have been crushed by government censors.

Επιμέλεια: JJ