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Canada, foreign affairs, human rights, Iran, policy, politics, Syria, United States
Iran has also helped the Assad regime crack down on social media. In February 2011, Syria allowed access to social media websites such as Facebook and YouTube for the first time since 2007. At the time, some viewed this as a positive attempt at reform in order to allow freedom of expression. By May there was a 105 percent increase in the number of Facebook users in Syria, but it also became clear that the regime was using social media to track dissidents.16 US officials reported that in
addition to providing weapons, riot gear, and training, Iran was also supplying sophisticated surveillance equipment to the Syrian government. The Syrian regime used it to track down leaders of the protest movements and arrest them.
What one may see on the web of Syria’s civil war may belie what either the Assad regime or the collection of rebel forces, group by group, have kept hidden even though the standards for propriety as regards online publishing could not be lower.
While Matthew Levitt’s report reaches back to the 2003 arrest in Iran and subsequent torture of journalist Zahra Kazem to provide its most graphic description of the kind of pain meted out by way of the regime’s paranoid fantasia, it may leave to YouTube and the future to describe what horrors behind the curtains became the lot of captured Syrian dissidents in recent times.
Of perhaps equal interest in the report may be a part of the primary source material cited in the footnotes, for example, “Executive Order 13572 of April 29, 2011: Blocking Property of Certain Persons with Respect to Human Rights Abuses in Syria“:
“I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, hereby expand the scope of the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13338 of May 11, 2004, and relied upon for additional steps taken in Executive Order 13399 of April 25, 2006, and in Executive Order 13460 of February 13, 2008, finding that the Government of Syria’s human rights abuses, including those related to the repression of the people of Syria, manifested most recently by the use of violence and torture against, and arbitrary arrests and detentions of, peaceful protesters by police, security forces, and other entities that have engaged in human rights abuses, constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States, and I hereby order . . . .”
The “Government of Syria” described in executive orders between 2004 and 2011 is the same as that supported by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.
It would appear the ghosts of the Cold War continue to haunt the politics in the Middle East.
Additional Reference
Levitt, Matthew. “Congressional Testimony: Iranian Support for Terrorism and Violations of Human Rights.” PDF download page. The Washington Institute, May 30, 2013.
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