There was a nonviolence movement in Syria when the protests there began in 2011. About that time young Syrian activists formed the Syrian Nonviolence Movement, a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) based in Cergy-Pontoise, Ile-De-France, France, and the Local Coordination Committees, led by Razan Zaitouneh.
From the Syrian Nonviolence Movement’s Facebook page:
https://www.alharak.org (deceased as of March, 2020)
"We believe in nonviolent struggle and civil resistance as a principle and method in achieving social, cultural, and political change in Syrian society, and in enabling Syria to take its role in building human civilization."
The Local Coordination Committees was a national decentralized network that reported on protests and advocated civil disobedience, such as nightly protests and refusal to pay water, electricity and telephone bills. In December 2013 Razan Zaitouneh and three other activists, Samira Khalil, Nazim Hamada, and Wael Hamada, were taken from their offices at the Violations Documentation Center in Douma. I'd like to think they're still alive. If I could I’d ask why they thought nonviolent activism in Syria had a chance.
I believed in civil disobedience even though I never practiced it. As a teenager I read the essay, On "Civil Disobedience," by Henry David Thoreau, that influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King. I don’t see how it can work today. I’d like to be wrong, but when Thoreau wrote that “Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient,” could he have imagined a government that would imprison, torture and murder innocent men, women, and children for the sole objective of remaining in power? Could he have imagined other governments (Russia and Iran) coming in to prop up a dictator and step up the slaughter? Remember, over 400,000 civilians have died and many more have left the country.
The activists might reply that they had no other choice. Syria had lived almost fifty years under emergency laws. Syrian civilians, even children, regularly disappeared inside Assad’s security apparatus.
Leading up to the “Arab Spring” in 2011 there was inspiration and organization already online. The Academy of Change, based in Qatar, was inspired by Otpor, which participated in the “Bulldozer Revolution” that overthrew Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Miloševic in 2000. The co-founder of Otpor, Ivan Marovic, later co-founded the Center for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies (Canvas), a group that trained activists. The Academy of Change may have had more of a role in Egypt, but Syrian and Egyptian activists were both using social media to organize. The Syrian organizers of the Dignity Strike in December, 2011 called for protesters to change their Facebook profile picture into the jasmine and “Dignity Strike” pictures, post messages encouraging friends to change their pictures, and send text messages and e-mails to urge everyone around them to get involved and spread the word.
In early April, 2012, there was hope that civil disobedience could work. Donatello Della Ratta, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen, wrote that “Civil disobedience is the only way to mobilize people in big cities that are deemed to be regime strongholds in Syria.” But by the end of May 2012 the brutal repression of all dissent was underway. According to an Amnesty International delegate, “every protest I observed in Aleppo ended with security forces and Shabiha militias opening fire on peaceful demonstrators.”
While nonviolent activists had Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other social media for organizing nonviolent protests, Syrian security also had western technologies for filtering and monitoring the Internet. At least thirteen proxy servers built by Blue Coat Systems were bought from a Dubai re-seller. Blue Coat Systems is based in Sunnyvale, California. Utimaco, which is part of Sophos, a British company based in Oxfordshire, sold sophisticated spyware to Syria through an Italian re-seller. Syrian security targeted protesters using social media, and as a result all the good that was offered by western technology was destroyed by western technology.
References
- Syrian Nonviolence Movement
- Syrian Nonviolence Movement Facebook Page
- Syrian revolution calls for Dignity Strike
- Local Coordination Committees [1]
- Local Coordination Committees [2]
- Social Media and the Arab Spring
- British software helped Syrian regime crush dissidents
- US technology used to censor Syria Internet
- Enemies of the Internet: Syria
- How Egyptian and Tunisian youth hacked the Arab Spring
- Syria: the virtue of civil disobedience
- The role of the Academy of Change in Egypt's uprising
- All out repression purging dissent in Aleppo, Syria
- Ending state of emergency in Syria does not stop human rights abuses
- CNN Tonight December, 14 2016 Transcript. Don Lemon, Rula Jebreal, and Michael Weiss discuss Aleppo. The discussion begins at 23:41:05, near the bottom of the page.
- Civil Disobedience, by Henry David Thoreau
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