The “Arab spring” that spawned an inspiring string of popular uprisings against authoritarian regimes across the Middle East has stalled in violence in Libya, Bahrain and Yemen. But it is in Syria that citizens seeking reform have confronted perhaps the most cruel and intransigent response. There, President Bashar al-Assad, echoing his father’s regime of massacre, has authorized the Syrian army to launch point-blank military assaults against unarmed citizens who continue to march peacefully in nearly a dozen cities and towns – even after they have been surrounded and isolated and had their water and electric power shut off.
More than 1,000 Syrian citizens have been killed, human rights activists report, and many times that number have been wounded or arrested, many in household raids. Syrians have been both appalled and transformed by the unrestrained violence leveled against them.
One case in particular has provoked their resistance and inspired their resilience. In involves a 13-year-old boy, Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, who was innocently tagging along a crowd of protesters in a village near Dara’a on April 29 when he was arrested by the army.
When his mutilated corpse – now the subject of a video that swept the nation – was returned to his family a month later, the army’s brutality was made clear. A New York Times reporter in Cairo described the shocking video of the “round-faced” child this way:
“Video posted online shows his battered, purple face. His skin is scrawled with cuts, gashes, deep burns and bullet wounds that would probably have injured but not killed. His jaw and kneecaps are shattered, according to an unidentified narrator, and his penis chopped off. ‘These are the reforms of the treacherous Bashar,’ the narrator says. ‘Where are human rights? Where are the international criminal tribunals?'”
This ghastly video depicts a government, long known for torture, that by all accounts is clearly trying to terrorize its people. Foreign reporters, barred from the country, cannot confirm the violence reported by the activists inside Syria, but information gathered by multiple sources leaves little doubt about the gross dimension of state brutality.
Leaders in Washington and other nations’ capitals cannot force Bashar from power without starting a war in the country, and none are inclined to try. Many reform-minded Syrians themselves say they don’t want an invasion. But they do want, and need, more economic and diplomatic pressure against Bashar’s regime to force the president to quit killing and torturing his people.
The Syrian uprising, initially provoked by the arrest of a group of 8- to 15 year-old children for spraying graffiti critical of the government in early March, has now adopted the image of Hamza as its symbol. Foreign leaders must do the same when they communicate with the Bashar regime.