Nick Cohen: Face the facts – Syria is an apartheid state

Another place worthy of an Action of Immediate Witness.  Cohen writes,

For a tyrant whose forces took 13-year-old Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, burned him, mutilated him, shattered his knee caps, cut off his penis and sent his corpse to his parents as a warning against participating in opposition politics, Bashar al-Assad receives remarkably forgiving treatment.

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I hope that liberals of my generation who beat their chests as they protested against racial apartheid in southern Africa will soon feel as outraged by religious apartheid in the Middle East. The Syrian opposition has as much right to our support as the African National Congress did because it has not targeted Alawites because of their religion. Indeed, it places its hopes on the Alawite-led army mutinying.

Nor does it want western military intervention. In a discussion of the opposition's needs, the pro-democracy thinktank, the Henry Jackson Society, emphasised the modesty of the dissidents' requests. They need encrypted laptops and satellite phones and sim cards to circumvent the regime's media blackouts and so continue the documentation of atrocities, and support from western intelligence services as they seek to persuade sympathetic Syrian army officers to switch sides.