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Foreign Media Portrayals Of The Conflict In Syria Are Dangerously In

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  • Foreign Media Portrayals Of The Conflict In Syria Are Dangerously In

    FOREIGN MEDIA PORTRAYALS OF THE CONFLICT IN SYRIA ARE DANGEROUSLY INACCURATE

    World View: It is naive not to accept that both sides are capable of
    manipulating the facts to serve their own interests

    By Patrick Cockburn

    June 30, 2013 "Information Clearing House - "The Independent"---
    Every time I come to Syria I am struck by how different the situation
    is on the ground from the way it is pictured in the outside world. The
    foreign media reporting of the Syrian conflict is surely as inaccurate
    and misleading as anything we have seen since the start of the First
    World War. I can't think of any other war or crisis I have covered
    in which propagandistic, biased or second-hand sources have been so
    readily accepted by journalists as providers of objective facts.

    A result of these distortions is that politicians and casual newspaper
    or television viewers alike have never had a clear idea over the
    last two years of what is happening inside Syria. Worse, long-term
    plans are based on these misconceptions. A report on Syria published
    last week by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group says that
    "once confident of swift victory, the opposition's foreign allies
    shifted to a paradigm dangerously divorced from reality".

    Slogans replace policies: the rebels are pictured as white hats and the
    government supporters as black hats; given more weapons, the opposition
    can supposedly win a decisive victory; put under enough military
    pressure, President Bashar al-Assad will agree to negotiations for
    which a pre-condition is capitulation by his side in the conflict. One
    of the many drawbacks of the demonising rhetoric indulged in by the
    incoming US National Security Adviser Susan Rice, and William Hague,
    is that it rules out serious negotiations and compromise with the
    powers-that-be in Damascus. And since Assad controls most of Syria,
    Rice and Hague have devised a recipe for endless war while pretending
    humanitarian concern for the Syrian people.

    It is difficult to prove the truth or falsehood of any generalisation
    about Syria. But, going by my experience this month travelling in
    central Syria between Damascus, Homs and the Mediterranean coast,
    it is possible to show how far media reports differ markedly what is
    really happening. Only by understanding and dealing with the actual
    balance of forces on the ground can any progress be made towards a
    cessation of violence.

    On Tuesday I travelled to Tal Kalakh, a town of 55,000 people just
    north of the border with Lebanon, which was once an opposition
    bastion. Three days previously, government troops had taken over
    the town and 39 Free Syrian Army (FSA) leaders had laid down their
    weapons. Talking to Syrian army commanders, an FSA defector and local
    people, it was evident there was no straight switch from war to peace.

    It was rather that there had been a series of truces and ceasefires
    arranged by leading citizens of Tal Kalakh over the previous year.

    But at the very time I was in the town, Al Jazeera Arabic was reporting
    fighting there between the Syrian army and the opposition.

    Smoke was supposedly rising from Tal Kalakh as the rebels fought
    to defend their stronghold. Fortunately, this appears to have been
    fantasy and, during the several hours I was in the town, there was
    no shooting, no sign that fighting had taken place and no smoke.

    Of course, all sides in a war pretend that no position is lost without
    a heroic defence against overwhelming numbers of the enemy. But
    obscured in the media's accounts of what happened in Tal Kalakh was an
    important point: the opposition in Syria is fluid in its allegiances.

    The US, Britain and the so-called 11-member "Friends of Syria", who met
    in Doha last weekend, are to arm non-Islamic fundamentalist rebels,
    but there is no great chasm between them and those not linked to
    al-Qa'ida. One fighter with the al-Qa'ida-affiliated al-Nusra Front
    was reported to have defected to a more moderate group because he
    could not do without cigarettes. The fundamentalists pay more and,
    given the total impoverishment of so many Syrian families, the rebels
    will always be able to win more recruits. "Money counts for more than
    ideology," a diplomat in Damascus told me.

    While I was in Homs I had an example of why the rebel version of
    events is so frequently accepted by the foreign media in preference
    to that of the Syrian government. It may be biased towards the rebels,
    but often there is no government version of events, leaving a vacuum to
    be filled by the rebels. For instance, I had asked to go to a military
    hospital in the al-Waar district of Homs and was granted permission,
    but when I got there I was refused entrance. Now, soldiers wounded
    fighting the rebels are likely to be eloquent and convincing advocates
    for the government side (I had visited a military hospital in Damascus
    and spoken to injured soldiers there). But the government's obsessive
    secrecy means that the opposition will always run rings around it
    when it comes to making a convincing case.

    Back in the Christian quarter of the Old City of Damascus, where I am
    staying, there was an explosion near my hotel on Thursday. I went to
    the scene and what occurred next shows that there can be no replacement
    for unbiased eyewitness reporting. State television was claiming that
    it was a suicide bomb, possibly directed at the Greek Orthodox Church
    or a Shia hospital that is even closer. Four people had been killed.

    I could see a small indentation in the pavement which looked to me
    very much like the impact of a mortar bomb. There was little blood in
    the immediate vicinity, though there was about 10 yards away. While I
    was looking around, a second mortar bomb came down on top of a house,
    killing a woman.

    The pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, so often
    used as a source by foreign journalists, later said that its own
    investigations showed the explosion to have been from a bomb left in
    the street. In fact, for once, it was possible to know definitively
    what had happened, because the Shia hospital has CCTV that showed
    the mortar bomb in the air just before it landed - outlined for a
    split-second against the white shirt of a passer-by who was killed
    by the blast. What had probably happened was part of the usual random
    shelling by mortars from rebels in the nearby district of Jobar.

    In the middle of a ferocious civil war it is self-serving credulity on
    the part of journalists to assume that either side in the conflict,
    government or rebel, is not going to concoct or manipulate facts to
    serve its own interests. Yet much foreign media coverage is based on
    just such an assumption.

    The plan of the CIA and the Friends of Syria to somehow seek an end
    to the war by increasing the flow of weapons is equally absurd. War
    will only produce more war. John Milton's sonnet, written during the
    English civil war in 1648 in praise of the Parliamentary General Sir
    Thomas Fairfax, who had just stormed Colchester, shows a much deeper
    understanding of what civil wars are really like than anything said
    by David Cameron or William Hague. He wrote:

    For what can war but endless war still breed?

    Till truth and right from violence be freed,

    And public faith clear'd from the shameful brand

    Of public fraud. In vain doth valour bleed

    While avarice and rapine share the land.

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