Reporting on Conflict | Media Watch Blog

• News source:
• 30 April 2012
• Aljazeera
• By Stan Cox

Salina, KS – In February 2011, with grassroots uprisings having toppled the governments of Tunisia and Egypt, unrest was swelling in Iraq as well. In response, the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki announced that it was postponing a planned purchase of F16 fighter planes from the United States. The money saved by not buying the 18 jets would be used, said al-Maliki, to provide Iraq’s poorest citizens with increased monthly rations from the country’s public food distribution system (PDS). The cancellation was a stark acknowledgment that when people are hungry, armaments won’t keep a country secure.

• News source:
• 23 April 2012
• IRIN

DUBAI – Syria is home to the largest Iraqi refugee population in the world – an estimated one million people, of whom 102,000 are registered with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).

For years, it was a stable and welcoming refuge, but since an uprising against the government began last year, Syria, too, has become a dangerous place.

Among the refugees are 18,000 who were in the pipeline or final stages for resettlement abroad. Initially delayed due to new US security procedures, the cases have now been put on indefinite hold because resettlement countries have had more difficulty conducting interviews amid the unrest.

• News source:
• 3 April 2012
• Al Arabiya

The president of the International Committee of the Red Cross is holding talks in Damascus on Tuesday aimed at expanding aid operations and gaining access to all detainees, the agency said, as Syrian forces press on with their crackdown on dissent.

Jakob Kellenberger, who will be in Syria until Wednesday, will push the ICRC’s proposal made in February for a daily two-hour ceasefire to evacuate wounded and deliver life-saving supplies to civilians.

• News source:
• 17 March 2012
• BBC

More than 8,000 people have been killed in Syria since the uprising began a year ago, and many more injured . Fearing ill-treatment at official hospitals, demonstrators have sought help at underground clinics. One Damascus surgeon tells his story.

• News source:
• 15 March 2012
• Ekklesia

Three of Britain’s largest Christian Churches have urged the United Nations Security Council to condemn the Syrian regime’s brutality and to seek a solution without violence.

The Baptist Union of Great Britain, the Methodist Church and the United Reformed Church today (15 March) urged the UN to “unequivocally condemn Syria’s state-sanctioned attacks on its own people”. They said that the UN should demonstrate a united opposition to the Syrian regime.

• News source:
• 7 March 2012
• Street Spirit
• "We found that during the period of 1900 to 2006, nonviolent resistance campaigns are about twice as effective as violent ones in achieving their goals. We also found that these trends hold even where most people expect nonviolent resistance to be ineffective -- for instance, against dictatorships and highly repressive regimes." — Erica Chenoweth
• By Terry Messman

In a groundbreaking effort to systematically study and compare success rates of violent and nonviolent social-change movements, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan carefully researched 323 social-change campaigns from 1900 to 2006. Chenoweth and Stephan’s astonishing finding is that campaigns of nonviolent resistance are nearly twice as likely to succeed as violent uprisings.

In their book, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, the authors found that far greater numbers of people from more diverse parts of society joined nonviolent campaigns than violent ones. This greater level of participation translates into more people who can demonstrate for change, and withdraw their cooperation from an unjust regime

• News source:
• 4 March 2012
• Aljazeerah
• The latest poll shows 61 per cent of Palestinians favouring non-violent resistance as an alternative to stalled negotiations [EPA]
• By Yousef Munayyer

WASHINGTON, DC – Khader Adnan spent 66 days on hunger strike, a symbolic, self-denying act of non-violent resistance to Israel’s practice of “administrative detention” or imprisonment without charge. His story quickly became well known and began to inspire other Palestinian political prisoners to follow his non-violent lead.

But Adnan’s is merely the latest episode in a growing wave of Palestinian non-violent resistance. While Palestinian non-violence has been a historic part of the struggle for Palestinian rights, armed struggle has been a component of resistance that often dominated the headlines.

Today things are changing significantly. More than ever, polling data shows, Palestinians are supporting non-violent resistance. A series of polls of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza which included a question on non-violence reveals an undeniable trend in the past 18 months. In June of 2010, for example 51 per cent of Palestinians polled responded that non-violent resistance was a preferred alternative to stalled negotiations. In the most recent poll conducted at the end of 2011, that number jumped to over 61 per cent.

• News source:
• 28 February 2012
• Los Angeles Times
• By Special Correspondent

DAMASCUS — In Syria, even beasts of burden have become casualties of the antigovernment uprising: Unwittingly pulled into the protests, 15 donkeys reportedly were shot by soldiers after they walked through the city streets with the words “Bashar al Assad” spray-painted on their rears.

The shooting of the donkeys provides a vivid symbol of the uphill struggle peace activists face in pushing nonviolence as they try to maintain momentum and spur those on the sidelines to join the rebellion.

• News source:

“A Relational Approach to Cross-Cultural Conflict: A Decade of Work”
Ken Fox, Professor and University Director of Conflict Studies at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota
Senior Fellow of the Dispute Resolution Institute at Hamline University School of Law
Thursday, March 8^th
4:30 pm - 6:00 pm
Allard Hall Forum, 1822 East Mall, Vancouver, BC

The Middle East is emblematic for intractable conflict. Thoughts about the region evoke visceral reactions, draw upon incommensurate narratives, and raise fundamental questions of how to support constructive change within and among diverse communities. For those who seek to help, are we peace-makers, peace-builders or unintentional partisans? Are we supporters of peace or supporters of justice and, if so, whose? Since 2001, Hamline University has partnered in a series of interrelated U.S. State-department funded civil society projects in the region. Working with Palestinian, Israeli, Jordanian and Lebanese educators, civic leaders, students and citizens, these projects have focused on social and structural change through education, informed by principles of relational practice. This talk will examine lessons from these various projects and discuss a relational framework for engaging constructively in social change across communities and cultures.

Ken Fox is a Professor and University Director of Conflict Studies at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, and a Senior Fellow of the Dispute Resolution Institute at Hamline University School of Law. He has a particular interest in the intersection between the way we understand human behavior, interaction and response in conflict. His publications focus on conflict theory, negotiation, mediation, and restorative justice. Professor Fox has taught, trained and consulted throughout the United States, in Central and Western Europe and in the Middle East. He has worked with private companies, regulated industries, non-profit organizations (NGOs), federal, state and local government agencies, courts, schools, and universities. He is a U.S. State Department Fulbright Senior Specialist grantee in law/peace and conflict resolution studies, where he taught conflict theory and practice at the Riga Graduate School of Law in Latvia. Since 2001, Professor Fox has been an active participant in a series of on-going U.S. State Department-funded civil society and conflict transformation project initiatives with Israeli, Palestinian, Jordanian and Lebanese educators and civic leaders.

UBC Program on Dispute Resolution

For more information on the Program on Dispute Resolution’s 2011-12 Speaker Series: http://www.law.ubc.ca/pdr/index.html or http://www.law.ubc.ca/files/pdf/events/2011/dr-Speaker-Series-2011-12.pdf

• News source:
• 25 February 2012
• Irish Times
• By MICHAEL JANSEN in Damascus

THE 70-country “Friends of Syria” gathering in Tunis yesterday proposed a UN peacekeeping mission for Syria after a possible end of hostilities between government and rebels.

Once a ceasefire was achieved, civilian peacekeepers would enter the country, with the agreement of the government, under a “chapter six” UN Security Council resolution requiring the parties to seek a peaceful resolution through negotiations.

• News source:
• 15 February 2012
• Jerusalem Post
• By ARIEH O’SULLIVAN

The Bethlehem-based Holy Land Trust has become one of the most visible organizations promoting non-violent resistance.

Sami Awad is wrapping up a day of training with Palestinian women leaders in Bethlehem, another step in the effort not only to empower women, but to extend the concept and practice of non-violent popular resistance.

“At the theoretical level,” Awad says. “I would say that the idea of non-violence is becoming more accepted. The criticism we had is going down.”

• News source:
• 11 February 2012
• London Free Press
• By Gwynne Dyer | QMI Agency

As the Syrian opposition abandons non-violent protest for armed resistance, many people think this means President Bashar al-Assad and his Baathist regime are in even deeper trouble than before. On the contrary, it means Assad and the Baathists are winning…

If physical force is what decides the confrontation, the regime almost automatically wins, because the force it can deploy is so much greater. As soon as the protesters throw the first brick or fire the first shot, the balance of power shifts radically in favour of the regime…

Nowadays dictators understand this, and do everything in their power to provoke their opponents into using violence. The Syrian protesters resisted this pressure for months, clinging bravely to non-violence despite a relentless toll of deaths and injuries inflicted by Assad’s regime. But then some of the regime’s troops, sick of killing their own people, deserted from the army – and took their weapons with them.

• News source:
• 5 February 2012
• Channel 4 News
• By Gene Sharp, interviewed by Lindsey Hilsum

Gene Sharp, whose writings have been credited with inspiring those behind the Arab Spring, tells Channel 4 News it is “suicidal” for Syrian protesters to fight the government’s army with weapons.

• News source:
• 23 January 2012
• Wall Street Journal
• Why did the Obama courtship of Iran go unrequited? One theory casts blame everywhere but Tehran and the White House. Sohrab Ahmari reviews "A Single Roll of the Dice."
• By SOHRAB AHMAR

Just over three years have passed since President Barack Obama extended a hand to the Islamic Republic of Iran in the hope of stopping its quest for nuclear weapons. Today his policy of engaging Tehran is judged by many to be a disaster. The headlines daily reinforce this conclusion: As Iran’s nuclearization drive hurtles to the point of no return, the governing mullahs plot assassination on U.S. soil and threaten American aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf. A diplomatic resolution to the nuclear issue remains as elusive as it was when the Obama administration first assumed power.

• News source:
• 13 January 2012
• Reuters
• By Sherine El Madany and Seham Eloraby; Writing by Sherine El Madany; editing by Tim Pearce

CAIRO – Former president Jimmy Carter said Friday that Egypt’s first parliamentary poll since a popular uprising swept Hosni Mubarak from power “accurately” reflected the will of Egyptians.

The Islamist Muslim Brotherhood will secure close to half the seats in Egypt’s first free parliament in decades in the election that started in November and is now drawing to a close.

The more hardline Islamist al-Nour Party has come second, putting Islamists of different stripes in control of more than two thirds of the chamber, based on projections from the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP).

“The general presumption by the Carter Center … is that the will of the people has been adequately and accurately expressed in the results of the election,” Carter told a news conference Friday.

There had been a number of “irregularities and disparities” in the process, including lack of training of judges and use of religious slogans during the voting, contrary to regulations, he added.

• News source:
• January 2012
• TED
• By Jonas Gahr Støre

TED Talks In politics, it seems counterintuitive to engage in dialogue with violent groups, with radicals and terrorists, and with the states that support them. But Jonas Gahr Støre, the foreign minister of Norway, makes a compelling case for open discussion, even when values diverge …

• News source:
• 6 January 2012
• BBC
• By Hanan Razek

It was a photograph that shocked the world – an Egyptian military policeman beating a protester in a hijab with sticks and dragging her along the street so that her clothes were torn open. It seemed to symbolise the vulnerability of women in a society that has changed little since last year’s revolution.

Many Egyptian women felt they had few rights or protections under President Hosni Mubarak, but the sense of liberation after he fell raised many women’s hopes.

Although they were in the front line alongside men during the revolution, a year on there is a clear sense of disappointment felt by many women.

Nada Zatouna: ”I still go the the square..and will keep going there”

• News source:
• 6 January 2012
• CS Monitor
• By Bilal Y. Saab

Syrian protesters have so far been unable to topple the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in large part because physical repression has served as a powerful deterrent against their goals. The risk of death, torture, or imprisonment for life can shake even the most resolute, courageous, and determined demonstrator.

Yet physical repression is not the only reason why the protesters have suffered serious setbacks. Middle East expert Bilal Y. Saab University of Maryland gives us seven other factors that explain why things might get worse before they get better for the protesters in Syria.

• News source:
• 6 January 2012
• CS Monitor
• By Dan Murphy

A massive explosion ripped through central Damascus today as tens of thousands of Syrians turned out across the country to peacefully protest against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. The apparent target was a bus full of military police. The contrast between the protests and the carnage in Damascus is a reminder that the struggle for Syria is now a two-front war. Though driven by unarmed citizens demanding that Mr. Assad leave power, there is an increasingly armed component.

• News source:
• 27 December 2011
• Foreign Policy
• By Louise Arbour

What conflict situations are most at risk of deteriorating further in 2012? When Foreign Policy asked the International Crisis Group to evaluate which manmade disasters could explode in the coming year, we put our heads together and came up with 10 crisis areas that warrant particular concern.