Assad is responsible for the carnage in Syria

By William Harris, Sunday, July 28, 4:47 PM

The writer is a professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand. His most recent book is “Lebanon: A History, 600-2011.”

In late June, in the course of observing aid to refugees, I visited the Azaz displaced persons camp on the Syrian side of the Syrian-Turkish border. The sun-baked rows of tents march away in the dust. At 104 degrees in the shade, life’s fortunes are reduced to whether a tent happens to be in the shelter of an old concrete hangar. Here, thousands wait forlornly for the chance to enter Turkey.

The immensity of death, flight and destruction in Syria, with these refugees being among the more fortunate flotsam, has not been a natural catastrophe. The all-encompassing criminality of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the clique around him remain the central reality of the evolution in Syria since March 2011. Unfortunately, this truth has been obscured, even sidelined, by the standard “post-modern” impetus in the West to equalize parties to conflicts and to indulge virtually any self-serving narrative or conspiracy theory. The West can thereby walk away from what has become the crime of the 21st century.

Read on at the Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/assad-is-responsible-for-the-carnage-in-syria/2013/07/28/c2d8d5fe-f57e-11e2-9434-60440856fadf_story.html

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photo courtesy of the Syrian Revolution 2011

Read my other blog entries about the War in Syria

tags: Syria, war, conflict, revolution, women, rape, violence against women, children, Homs, Aleppo, Damascus, Middle East, Civil War, Conflict, Assad

Cecilia Manguerra Brainard

Cecilia Manguerra Brainard's official website is ceciliabrainarddotcom. She is the award-winning author and editor of 22 books, including When the Rainbow Goddess Wept, The Newspaper Widow, Magdalena, Selected Stories, Vigan and Other Stories, and more. She edited Growing Up Filipino 1, 2, & 3, Fiction by Filipinos in America, Contemporary Fiction by Filipinos in America, and other books.. Her work has been translated into Finnish and Turkish; and many of her stories and articles have been widely anthologized. Cecilia has received many awards, including a California Arts Council Fellowship in Fiction, a Brody Arts Fund Award, a Special Recognition Award for her work dealing with Asian American youths, as well as a Certificate of Recognition from the California State Senate, 21st District, and the Outstanding Individual Award from her birth city, Cebu, Philippines. She has lectured and performed at UCLA, USC, University of Connecticut, University of the Philippines, PEN, Shakespeare & Company in Paris, and many others. She has served in the Board of literary arts groups such as PEN, PAWWA (Pacific Asian American Writers West), among others.