David Cameron recently visited Saudi Arabia for the first time as Prime Minister to strengthen the UK-Saudi partnership. Saudi Arabia is UK’s largest Middle Eastern partner with an annual trade value of £15 per year according to BBC News. Mr. Cameron met King Abdullah and Crown Prince Nayef after arriving in Riyadh last week. Downing Street reported:

Building a strong relationship with Saudi Arabia is vital to advancing the United Kingdom’s priorities in the region: increasing exports and investment; boosting energy security and creating jobs; co-operating on security, counter-proliferation and counter-terrorism; and promoting stability through political reform and human rights.

Currently, the kingdom is the second largest purchaser of UK arms. It has been rumored that the UK is planning on going forward with an order of 72 Eurofighter Typhoon and 48 Eurofighter jets. However, until now, nothing is confirmed. Even though the UK sees Saudi Arabia as a major sale market of military equipment, the British Prime Minister did not visit the Saudi King just to discuss business, it has been reported that one of the main goals of his visit was to establish a personal relationship with the King.

According to CNN News, the two leaders are most likely to discuss security, world economy, and Middle Eastern issues, such as the current protests occurring in the region. Moreover, Mr. Cameron also met with the Saudi Foreign Minister, Prince Saud Al Faisal and talked about this year’s UN General Assembly; both leaders agreed to strengthen the co-operation between their countries.

BBC News reported that, in an interview with the Al Arabiya news, the Prime Minister said:

The UK is prepared to table a new resolution at the UN Security Council over the appalling bloodshed carried out by the Syrian regime. The whole Arab League has to come together; others need to listen to that and act on that at the UN. Britain stands ready to do that.

Mehdi Hasan, the senior politics editor at the New Statesman magazine, believes that Britain has no “moral authority” to advocate democracy to Syria and Iran, he told RT News, “It’s a bit rich for the British prime minister to stand in Saudi Arabia and condemn the dictator in Syria without looking around him – all the dictators were surrounding him in Riyadh.”

The UK and Saudi Arabia have always been close allies, with more than 150 business joint ventures between the two countries. Currently, around 30,000 Britons live and work in the kingdom.

Image Courtesy of  http://www.flickr.com/photos/nickatkins/ 

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The international organization Human Rights Watch released a report on Thursday, December 15, concerning violations and abuses in Syria committed by security forces since the beginning of anti-government protests and demonstrations in March 2011.

The 94-pages report called “By All Means Necessary!” is the result of the investigations conducted independently by Human Rights Watch in Syria, and it is based on statements of hundreds of victims and witnesses. In particular, it focuses on the violence and killings that occurred between April and August 2011, in seven of Syria’s fourteen governorates: Damascus, Daraa, Homs, Idlib, Tartous, Deir al-Zor, and Hama.

Sixty-three defectors, both from the army and the intelligence agencies, were interviewed separately and accurately. They provided detailed information and reports on the violations, the abuses, and the orders they received from commanders of the Syrian army at any level for repressive actions, violence, and attacks on civilian protesters.

The orders were to stop the protests “by all means necessary”. The people who were interviewed had firsthand knowledge of the violations. Their statements provide accounts and evidence of the systematic abuse on civilians and of the responsibility of the government forces for these abuses.

Anna Neistat, an associate director for emergencies at Human Rights Watch who participated directly in the investigations for the report, said and wrote to CNN, “But responsibility for these crimes does not stop with the commanders on the ground.

Under international criminal law, al-Assad, as commander in chief of all forces in Syria, bears responsibility for the most serious crimes committed by his forces – even if he did not order them – to the extent that he knew, or should have known, about the abuses and failed to prevent them.”

A quote from the report reads, “Human Rights Watch’s findings show that military commanders and officials in the intelligence agencies gave both direct and standing orders to use lethal force against the protesters (at least 20 such cases are documented in detail in this report) as well as to unlawfully arrest, beat, and torture the detainees.

In addition, senior military commanders and high-ranking officials, including President Bashar al-Assad and the heads of the intelligence agencies, bear command responsibility for violations committed by their subordinates to the extent that they knew, or should have known, of the abuses, but failed to take action to stop them.

Given the widespread public and international criticism of the abuses, it would be incredible for al-Assad to argue that he did not know.” Hence, what comes out from this report is the commitment and the responsibility of the Syrian regime, and its president, in crimes against humanity during the crackdown of the anti-government protests.

The non-involvement and non-responsibility claims of President Bashar Al-Assad were demolished by the witnesses’ accounts and statements documented in the report of Human Rights Watch.

Moreover, the claims of Syrian authorities about the violations and the violence having been committed and organized by armed terrorist gangs that were “incited and sponsored from abroad” and by foreign countries, crumble in view of what has been reported and documented. During the nine-month crackdown, the number of victims is estimated around 5,000 people, of whom at least 300 were children.

Despite the sanctions imposed recently by the Arab League on Syria and the increasing isolation of the country, the violence and the abuses did not stop, and there seems to be no change in the regime’s police. Maybe the worst has yet to come.

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A voice rises from the web to tell what is going on in Syria, a country where it has been two months since the uprising started.

Amina Abdullah is the 34 years old blogger who became the symbol of Syrian revolution. She is half American, on her mother’s side, and half Syrian, on her father’s side, and she spent her life between US and Syria, where she currently lives. But above all she is lesbian and dissident.

Her blog, A Gay Girl in Damascus, seems to be very successful thanks to her accounts on protests and regime’s repression and heavy crack-down against civilians protesters. Her posts, written in English, tell her life experiences about homosexuality, politics and the current situation in Syria.

“An out Syrian lesbian’s thoughts on life, the universe and so on…” is the way Amina describes her blog. In a interview to Katherine Marsh, a correspondent of Guardian in Damascus, she said: “Blogging is, for me, a way of being fearless,” and she added “I believe that if I can be ‘out’ in so many ways, others can take my example and join the movement.”

When she started blogging she did not assume her blog could have become so popular. “My own day dream has been to encourage other women in Syria to be more upfront. I didn’t realistically expect much!” she said. But some weeks ago her post My Father, the hero, where she tells the episode when her father faced down two agents who came to arrest her on the charge of being a Salafist – an Islamic extremist – and a foreign agent, called the attention of many people, making it become very popular. “MY DAD had just defeated them! Not with weapons but with words … and they had left … I hugged him and kissed him; I literally owe him my life now.” This post describes a new of the regime’s repression, the dissidents’ mass arrests.

Currently she is hiding to escape from arrest, while the security services are keeping on searching for her, and she blogs whenever she can. “I don’t want to go to prison, though I am not scared of it. I believe I can do more for Syria free inside Syria than as a martyr” she said.

However in Syria homosexuality is illegal Amina decided to come out of the closet. Amina’s coming out is both sexual and political. “It’s tough being a lesbian in Syria, but it’s certainly easier to be a sexual than a political dissident.”

Her blog represents a freedom act, she could release herself through the web overcoming her fears and disclosing her ideas and her strength as a lesbian and as a political opponent. She is fighting a double war as she wrote “there’s a cyber-war on as well as one on the streets. They have hackers working busily to bring down hostile websites (I know of at least one friendly newssite where I might have drawn their attention; oddly, it’s now blocked in this country). They are hacking facebook and other social media. And they are all over every site spewing forth regime propaganda.”

Amina’s voice is one of the voices from Syria and it brings with it hopes and desires of all Syrians who want to be free and are struggling for it.

Hoping all the voices from Syria will be free soon I’d like to share this abstract from the post We are all Syria:“We need to free ourselves. If we want to protect our city or our sect or our clan, sometimes we must go forward on trust. And who better to defend those things than the collectivity of all of us? We love Syria; you love Syria. Let us come together and make this the greatest country in the greatest nation once again!”

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