Atassi 8 Freed

The Atassi 8 have been freed.

Here is Ammar Abdulhamid's comment about it:

Another Demonstration of Weakness and Confusion! A few hours ago, the Atassy 8 were released. International and internal pressures seem to have paid off. As such, and rather than coming as a demonstration of strength, as it was intended to be, the entire move came as a further demonstration of the Regime’s weakness, confusion and lack of resolve.

Mr. Ali Abdallah, however, the leftist activist that had read the Muslim Brotherhood statement in the Forum is still under arrest and will reportedly be tried under Law 49 outlawing the Brotherhood and prescribing the death penalty against those who collaborate with it. The same fate seems to await the lawyer and human rights activist, Muhammad Raadoun.

Meanwhile, yesterday, the government arrested another well-known lawyer and activist, one Habib Salih. No reason was given for the arrest. Also, the official spokesman for the Atassy Forum, Mr. Habib Issa, jailed two years ago, is still in jail and is not expected to be released anytime soon. So are the MPs Riyad Seif and Mamoun Homsi. The same applies to scores of Kurdish, Islamist and secularist activists that have been arrested over the last few months and years. The promise that the President made less than a year ago to end the file of political detainees still goes unfulfilled, and still witnesses unexplained reversals.

Patrick Seale had this to say about the Atassi 8 arrest:
The harsh response by the authorities is regrettable and counterproductive. Bayanuni himself had long since persuaded his branch of the Muslim Brotherhood to renounce violence and extremism. He has repeatedly called for national reconciliation and the healing of wounds. He has even won the support of Syria's "Mandela," the veteran Communist Riad Turk, who spent 20 years in jail. Turk, whose new party name is the People's Democratic Party of Syria, advocates cooperation with a range of political groups, including Baathists and reformed Muslim Brothers.

Before her arrest last week, Suhair Atasi, daughter of the founder of the Atasi salon, was also campaigning for a national dialogue involving Baathists, communists, Kurds, Muslim Brothers and civil rights activists, to thrash out a reform program helping Syria protect itself against foreign pressures. What distinguishes the strands of the Syrian opposition is that they are all resolutely "patriotic," refusing any collaboration with the United States, or any outside power, against their own country.

In this, they differ sharply from the U.S.-based Farid Ghadry, an "opposition" figure of little local credibility, who has been taken up by Washington and by some European officials in Brussels. The Damascus opposition derides him as the Syrian Ahmad Chalabi.

The Atasi group is not, however, the only victim of Syria's security services. There have been several arrests at Damascus airport and elsewhere, as well as reports of political kidnappings. Armed robberies have also taken place by criminal gangs, some of them linked, or so it would appear, to disorderly cousins of the president, or even to his brother Maher Assad, a commander of the Presidential Guard.

Mohammad Raadun, president of the Arab Human Rights organization in Syria, was seized from his office in Latakia on May 22 for advising Syrian exiles not to return home for fear of arrest or worse. Meanwhile, the former head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon, Rustom Ghazaleh, and his three siblings, have been accused by the Medina Bank of Lebanon of defrauding it of tens of millions of dollars. The general impression is one of racketeering, lawlessness, and of unchecked security services, which Assad seems unable or unwilling to bring under control. The French daily Liberation described Syria as a "dictatorship without a dictator."

It is a fact of life, however, that when a small country is in danger of being overrun by an aggressive superpower, it would be wise for it to clean up its act in order to win some protection from the international community - and more importantly from its own nationals. For whom in the country today, apart from those profiteering from the regime, would rise in its defense?