Great pleasure to welcome the Stevens staff to speak to the last seminar of this term.
He's a journalist who's lived in Damascus and elsewhere in Syria over the last five years, up until last year, 2012.
And he worked first as editor for the Syria Times and then as a freelance reporter.
So he's reported the popular uprising inside the country and has written the book for which the flyer is here, Revolt in Syria,
published by Hearst, who of course have close links like the service's CW program of 12 times only, so incredibly good value.
And he's also written in the Los Angeles Times, The Irish Times, USA Today, GlobalPost,
The Times, The Globe and Mail, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post and The Sunday Times.
Over the last year, September 2012 to April 2013, he was the month school fellow in global journalism at the University of Toronto,
and today his title is less than vital to the people behind.
So I'll leave you to say exactly what it is. But you can be sure you've got it right.
Thank you very much. Thanks to everyone for coming.
It's an honour to be here. The title of my talk is How the Syrian Regime Sells Its War at Home.
I'm not quite sure if I'll speak for a full 45 minutes on that particular topic,
but I have slightly more time for discussion about the broader kind of situation in Syria as it stands today.
I moved to Syria from Ireland in early 2007. I graduated from a master's degree in international security conflict studies from university,
from Dublin City University, and essentially moved to Moscow with little or no plan.
So many students of few here who are thinking of travelling abroad encourage you to do so.
And as you mentioned, a couple of months after arriving in Syria, I began working for Syria times,
which was which is actually it's started functioning again recently is a an English language version of the Syrian government's news as they see it.
And from the actual news perspective, Syria times wasn't very valuable at all.
And I imagine I gained more from working in their office than they probably did from from I.
But I think the six months that I spent there until 2008 was quite instructive in the sense that I got a sense for how to what degree at that level,
how the Syrian regime operates its its propaganda, how it sells its message, and essentially what was reported in English and what went into there.
The pamphlet was almost direct translations of of news that was reported in Arabic.
There was little or no original content in English.
We need to go back a couple of decades, I think, to understand exactly how the Syrian regime sells its war at home.
And the most pertinent points as it stands today is that Hafez al-Assad,
the former president and father of Bashar al-Assad, built the Syrian regime as it stands today.
Bashar al-Assad became president in 2000, has inherited this system.
There is a huge gap between building a state system in terms of security, in terms of administration and governance and inheriting this.
These are two very, very different things. Hafez al-Assad came from a moderate town in the coastal mountains of Syria, not far from the city of Tokyo.
And the essentially came from from from nothing knew exactly what he wants to do and was equally
gifted and brutal in getting what he wanted and building a system that is important today.
Because perhaps the chief question asked is why the Syrian revolution has failed slashed continue for so long
in obviously in Egypt and Libya in other countries regimes were overcome in quite short periods of time.
Many people expected, myself included, that the route that the regime would fall in Syria, perhaps after a couple of months it didn't happen.
And even after being in Syria at that stage for four years or so,
I expected at that stage that the regime would fall within months as opposed to years.
Today, of course, we the idea of the regime falling or winning.
These these concepts these concepts are, I think, less and less important than they were two or three years ago.
In 1995, the Lebanese former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, was assassinated.
Syria, the Syrian government is thought to be behind this. This was a period of time that was.
Drones destabilise the Syrian regime to a very, very significant degree.
I think its forces were forced out of Lebanon, where they had been for 29 years.
Syria was on this so-called axis of evil subgroup.
And for the Assad regime with Bashar al-Assad as president, this was the first kind of major issue that they had to deal with.
What did they do? How do they survive? They didn't do anything aside from moving troops out of Lebanon.
The Syrian regime is a reactive entity, and perhaps we can talk a little bit more about the chemical weapons issue later on.
But this is also this place. More recently, this plays into that that points that the Assad regime doesn't actively make big
moves and doesn't actively invoke important issues on an international stage.
I think by 2008, President Bashar Assad was the guest of honour of Nicolas Sarkozy.
The chance to say, I'm going from on the point of being invaded by the American administration in 25,
26 to being a guest of honour in Paris two years later was a remarkable turnaround.
The following year, as Prime Minister of Lebanon, Saad al-Hariri was invited to Damascus and went and,
you know, essentially his his father had been killed by elements linked to the Syrian regime.
But the regime had proved so at that stage that they were able to essentially
get Saad Hariri as prime minister of Lebanon to come to Damascus with his tail,
basically between his legs. And, you know, this is this really an important point, I believe, in terms of how durable the Assad regime is.
But to working in Syria times in 2007 and 2008.
The building we walked in, we shared offices with the Tshering, with Tshering,
which is an Arabic language title, one of three state newspapers in Syria at the time.
All news came from Sana, which is the official state media Tshering Abbas and a soda and three times the
English language equivalents got all their news and information from Sana.
This is important in terms of stressing how centralised the message coming from the government was at that stage and continues to be today.
I think the journalists that worked in Syria at times and into stream were not so much journalists
as state workers looking for a stable income in a government sector for the rest of their lives.
At that time, I think the average salary for those workers was about $250 a month.
You had people working in Syria at times that could speak little or no English.
They were only there because their arms or uncle or father or some relative could get them a job there.
They had little or no journalism training, no English language experience, and essentially shouldn't have been there.
But this also gives you a sense of exactly how the regime operates, I think.
So there was no reporting to screen for three times all us for the most part.
And generally speaking, Syrians across the board, I think,
see these state newspapers for what they are, which they present the government's perspective.
And and that's about it. That's about it.
They're important to the to the extent that there is no free press or at that stage there was no free press in Syria.
And aside from certainly in the print and the print media, people, of course, had access to Al Jazeera and a lot of media and regional Arabic media.
But in terms of what was happening specifically in Syria, you had these three titles, a couple of websites that were a little bit less you know,
these were less pro-government, weren't controlled to the same degree as the newspapers were.
But this is where people got their news about Syria for the most part.
An important aspect, I think, and it's it's perhaps overlooked is and correct me if I'm wrong,
the idea of cult of the personality, when any of you go into Syria, I'm sure there have maybe there are some people here,
some Syrians, perhaps the first thing certainly the first time that you're there,
you the first thing perhaps people remarked about is the the pictures of Bashar al-Assad in Homs.
And I said everywhere. They're not there for no reason.
They're there for a specific reason.
The obviously the idea is that in everything you do, in every public and every public space, there are always on you, essentially.
So there's a lot more to it than just pictures of Bashar al-Assad everywhere.
In March 2011, as the regime as the revolution picked up, there was a full on propaganda assaults right from right from the beginning.
In the first couple of weeks of the revolution, when you had protests in Dhahran, in Baniyas,
and in one small protest in central Damascus, immediately you had this counter efforts whereby you had Syrian government security cars,
supporters driving around the streets of Damascus and other cities shouting their support for Bashar Assad,
holding pictures of Bashar al-Assad, decrying Israel, the US, the UK.
All the the standard for talking is in the eyes of the Syrian regime.
And at one stage the same day I believe, I think it was March 17, 2011 or the first major deaths all came from Deraa in the south.
There was a massive, massive rally in central Damascus.
There were hundreds of thousands of people.
Now, a question you might ask it's an important issue is that were all these people did people come by themselves or they co-opted more state workers?
Were they students from school who were brought out onto the streets because they had to do so?
To a large degree? They were.
But there was certainly an element in those hundreds of thousands of people that came because they genuinely supported Bashar al-Assad,
because what he had done for a segment of Syrian society,
the middle class, urban based people, specifically in Damascus, to a lesser extent in Aleppo and the other kind of cities around the country.
The even Bashar al Assad excuse me.
And this was this was a really this is an important issue, I believe.
Why do they support the regime? Why? They support Bashar Assad.
Why did they oppose in certain degrees what was happening?
And there are where you had this popular revolution, an uprising, so to speak, in the beginning, because these were people with relatively good jobs.
These were people who could get loans from banks, who had bank accounts,
who were able to dine in restaurants a couple of times a week, who were able to travel and holiday in Turkey once a year.
And they saw Bashar Assad responsible for where they were at the time.
They didn't want anything to change, perhaps.
And even, you know, there were people who didn't outwardly like President Assad and the regime and I guess saw for what it was that,
you know, if you say the wrong thing in the wrong at the wrong time, that you you know, you've been turned.
But for them, life is quite good at that stage.
For people in Daraa and people in, you know, cases in eastern Aleppo, in eastern Damascus, it was a very different story.
They did not have bank accounts. They did not have stable jobs. Thousands of them came from eastern Syria because there was a drought for three
years that destroyed much of the country's agricultural production at that time.
They came to the poor parts of the major cities looking for jobs, many of them.
What this taxi drivers were very much disenfranchised, I guess very much unhappy with the regime.
They felt that they had been forgotten. And at that stage, you had a growing divide between the urban middle class to speak of Rome,
to be happy with where they were, didn't want regime change as that happened in Egypt at that stage.
And these people on the periphery who were facing a very difficult situation indeed.
At that time in the first couple of weeks. There was a multiplication of pro-government propaganda.
So all the radio stations and the TV stations in Syria were co-opted by the regime to essentially put out this message.
That theory was strong, that showed us this is this is right and powerful.
And there's those right by the Syrian people.
And it was a sensory overload. I think even, you know, as a foreigner myself at that time,
we got a sense that this is this is really, really something that in every aspect of public life,
you drive down the streets and you see the posters everywhere,
and you turn on the radio in the in the book, the bus or the Negro in your car, you get the same message.
You go home and you put on TV. The Syrian TV at least.
And you get the same message over and over. Of course, for people who you chose to watch Al Jazeera and Arabiya,
there was obviously a very different message for why you had people phoning in from the peripheral towns like that are like Banias.
That's the image from areas of eastern Damascus.
And, you know, at that stage, this, I think, increased this divide between the urbanites and between the rural poor moving forward.
Now, there were a couple of attempts by the international community to force the Syrian government to open up.
So in late in November 2011, the Arab League sent a group of observers to Syria to essentially see what was happening.
The Assad government welcomed them and said, you know, we're abiding by international, by the Arab League.
You asked us to open our country up to you to see what was happening, and we're doing it so on.
At one stage I went with the An Arab League contingents in January of last year,
almost two years ago, went to a town called House, which is about an hour north of of Damascus.
What happened essentially was that we drove in a convoy from Damascus.
We got to the first roundabout outside the town.
The Arab League observers got out of their cars, which were escorted by Syrian government troops.
We're told by the soldiers at this checkpoint that the town of Rancocas,
which was just over here, was in control of rebels, insurgents, as they call them.
And the soldiers said, the government soldiers, that we can't guarantee your safety if you go there.
So for about a half an hour, the RV goes over water on this roundabout, essentially spoke to some of the soldiers there.
There were a number of checkpoints that were passing people passing traffic there.
And of course, with us was a large contingent of Syrian media.
So whenever the Arab League observers would go up to speak to some individuals or some locals, the Syrian state media was right on their shoulder.
So as the Arab League representative spoke to the average taxi driver,
you had the Syrian government's TV presenter with the camera and with the the microphone on one side and on the other side, you had some security.
And so obviously the guy, the taxi driver in the car was saying everything is great, that Bashar al-Assad is his excellency.
And, you know, everything is fantastic in Syria and this is a foreign plot and so on.
And at one stage, one taxi driver wouldn't stop. He drove through the checkpoints.
And one of the stunning to one side, one of the security guards, he kind of I mean,
the way he he he looked at this taxi driver who wouldn't stop was was was really quite menacing.
A half an hour later, as I say, the Syrian government's army officer arrives at the scene of the roundabout and said,
you're free to go into the town, we can't go with you and we can't guarantee you your safety.
The Arab League observer said, okay, we won't go in. They got in the convoy, drove back to Damascus.
I drove with them as I was covering them that day. There were some journalists in the New York Times and The New Yorker magazine State went into
the town by themselves 2 hours later and the Syrian government began shelling the town.
The point of all this is that this is what was being reported by the Syrian media and B, by, of course,
the Arab League observers that, you know, for the most part, everything was fine and people were happy with the regime and so on.
Meanwhile, 2 hours later, shells were falling on the town inside.
The Syrian regime enacted a dual policy, I guess, of soft power and hard power early on in the revolution.
What they would do every evening is get a group of priests,
Shia sheikhs and Sunni sheikhs around the table on TV and they would pray together in Christian prayers,
Islamic prayers, giving the idea that Syria was opposing.
This is very important, I think, for minority groups, particularly Christians,
at least in my experience, that, you know, the Syrian regime is a voice for them.
This is our priest on TV. He is obviously supporting the governments.
So for the most part, this is what we should do, too.
At the same time, you had a number of, I guess, debate programs on on Syrian TV and on the second TV channel run by finance,
by least by running Makhlouf, the president's brother in law.
So you would have a group of young people in a very well very choreographed kind of situation.
They would call on television and they would be interviewed by a Syrian host.
And, you know, they would be asked, what's your your plans for your problems?
Do you have a job? All these kind of issues. And through the GRI, there was a little bit of pushback at that stage.
And, of course, for everyone that watched this, saw that, you know, this is something new.
We haven't seen this before in Syria ever before. There is some criticism of criticism of the regime.
At the same time, the Syrian governments, the parliament voted to end emergency laws, obviously in name only.
So to the grief of the Syrians who wanted to believe that the regime was right and that the revolution itself was a foreign plot,
there was something for them to show them that, in fact, yes, the regime is is is kind of addressing our concerns.
We're seeing things on television that we've never seen before that people were criticising the regime.
At the same time, you would see also on Syrian state television kind of montages of the Syrian cultural history,
of the famous tourist sites, how beautiful Syria was, how unique its history was.
And of course, when people watched Al-Jazeera, that we'd see pictures of tanks firing on mosques,
people getting killed, people getting gunned down, dead bodies and so on.
This idea, of course, the montages of the historical sites were that this is peaceful Syria and this is peaceful Syria under the Assad regime,
and this is peaceful Syria for the last 40 years. This is how it's been with us.
And this, of course, is the revolution, what you see in Jazeera. And this is a very you know, this is not what you want at all.
This is a very unstable situation. People getting people are dying for the most part.
You know, I'm not sure of who any of you here on Twitter.
Any of you follow the follow sonnet to Sana's English Twitter feed.
It's on. So no, it's it's quite remarkable that they they give information about parties and gatherings and so on.
You know, again, the idea is to present this idea that life is continuing, that everything is fine,
that day to day life and activities are still continuing in areas of the country that
the regime controls and that in areas of the country that the regime doesn't control,
even though it's not expressly say that, of course, they were not represented at all.
The World Revolution, revolts, uprisings, civil war.
For the first year at least, was never used by Syrian state media.
People refer to it as the crisis. And of course, a lot of people would copy essentially what people were saying on television.
And that, I think, of course, is what everything I spoke about until now is about elements of Syrian society that were relatively well-to-do,
relatively stable, didn't want things to change,
had seen the Syrian government reacting to what they believed was this revolt,
this crisis specifically, and were for the most part, convinced by the governments of the hard power.
Also, what you would see on television, pictures of the Syrian governments, the Syrian army firing rockets, soldiers marching.
Pictures that you'd associate, I guess, with North Korea often that the Syrian government with strong picks,
lots of pictures of of citizens throwing rice and soldiers, you know, elderly women kissing soldiers and so on.
People love the army and so forth.
They will also do interviews with people who had done wrong things in the past and who realise the mistakes of what they had done.
They would put them on television and say, Yes, we support this. We were given money by some guy from Saudi Arabia or some guy from Jordan.
They would pay recordings of television conversations between the person that they
had interviewed who would suddenly right the wrongs of the past and of course,
completely fabricated. This also give a sense that, you know, this is what's happening and this is the regime's position.
I suppose one of the most sorry, the first 12 months you the most important elements of the Syrian government's,
how it saw its war for you was that there were a number of daily bombings in Damascus, in Aleppo during the first number of months.
And of course, both Syrian television and newspapers would show these pictures,
these awful scenes of charred bodies, of people blown to bits of cars and fire.
They would interview people who'd ask, you know, rhetorically, of course, is this true freedom?
Is this is this your this is what you want?
And this kind of continuous loop they would show, you know, for Tuesday, two days after a particular bombing.
Often it was military and security buildings that were targeted.
This, again, reinforced this idea that this is not a popular revolution, a peaceful revolution,
whereby people went in the streets and called for how do you this was a violent and deadly and chaotic situation.
So, you know, this was also for the the section of Syrian society.
Again, I must stress this, that we're not directly involved in the revolution.
The silent majority of we can still use that term today,
people who would rather be happy to what they had recognised often that the regime was a a a brutal entity also,
but did not want things to get worse for them.
This is, of course, these bombings created quite considerable outrage and led the revolution to be associated,
I say, with this deeply unstable, deadly new chapter in Syria.
The result is essentially a population confused and angry. And as I say, if not totally convinced by the regime's the regime's message on some.
Now, the government uses the same language over and over and over,
and you can watch the Syrian media as English or Arabic news updates on on the Syrian state television website or by the same language is used,
you know, the army is destroyed, terrorists and terrorist dens, you know, this every day, the same kind of four or five words more militants, gunmen,
then the same words over and over, reinforcing this idea of of what was happening, of course, their own perspective.
But each time they would defeat terrorist money might that my friends student
Syria have been telling me for well over two years that the regime is winning.
Of course, you know, it's it's not the case that it's going to be over soon and so on.
Another important aspect, again, in terms of of of giving its message was that it would it co-opted a number of well-known actors,
filmmakers, musicians, and that.
So at one stage, I'm not sure if any of you were in Damascus in kind of the first few months,
you had posters of the Syrian squadron hum, perhaps the most famous Syrian actor concert and somebody Syrian officer,
at least on every corner of every street in Damascus and in Aleppo and in parts of the government,
parts of the country controlled to control his picture, calling for people to take responsibility to be responsible.
Oftentimes they would also appear on Syrian talk shows. So you had someone well known by the Syrian public.
For their acting work, appearing in a political space on television, talking to people about what they felt, what they thought was happening.
And these are obviously important individuals, people, you know, that that were looked up to in that.
At one stage there was a concert in the women's square in the mosque is free of charge.
You know, hundreds of thousands of people went. Many of my friends went not because the concert was free or because it was a fee.
Habib was well-known Syrian singer, but because it was, you know,
lots of people I know went there because it was an opportunity to be close to girls and to mingle with girls and talk to girls, basically.
As things continued, let's say, into the second year of the revolution slash war,
the tone used by Al Jazeera and Al-Arabiya shifted away from interviewing activists
and eyewitnesses of of common atrocities through a much more partisan perspective.
I think now if you watch on of if you turn on Al Jazeera Arabic, not the English Channel,
you see that you get a very one sided view of what's happening in Syria.
For the most part, this again, this large sort of majority, we can kind of quantify them.
I think we can't measure them in terms of population, in terms of number.
They see when they went to to look for information about what was happening in there in the beginning,
a year later, they were getting a very different line,
I think a much more partisan position, much more anti Syrian governments when of course,
what was happening on the ground, what they were experiencing every day was quite different.
They felt, of course, that they were seeing, you know,
their experience of what was happening in Syria was very different than what Al Jazeera were publishing.
And it was just the same with York, not that it obviously the same degree of the Syrian state media, but it was really,
you know, a very one one dimensional perspective on what was happening in Syria, always pro rebel anti Syrian government.
And that and this really, you know,
a lot of people I think turned off got turned off by this very much partisan message from Al Jazeera and a lot to be a point at a time before a year
previous the they were an important voice I think in for Syrians who wanted to hear what was happening in the the small towns around the country.
This, of course, is reflected by the fact that Saudi, Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabian elements, at least Saudi Arabian governments,
Qatari government, were much more involved in arming and financing particular rebel groups.
So this this is not something that happens by itself.
The chemical weapons attack, which it seems a long, long time ago, obviously only happens last August.
This was, for me at least just the latest way the Syrian government was able to twist things and present things to their own advantage.
The regime is able to portray the chemical weapons deal. Of course, I'm not sure.
Quite so familiar. Of course, there was the use of chemical weapons in eastern Damascus in a town in the west southwest of Damascus called Multimedia.
Russia presented this idea that the Syrian going to give up its chemical weapons.
And, of course, the Syrian government said, yes, of course, we'll do that.
As you know, Barack Obama was seriously talking about airstrikes on Syrian military targets.
The regime was able to save its military, airports and airfields, its weapons, as a result of this chemical weapons deal.
Of course, as ghastly as the use of chemical weapons is, it only represents a very,
very small percentage of the overall war that the government's war on on rebel elements.
So, of course, they've given up this car, but they still have a whole, you know,
close to a full pack that they can fully work with in terms of their conventional military assets.
Inside Syria at that stage.
The regime initially blamed rebels for this use of chemical weapons, pardon me, initially denied anything happens and then blames rebels.
Some work done by The Wall Street Journal within the last couple of weeks. I'm not sure if you've read the article.
You should. It's very interesting whereby they have, for the most part, presented at least the idea that the Syrian government was responsible,
mistakenly used chemical weapons that had on a number of occasions used chemical weapons against the rebel rebel forces.
But on a very small scale, what happens on August 21st was an accident.
It shouldn't have have been as deadly as it was. But read the Wall Street Journal article.
It's interesting. At the same time, you over the previous two and a half years,
you had this message that I've been speaking about, that these areas of eastern Damascus,
these areas under rebel control that had fallen out of Syrian government's control were bad spots that bad people live there.
If you if you live there, you're you're anti-government, regardless of if you are or not.
But there was a sense that bad things were always going to happen to people who live there.
So that's say in Eastern Ghouta, where the chemical weapons were were used.
People living in government controlled Syria were not perhaps that surprised because, you know,
this had been they had known from personal experience that these were parts of
the country and parts of Damascus that had been anti-government for a very,
very long time.
So this was, of course, the Syrian government's propaganda message was that this was the case, so that when the chemical weapon attacks happens,
as I say, there wasn't a huge amount of surprise, I think from, again, the section of the Syrian society still living in government controlled areas.
For me the most the regime's smartest move and we can discuss this further I think was to use the term Syria
when it meant regime when it was so when when they would say things on Syrian TV that the regime was strong,
that Syria was strong. Excuse me. They meant the regime they replaced.
The regime, the governments with the war in Syria. And of course, for Syrians, their national identity, like any country, is a very important thing.
But the Syrian regime managed to to use this word to use the word Syria to represent themselves.
So if you were against Syria, you know,
the international community is doing things against Syria that so on and so forth that there was going to be an attack on Syria when in fact,
for us, the Westerners and foreigners, and that this was an attack in Syria at all, this was an attack.
This would be an attack, at least on Syrian government, the Syrian regime, on Syrian government, military points.
But of course, it back home Syrian army apparatus presented this as an attack on Syria.
So they don't use, obviously, the word regime. They don't use the word governments.
The word they use is Syria. This is a really key points, I think.
I would argue that the regime has collapsed.
There have been defections, that it's perhaps using only two divisions of the of the Syrian National Army, the fourth Division under Republican Guard.
It has collapsed, but I think it's collapsed inwards. What you had today is a much more durable entity that is much more much better at fighting wars,
less so at governance, at creating jobs and keeping people in jobs and stabilising the the the Syrian era.
It's essentially, I think that the Syrian government has brought the country to where it is to this violence chapter.
This is what the Syrian regime is good at. It's good at rounding up dissidents.
It's good at torture. It's good at military issues.
Not so much good at governance. Not so much good at creating jobs. Very good at propaganda, of course.
So it's it's collapsed, I think, but collapsed in words.
Why is this matter today? For people who still live in government controlled Syria.
A they believe that there is a foreign conspiracy against their country, against Syria.
B, they see the violence that has happens in other parts of the country as a result of the revolution in places that are controlled by rebels.
It's a very dark place. There are some serious issues there.
We can talk a bit more about that, I think, later. They don't want that.
People still living in certain government controlled areas do not want that life.
And C, of course, is the foreign jihadi elements.
That's, you know, for for urban Syrians still in government controlled areas.
They share little or nothing in common with they see people coming from the UK,
from the states, from Canada, from Chechnya to fight a holy war in Syria.
But these people in central Damascus, for people on the in the cities along the coast,
for Christians, for the ordinary population, they have little or nothing in common.
Of course, with these people. Many of these people go to nightclubs, money of the Syrians.
And speaking of go to nightclubs, dress literally, learn English, learn French are, you know, well-travelled enough.
So what they see when they see these people coming from all different countries to fight jihad, to blow up checkpoints and whatnot, you know,
this is the third important issue that they they cannot identify with at all today,
almost three years or approaching three years of the revolt slash civil war.
There's a huge sense of fatigue, not just, you know, there's a different type of fatigue.
I think in the rebel held areas, people are facing different issues there.
But four in four populations still living under the Syrian government control is a tremendous sense of fatigue.
This is likely to lead to less activism and likely to lead to fewer people supporting
the revolution in any sense or seeing the revolution as a positive thing.
But people today are more concerned with is, you know, again, in Damascus,
that they're more concerned with with the mortars that are falling on their neighbourhoods than
they are with the the international dimension and diplomacy surrounding the the broader conflict,
I think. They have no time, they have no money, they have little electricity to be concerned by such issues.
They're trying to get by day to day. They have seen how brutal the Syrian government is.
They do not want to be involved in politics and they're essentially waiting it out.
Couple of anecdotal points. Interestingly enough, in early 2011, I was granted a year long journalist visa by the Syrian Ministry for information.
When you go to the Syrian Ministry for information in the Mizzi area of Damascus, you see essentially what the Syrian regime is about.
It's an old, decrepit building.
It's something that many Syrians associate with the regime as opposed to the emergent private sector that was developing in 2009, 2010 and early 2011.
So you would go through the elevators don't work. You know, the building is not clean.
You go upstairs. The half some of the employees are asleep, you know, others are drinking tea, smoking cigarettes don't appear to be doing much.
So on one occasion, I went to the foreign media section where there was an employee I knew quite well and asked him,
You know, I want to visit Homs, you've got to let me go.
At that stage, there were the governments allowing groups of journalists from the Guardian, various organisations,
to go, obviously in government controlled trips to Homs and Iran, various parts of the country.
I wasn't allowed because I was a permanent member of the staff based in the city.
Now, when I was in this office, I saw a bunch of English language newspapers,
and at that stage it was quite difficult to get The Guardian in the Times,
the International Herald Tribune, as it was known, and these kind of newspapers,
they asked the employee, Can I take these weight to the Yeah, sure, no problem at all.
So I took some of these newspapers away. I went to a café and opened up The Guardian, and there was a story about the account of a.
Exactly some specific event, but it said something about how the Syrian regime forces had killed x number of people and whatnot.
And under on this short paragraph have been underlined presumably by someone working in the Ministry of Information.
So on one level you see this decrepit building.
No one's working people there for, you know, jobs, for life kind of kind of thing.
But underneath that, they're doing a job.
They are seeing that The Guardian is writing very negative things about the Syrian regime.
So it's something, you know, that's a.
Important points like summing up.
Mm hmm. I think there's little to no control in the hands of individual media organisations in Syria.
Um, the, the, the news comes from Sana and goes to all the other various organised media organisations in Syria.
That's how it works.
Violence employed by the regime has silenced many of the silent majority, which we can discuss a bit more about to what extent that even exists.
The Syrian government to complete control of the public sphere in the first 12 months or so and then changed its message to a case that it was a war.
After about a year, 15 months or so, it was fighting foreign jihadists to control complete control of all public space.
It changed the idea that a revolution was happening.
It changed it from the guilty.
That was revolts to to a war funded by Saudi Arabia, by Qatar, by Israel, even by Turkey, and overseen by the United States.
And I think that's. Yes. Thank you very much.