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	United Nations observers in Syria have suspended their mission by Reuters & agencies   July 04, 2012   Syria accused of running multiple torture sites.   Human Rights Watch says it has uncovered a network of government torture chambers in Syria.   The group has identified 27 detention centres it said intelligence agencies have been using since March 2011, when president Bashar al-Assad''s government began a deadly crackdown on anti-regime protests.   The group interviewed more than 200 people, including women and children, who say have been tortured by government forces.   The report, titled Torture Archipelago, says torture methods include prolonged beatings, electric shocks, burning with sulphuric acid, sexual assault, and the removal of fingernails.   One rebel fighter, who was detained in Homs, says he was beaten by security forces for days.   "When we were detained in the Homs military intelligence prison they hung us by our arms with our bodies suspended in the air," he told the BBC.   "They beat us and said, ''you want freedom? You want democracy? Here is your freedom, here is your democracy''."   The emergencies director of Human Rights Watch, Ole Solvang, says the state-sanctioned abuses amounts to crimes against humanity.   "What''s absolutely clear from this report is that torture is widespread and systematic," he said.   "The amount of information that we have collected shows indicate a clear state policy and a clear tolerance of the use of torture."   Syria''s government has not responded to the accusations which have been echoed in earlier reports by the United Nations.   "Torture is one of the most extensively and best documented of the many awful human rights violations taking place in Syria over the past 15 months," UN human rights spokesman Rupert Colville said.   He added that a recent UN mission to the region interviewed people who had faced severe beatings, electric shocks, cigarette burns, mock executions, and sleep deprivation.   Human Rights Watch has called for the UN Security Council to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court and impose sanctions on officials carrying out abuse.   "The reach and inhumanity of this network of torture centres are truly horrific," Mr Solvang said.   "Russia should not be holding its protective hand over the people who are responsible for this."   Russia - an ally of Syria - and China have already vetoed two council resolutions that condemned Damascus and threatened it with sanctions.   The United Nations has said more than 10,000 people have been killed during the 16-month Syria conflict. Syrian activists say more than 15,000 people have been killed.   In the latest bloodshed, Syrian regime forces pounded several rebel-held districts in the central city of Homs.   The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said more than 80 people were killed on Tuesday, including at least 59 civilians.   June 17, 2012   United Nations observers in Syria have suspended their mission, saying the conflict has become too dangerous for them to monitor.   "Men, women and children are being killed every day," said Major General Robert Mood in announcing the observers would remain on base until further notice.   He said the fighting put the unarmed observers at significant risk. Mood said some of the member states that provided unarmed observers were unwilling to continue to expose them to danger.   Syrian security forces have responded with ever increasing violence, turning a conflict that began as a popular uprising, suppressed with riot police and rifles, into one where entire neighbourhoods are being shelled by artillery, mortars, with army formations entering cities and towns often supported by Government aligned allied militias.   June 1, 2012   Syrian forces and allied "shabbiha" militia who stand accused of committing a brutal massacre in Houla may be liable for prosecution for crimes against humanity, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said on Friday.   Pillay, in a speech read out on her behalf to a special session of the United Nations Human Rights Council, said: "These acts amount to crimes against humanity and other international crimes and may be indicative of a pattern of widespread or systematic attacks against civilian populations that have been perpetrated with impunity."   Pillay, a former war crimes judge, added: "I reiterate that those who order, assist or fail to stop attacks on civilians are individually criminally liable for their actions."   International peace envoy Kofi Annan accused Syrian President Bashar al-Assad"s forces of atrocities and arbitrary arrests, and said he had delivered a blunt message to President Assad to act now to implement all points of a peace plan.   Annan said the massacre of men, women and children in the eastern Houla region was a terrible crime. "Worst of all, it is one of many atrocities to have taken place," he said.   "Hundreds of thousands of Syrians are internally displaced. Meanwhile, arbitrary detentions continue, with widespread reports of human rights abuses of all kinds, including the widespread use of torture."   Annan said: "The specter of all-out civil war, with a worrying sectarian dimension, grows by the day. The increasingly sectarian nature of the conflict is fuelling concern that the conflict could unravel the Middle East"s religious and ethnic mosaic if unchecked.   Although the Annan peace plan looks increasingly uncertain, it appears to be the only option on the table, as foreign governments appear reluctant to intervene militarily and Russia with the support of China is defending the ongoing role of the Assad regime on the diplomatic front.   Mr Annan"s plan involves withdrawing heavy weapons and ceasing violence, releasing detainees, letting in foreign humanitarian aid, and allowing people to protest peacefully. Some 300 military observers had been deployed in Syria to monitor the now-collapsed ceasefire.   "But we do not have what this was set up to achieve - an end to the appalling violence and abuses, and the launch of any political process for a transition that meets the legitimate aspirations of the Syrian people," said Mr Annan.   May 29, 2012   Eyewitnesses have offered horrifying accounts of what happened in the Syrian town of Houla, where regime forces have been blamed for a massacre which has shocked the world.   Syrian activists say shabbiha militiamen loyal to the Assad regime killed scores of men, women and children at close range after the town was hit by an intense artillery barrage.   Funerals were held for more than 100 people who were killed in the attack, including 49 children and 34 women.   United Nations special envoy Kofi Annan said, "I am shocked and horrified by the tragic incident in Houla, which took so many innocent lives - children, women and men," he told reporters. "This was an appalling crime."   Even as the world responded to the massacre at Houla, more Syrians were being killed at nearby Hama, barely 20 kilometres away.
	Reinventing Democracy by Ash Amin Cambridge,.UK   If democracy means rule by the people for the people, it has broken down. At pivotal moments in the past, altering the rules of the political has been a defining trait of the organised left, able to project a new social order out of latent concerns, as well as develop the means to alter the grammar of politics.   If democracy means rule by the people for the people, it has broken down. All we have today is rule by elites for national and transnational elites, marked by periodic social eruptions that fail to add up to anything transformative. The elites bounce back regrouped, the protestors are silenced or appeased, and electoral victories promising radical change end up captured by vested interests.   The Arab Spring has yet to bring spring to the masses, the uprisings around the world against financial capitalism and austerity have only served to strengthen ties between banks, international financial institutions and the powerful states. The millions of people crushed by the current economic crisis and its handling by the authorities are told that their sacrifice is needed for a return to better times, while reforming governments trying to protect the less well-off rely on the approval of lenders, rating agencies, the media and powerful states.   These failures of democracy are worldwide, a feature also of so-called ‘mature democracies’. People everywhere are not doing much of the governing, while those supposed to be acting on their behalf are doing nothing of the sort. The consequence is growing social discontent and injustice.   Left to its own momentum, this state of affairs will end in more authoritarianism or in revolutionary breakdown. A safer option would be to renew the democratic contract, clearly an aim of little interest to self-serving elites, but presumably of some attraction to political forces committed to the fair and equal society.   I say ‘presumably’ because it is not clear that the established wing of these forces, for example, socialist and social democratic parties and labour unions have shown enough interest of late in making common cause out of embedded social injustices or in working with the insurgent movements that daily rail against the colonisations of elite power. In Europe, for example, what does the official left have to say on democracy, equality, justice, or the good society? Not enough.   It is as though it accepts the fracture of the democratic contract, the reduction of politics to electoral posturing and populist appeasement, the inevitability (perhaps the thrill) of sitting at the table where elites and their ideologues gather, in hope of small crumbs of social reform. In the process it has become deadened, devoid of a vision of society beyond the status quo, detached from the subjects, trials and tribulations of everyday life, oblivious to political struggle and organisation beyond the rituals of corporatist management.   Because of this deficit, the insurgencies worldwide for justice (from the occupy movement to anti-war protests and popular rebellions) have no means of amplification. Nor do the many efforts to forge a better society.   Contrary to received wisdom, there is an abundance of experiment in all parts of the world, as listed in show in my analysis, attempting to mitigate contemporary sources of inequality. The landscape is far from homogeneous, but the experiments remain isolated, fragile, and self-referenced rather than part of a larger politics of social transformation.   Today’s paradox is that there is a surfeit of grass-root activity, let down by the absence of an organised force able to gather the fragments, construct a persuasive narrative of change around them, and denude elite power in effective ways. Today, the organised left does not see the overhaul of politics and society as part of its mission.   It has not always been so, for at pivotal moments in the past, altering the rules of the political has been a defining trait of the organised left and social justice movements. The period in Europe between 1880 and the First World War provides one such moment. Against the grain of generalised misery, oppression and political closure (just like today), a reformist and revolutionary left came into being, managing to both change hearts and minds as well as secure lasting material and institutional gains.   The struggle for a society for the many and not the few took on a world making quality, made tangible by specific campaigns, from agitation for popular democracy and the rights of workers and women, to movement for the franchise, alternative lifestyles such as vegetarianism, the great outdoors and sexual liberation, and freedom from imperial rule. This quality arose out of the ability of the nascent left to project a new social order out of latent concerns, as well as develop the means to alter the grammar of politics, as two brief examples help to illustrate.   * Ash Amin is 1931 Chair in Geography and Fellow of Christ"s College, Cambridge. Visit the related web page
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