Syria’s Losing Battle to Control the News
By ROBERT MACKEY
Nearly 12 months into the uprising in Syria, government attempts to stifle news coverage by barring independent reporters from the country are still being confounded by a network of activists who have now posted more than 40,000 video clips on YouTube, offering glimpses of protests and documenting a violent crackdown on dissent.
Faced with this apparent evidence of a popular movement to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, and the accounts of foreign journalists who have managed to find ways into the country to witness the violence firsthand, the Syrian government continues to dispute the authenticity of the footage, day after day, and works to undermine the credibility of activists and reporters it accuses of either fabricating the images or lying about what they show.
These efforts have been under way since the very start of the uprising last March. At a news conference in Damascus on March 24, 2011, an adviser to the Syrian president, Bouthaina Shaaban, lectured a BBC correspondent for using video posted on YouTube to illustrate a report about the use of force against protesters in the southern city of Dara’a.
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At a news conference in Damascus on March 24, 2011, the week after the uprising in Syria began, Bouthaina Shaaban, an adviser to the Syrian president, attacked the BBC and CNN for using footage posted on YouTube by activists to illustrate reports of an attack on protesters.
At that news conference, Ms. Shaaban told Lina Sinjab of the BBC that there was no need for foreign broadcasters to look to YouTube since they could rely on the government’s own journalists who “have their credibility.” Since “the events are happening in Syria,” she added, “only Syrian television tells the truth, no one else.”
This week, faced with far more graphic video evidence of an atrocity, Syria’s state-run media did acknowledge that a massacre had taken place in the city of Homs, but blamed the violence on “armed terrorist groups,” as my colleague Anne Barnard reported.
Evidence of the massacre in Homs, where forces loyal to Mr. Assad recently entered neighborhoods that had slipped from government control last year, emerged on Sunday, in the form of extremely graphic video posted online by activists, showing the dead and mutilated bodies of the victims. After those images were broadcast on the Arab satellite channels Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, along with activist claims that pro-government militiamen were responsible for the killings, a Syrian official called the slaughter an elaborate opposition plot to discredit the government.
In a statement to the Syrian government news agency Sana, Syria’s information minister, Adnan Mahmoud, claimed that the activists who recorded the footage of the victims were responsible for the killings. According to Sana, the minister said the citizen journalists “these channels proclaim to be correspondents in Homs and other areas are gunmen and terrorists who participate in these crimes and record them. Then these channels broadcast false allegations and twist facts.”
A Syrian state television report also presented the mutilated corpses as evidence of a crime committed by government opponents.
Syrian activists countered by posting video of an interview with a man being treated for bullet wounds who said he had escaped the killings in the contested Karm el-Zeitoun neighborhood of Homs. “We were arrested by the army, then handed over to the shabiha,” he said, using the word for “thugs” or pro-government militiamen. After the shabiha beat the prisoners for two hours, the man said, “they poured fuel over us. They shot us — 30 or 40 persons.”
Syria’s official response to the new atrocity footage comes as supporters of Mr. Assad are working overtime to undermine the credibility of the foreign journalists and Syrian activists who survived the recent military assault on another neighborhood of Homs, Baba Amr.
As part of this effort, Syrian state television and bloggers sympathetic to the government have recently attacked Paul Conroy, a British photographer who was wounded in a rocket attack last month in Homs that killed two of his colleagues, Marie Colvin and Rémi Ochlik.
Like two of the other foreign journalists who managed to make it out of Homs last month — Javier Espinosa, a Spanish reporter, and William Daniels, a French photographer — Mr. Conroy has been unstinting in his praise of the Syrian activists who risked and in some cases lost their lives to gather footage of the military assault on Baba Amr by government forces.
After his escape, Mr. Espinosa wrote on Twitter of his “respect for all the citizen journalists of Baba Amr. I never saw ‘journalists’ so brave.” Speaking to CNN after he returned to Paris last week, Mr. Daniels was asked what he and his colleague Edith Bouvier had said to the Syrian activists who smuggled them to safety when they parted ways. “We told them they are heroes,” Mr. Daniels said. “They are just heroes who have been massacred.”
In a telephone interview with The Lede, Mr. Conroy said the activists had exhibited remarkable courage by taking to the streets to record video of the assault even after the professional journalists there had decided that the bombardment of the district made it too dangerous to work.
After Mr. Conroy returned to Britain, he described what he had witnessed in Baba Amr as “a massacre.” He told The Lede that having served in the British military as an artillery gunner for six years, he could tell that the neighborhood was being shelled in a professional, systematic way.
As Al Jazeera reported, following Mr. Conroy’s criticism, a Syrian news anchor told viewers: “International journalists who entered Homs in non-legitimate ways, their attempts at covering the so-called massacres in Homs proved these atrocities did not happen. It begs the question as to how truthful and how honest is the reporting of journalists like Paul Conroy.”
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Syria's Propaganda war on Homes
In an apparent attempt to associate Mr. Conroy with an Islamist militant featured in many conspiracy theories about supposed foreign agents fighting in Syria, the state broadcaster also showed viewers a photograph of the journalist standing with Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a Libyan rebel commander.
Supporters of Syria’s government claim that this photograph — which was originally published in November by The Liverpool Echo, a British newspaper, with a report by Mr. Conroy on his experience covering the war in Libya — somehow proves that the British journalist is an intelligence agent who visited Syria not to report but to aid the rebels.
Paul Conroy
Paul Conroy, second from left, with Abdel Hakim Belhaj, fourth from left, in October.
After Mr. Conroy was wounded in Homs last month, and appeared in an activist video appealing for help, the photograph was uploaded to a pro-Assad Facebook group called Syrian Truth, supposedly proving that Mr. Conroy was associated with Al Qaeda. (Mr. Belhaj was once a member of the anti-Qaddafi Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which American officials suspected of links to Al Qaeda. In 2004, he was arrested in Bangkok and sent back to Libya, where he said he was tortured, as part of the American-led program of “extraordinary rendition” of terrorist suspects.)
Mr. Conroy explained to The Lede that the photograph was taken as a souvenir in Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s living room in August, minutes after the Bab al-Aziziya compound in Tripoli was seized by rebel forces under the command of Mr. Belhaj and his Libyan-Irish deputy, Mahdi al-Harati. The photographer, who had covered the rebel advance with his colleague Ms. Colvin, recalled that a lot of snapshots were being taken at that moment, by fighters and journalists who were “elated to be alive.” Everyone, he recalled “was just going, ‘Whoosh, we’ve made it.’”
The Syrian attempt to undermine Mr. Conroy’s credibility by associating him with Mr. Belhaj draws on an Internet conspiracy theory developed at length in posts on two Web sites run by men who also claim that the attacks in New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, were carried out by United States intelligence officials.
Infowars — operated by Alex Jones, a radical libertarian talk radio host from Texas — argued that the photo shows Mr. Conroy being friendly with terrorists. Not to be outdone, the Voltaire Network — founded by Thierry Meyssan, the French author of “9/11: The Big Lie” — asserted that the image somehow proved that Mr. Conroy was an agent for the British intelligence service MI6.
The Voltaire Network also claimed that Mr. Belhaj is Ayman al-Zawahiri’s right-hand man, and currently Al Qaeda’s No. 2 commander. “Although officially still one of most wanted criminals in the world, NATO named him military governor of Tripoli,” the site said. The site also asserted that his deputy, Mr. Harati, is both a Qaeda commander and an MI6 agent. According to the Voltaire Network, Mr. Harati “organized a model village in Syria located in the mountains on the Turkish border” where “he hosted Western reporters singing them the praises of the Syrian ‘revolution.’ The village is inhabited by a tribe that was paid to stage demonstrations and pose for the press.”
Asked about these allegations, Mr. Conroy suggested that hearing about them had aided his slow recovery from the wounds he suffered in Homs. “It’s been good for me, because I’ve never laughed so much.”
The attacks on Mr. Conroy came amid repeated efforts to undermine the credibility of a British-Syrian activist, Danny Abdel Dayem, whose reports from Homs, narrated in English, featured desperate pleas for intervention by other countries. Last week, a fake Twitter account was launched in Mr. Dayem’s name, apparently to tarnish his reputation.
While the fake account has now been suspended, screen shots taken when it was active show that it mixed plausible-sounding messages decrying the Assad regime with updates that served to undermine Mr. Dayem, by suggesting that he was out to foment sectarian discord and was trying to arrange armed intervention by Israel — by asking Mia Farrow to ask Woody Allen.
Danny Abdel Dayem, Edith Bouvier, Javier Espinosa, Marie Colvin, Paul Conroy, Remi Ochlik, Syria, William Daniels
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