By Martin Jay
Al Arabiya, 11 July 2011
Breaking news! Western embassies, conveniently located in central Damascus, “attacked”! At least a decent story which local hacks in Damascus can cover before heading off to the pub. Amazingly, BBC ran this story about the US embassy being sprayed with graffiti and a stone breaking a window, which surprised me bearing in mind the magnitude of the demonstrations and the killings that followed. What a shower!

What is more alarming about the day-to-day carnage in Syria, carried out by the brutal hands of the Syrian regime? The fact that over 1,000 protesters could be slaughtered in the street like pests? Or that the West is so impotent to really do anything about it? I was in Syria making a documentary for French TV in 2008 and witnessed first hand the remarkable level of paranoia by the regime there. But was this what they were afraid of? Wide scale revolt?
We know now that the Bashar Al Assad regime doesn’t give two hoots about bad press coverage; his answer is simply to not let the bastards in, in the first place. But actually this is a not a recent peculiarity of the PR skills of the Syrian tyrant but something which was always in place.

Compare the numbers first of all. I was told by the head press honcho – whom we shall call Mohamed – in 2008 that there were only 41 foreign accredited journalists in Damascus. This is an alarmingly small figure for such an important and massive country in the region. Morocco, by comparison, has 147 camped in Rabat (I know this as I’m usually the last one to get my accreditation in order and so have had No. 00147 before). Back in 2008, the chain smoking former head of the defunct Syrian press agency’s London bureau winked at me and alluded to the fact that most of the 41 were “more or less well behaved,” which was his way of saying that they comply with what the regime tells them not to report on, and stick to the government line on the main issues. At least I think it was a wink. He drew heavily on his cigarette and squinted slightly leaning back on the rear legs of his chair sipping a Turkish coffee, while trying to fathom me out.

I noticed that he looked down at the fax machine, which churned out the 9th or 10th request from a foreign TV outfit for permission to enter the country and film. He noticed that I noticed.

The role of the foreign media though cannot be overlooked and disregarded as irrelevant though. In fact I would go as far as to say that if it wasn’t for the cowardly attitude of BBC, France 24, Euronews, and CNN which has produced, in part, a regime capable of such cold-blooded murder in the streets of provincial towns across this vast country. Assad’s regime must have figured as far back as the days of his father — who bragged at a dinner table in Beirut about the number of how many were slaughtered in Hama (1982) being much higher than what western press were estimating — that sooner or later a regime crackdown was imminent.

With most of the leading western broadcast news outfits out of the country, camped in downtown Beirut, the regime knew that they it could get away with murder. Literally. Most could not have imagined firstly, the role of the Internet and YouTube providing the broadcasters with B-Roll. And secondly those same broadcasters being so unprofessional as to take the material and use it as “legitimate.” It wouldn’t have happened 20 years beforehand but would have caused an outcry. Who would have imagined that CNN and BBC each night in Beirut would have their local correspondents blunder on with a live “down the line” interview with their anchors, with YouTube material running, edited to synch to their expert analysis? What happened to journalistic ethics in 20 years?

The henchmen were not counting on YouTube when they sprayed their bullets into the crowds of protestors.

Syria has taught us all lessons. A monstrous dictatorship which doesn’t really care too much about Western sanctions or what really anyone thinks of its domestic policies of “slaughter and keep on slaughtering” to calm the madding crowds. What it has taught us the most though is that the myth that we all live in a global village and are therefore so much more accountable to each other is just that. A myth. A genocide is happening, not in central Africa but in a Middle Eastern country which just recently – in 2009 – the EU brought back in from the cold (following the suspected involvement of the Syrian regime in 2005 of the assassination Lebanon’s former prime minister, Rafik Hariri) and Washington welcomed with open arms.

Alright, alright, I know EU foreign policy in the Middle East is about as useful as a typewriter at the bottom of a swimming pool, but why would the West care about Syria? Simple. It was supposed to be our bogey man, our fall guy for talking to all the unsavory people in the region who we wouldn’t be seen dead with, unless we were determined to not be voted back in for a second term. Syria was perfect. It has excellent relations with Hezbollah, Hamas and the Iranians. It was for this reason that Brussels signed the “association” agreement which had an impressive section on human rights. But no one assumed the Syrians were going to actually implement it.

The deputy prime minister in Damascus told me in 2008 that there was “no way we are going to improve our human rights as part of a deal with Brussels.” He spoke to me on camera in the same way perhaps you would speak to a man who had crawled out of a sewer and still had a turd or two stuck to your scalp but perhaps with less reverence. It was a boring interview but I shall never forget the pre-interview chat about his fun student days chasing English slags in Leicester square as a young LSE student, back in the days when London was the capital of an important country.

Syrians are extraordinary in that their arrogance is only outweighed by their delusion. They consider themselves to be the Big Brother of the region as culturally they gave the Arab world great poets and writers. But that’s as ridiculous as Brits telling Americans that the English are the arbiters of the English language as we gave the world Shakespeare. I’ll shut up here. Back to the Syrians. The senior civil servant class is made up of appalling snobs who look at the rest of the Arab world as inferior and a bit pathetic. They are deluded, internationally, and out of touch. But history has given them a complex that they struggle to shake off. And they are as likely to accept advice from Brussels or Washington as I am from a man with no teeth who wishes to council me on dental hygiene.

What these last four months have taught us is that the “new media” of these big networks which won’t risk sending in any journalists – or for that matter work with any local freelancers — actually helps in the slaughter. In the UK today, everyone is obsessed with the phone hacking story. Few though know or care how their own national media are responsible for many deaths in Syria.

We sent journalists in under cover in Zimbabwe, so why not Syria? For the simple reason that Assad’s regime makes them disappear. So why can’t we build networks of Syrian freelancers. If the Internet could be the technical platform for amateur video images, why can’t it provide work for local freelancers? The truth is that those big names on the TV each night don’t want to risk their lives going across that border to set up the network of informers and sources in the first place. And even if they did, their own TV networks probably wouldn’t allow them, in this new era of litigation paranoia. The lawyers have taken over the news floor. This is partly responsible for “down the lines” from Beirut being accepted as the next best thing to our correspondent being on the scene. But they are not.

The European Union signed a trade agreement with Damascus in 2009 with human rights a key part of it. But what the Eurocrats in Brussels didn’t do was make it a condition that Syria allowed total, unreserved access to its country for all Western media as part of the deal. If this had been the case, it might have made a dramatic difference in the blood bath as, ironically, what Damascus cares about more than anything is its image across the country. Syria is made up of many ethnic groups and the wise thinking from Arab watchers is that a regime always had to be a ruthless one to keep everyone in line and together.

It was always hell getting into Syria as a foreign journalist, as “Mohamed” for years used to play silly buggers with us all by making sure that we had our airline ticket booked first, before we applied for a special journalist visa; or that we applied for the special visa before purchasing the airline ticket. Trying to call him was rather like calling America and expecting to be put through to Elvis Presley. Most of the time he simply chose not to answer his office phone. That was the policy. The only reason I got a special visa in 2008 was because of the political significance to the trade deal with Brussels. A second attempt in 2009 resulted in the Syrian secret service contacting a dissident in Brussels and linking him to me – therefore justifying no trip.

Syrians have not real independent media so foreign press has a much bigger impact when it reaches the masses. The paranoia of this regime though should not be overlooked, and it should be a lesson to Washington and Brussels that foreign media are paramount to any process of pushing a human rights agenda. It also makes the journalists working there paranoid too though, although be very wary of a charming taxi driver who approaches you outside your hotel and speaks quite impressive English.
Bugger! What I have just written is a caste-iron guarantee of never getting back into Syria under the current regime and I wanted to call Mohamed’s replacement soon on the same direct telephone number.

Next week, tune in for how Lebanon became the most stable country in the Middle East. Don’t laugh. And why AK-47s are now almost $2,000 new from our man in southern Beirut.