“As I’m talking to you now, they’re dying.” Injured Sunday Times photographer Paul Conroy gives Sky News an interview from his hospital bed. This is a really important interview. His descriptions of what’s happening in Homs are painful and terrible. He spoke of the scheduled regularity of the shelling, beginning with horrible predictability at 6:00 every morning.
I’ve worked in many war zones. I’ve never seen, or been, in shelling like this. It is a systematic … I’m an ex-artillery gunner so I can kind of follow the patterns… they’re systematically moving through neighborhoods with munitions that are used for battlefields. This is used in a couple of square kilometers.
He described the state of fear in Homs, calling it “beyond shell shock,” and the actions of Assad’s forces “absolutely indiscriminate,” with the intensity of the bombardments increasing daily. Conroy’s detailing of the inhumane conditions and the position of the Syrian citizens and the Free Syrian Army is important, because we don’t have as many journalists who have been able to tell us what it was like to be there as we have had elsewhere. He tells us that “The time for talking is actually over. Now, the massacre and the killing is at full tilt.”
I actually want to quote his entire interview about the people who are living without hope, food, or power and his conviction that we will look back on this massacre with incredible shame if we stand by and do nothing. In lieu of that, you must must must watch every bit of this interview.
What is wrong with people? Did we learn @#$%ing nothing from Rwanda etc? Is the international community just gonna stand by and let another massacre happen again?!
what can we do though? like, as a serious question, as an individual from a foreign nation.
I think that saying “forget the geopolitics” could be quite a dangerous thing to do, as it’s exactly that source of urgency that colonialists have used to impose long-running brutal systems of oppression in other parts of the world
obviously it’d be great if, say, the UN could intervene in literally a peace-keeping way to protect civilians and stop the fighting - but what if the Syrian army fights back against them? what if the Free Syrian Army does? how do we account for the imperialistic drives of our home countries if we’re pushing for intervention?
this is a genuine question that I want help with. I’m fine with the long-term “well the world needs to be structured like this…” but what do we practically do in the short term for the people of Syria?
(via thearabspringrevolutions)
