Amnesty’s support for Syrians working towards transition

This day last week a conference took place at SOAS, London, titled Syria – Correcting the Narrative, Building Solidarity. A number of speakers had interesting and inspiring things to say on issues relevant to the theme of this blog, and I look forward to video of the event going online.

Kristyan Benedict of Amnesty has provided an edited version of his remarks, with the title Building solidarity – what concrete forms of action can we take to support the Syrian People?

In his presentation he talked of some of the implications of Amnesty’s human rights focus, and of the difficulty in building solidarity under a dictatorship that uses violence and terror to disrupt any attempt by dissenters to organise. He outlined four key areas of work for Amnesty: accountability; humanitarian action; solidarity and support for imprisoned activists; and transition. On this Kristyan Benedict said:

We’re helping to empower, equip and mobilise Syrian activists to help them develop an independent civil society, take human rights messages out to a wider audience and be better enabled to use non-violent means to defend their own and others rights.

This last point on transition is crucial – across Syria and outside the country, there are still many thousands of brave people who continue to stand up for their rights to demand an end to poverty, corruption, impunity and repression. Those were key drivers of the uprisings and over three years on, the poverty is worse, the corruption is worse, the impunity is worse and the repression is worse. The regime arrested or killed a lot of peaceful activists in 2011 but there are still many who remain and many new activists imbued with a revolutionary spirit. Those that call themselves progressive should be supporting these activists.

These activists are calling for a future where human rights are respected and protected. If you truly believe in social justice you will make an effort to get to know this beautiful reality.

So many self described progressives have been disgracefully ignorant, maybe on purpose, of this reality – confront them, in a positive way, with the reality of Syria’s many progressive activists campaigning for a better Syria and being repressed by a tyrannical regime – ask them to make a decision – who is more deserving of support and solidarity?

Read the rest at Amnesty, or at EA WorldView.