Total Pageviews

Vivid Dispatches From Syria\'s Front Lines

September 25, 2012, 6:25 pm
By ROBERT MACKEY

Eighteen months have passed since an adviser to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria scolded a BBC correspondent in Damascus for reporting that video posted on YouTube by activists appeared to contradict official accounts of a crackdown on protesters broadcast on state-run television. “The events are happening in Syria,” Bouthaina Shaaban insisted, one week into the uprising, “therefore, it's Syrian television who tells the truth, nobody else.”

Now that the Syrian government has lost its monopoly on the flow of information - and on the use of violence to impose its will - the Assad government has become somewhat more willing to grant limited access to foreign correspondents to report on the battle for control of Syria's largest cities.

One of those correspondents, Bill Neely, the International Editor for Britain's ITV News, filed a remarkable video report this week from Homs, where parts of the city are still held by armed rebels, six months after the Free Syrian Army retreated from the district of Baba Amr under heavy bombardment.

Mr. Neely, a Belfast native who began his career covering sectarian violence by Christian militias, explained on the ITV News Web site that the government snipers he met in Homs were just 50 yards away from the rebels, in a ruined neighborhood where “the front line has moved no more than five hundred yards,” since May. “One hundred yards a month, at a cost of hundreds of lives. A day ago, five Syrian soldiers were killed here.”

After he returned to Damascus from the front line in Homs, Mr. Neely reported on Twitter that Assad loyalists were still fighting to retake parts of the capital from the rebels on Tuesday.< /p>

Lyse Doucet, a Canadian correspondent and anchor who is in Damascus for BBC News, filed two reports this week, one from a village in the western region of Latakia, the heartland of the president's Alawite sect, and a second from the capital.

Her first report showed mourners at the funeral of a government soldier in an Alawite village fiercely loyal to the president, where one man told her: “There are two sides. The conflict is severe and villainâ€" and we don't like it. We don't like it, we don't want it, but we are forced, we are compelled to do it.”

Writing on Twitter after she returned to Damascus from Latakia on Sunday, Ms. Doucet reported hearing explosions, one of them just outside her hotel.

Images of the security forces scrambling to respond to the explosion outside the Damascus Four Seasons Hotel, and of a man being detai ned and head-butted by a security officer, were included in Ms. Doucet's second report, broadcast on Tuesday.

Ms. Doucet's most recent report also showed that the government still restricts the movement of foreign journalists quite heavily. Her crew managed to film the security forces blocking her from reporting in a northern district of the capital and then sending a fighter in plain clothes to listen in on her interview with a fruit seller near a government checkpoint.

On Tuesday, the Guardian published a portrait of “the bloody stalemate” in Syria's largest city, Aleppo, reported from behind rebel lines in recent weeks by the correspondent Ghaith Abdul-Ahad. The reporter's journey to that front line was featured in a long video report broadcast last week by PBS.



Video of Obama\'s U.N. Address

September 25, 2012, 2:19 pm
By ROBERT MACKEY

As my colleague Helene Cooper reports, President Barack Obama devoted most of his address to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday to the Arab democracy movement and the tension between free speech and mutual respect among cultures and faiths in an era of instant, global communication.

PBS Newshour posted video of the entire 30-minute speech online.

Video of President Barack Obama addressing the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday in New York.

Mr. Obama's remarks began and ended with a tribute to “an American named Chris Stevens,” the ambassador to Libya who was killed in Benghazi this month, on the first day of protests over a trailer for a crude film about the life of Islam's founder posted on YouTube in California.

The president praised Libyans who marched in their thousands to protest the killing of the diplomat, and three other Americans, and discussed the impossibility of constraining speech now that it is possible for Syrian protesters and anti-Islam zealots alike to harness the power of the Web to reach a global audience with their broadcasts.

I know that not all countries in this body share this particular understanding of the protection of free speech. We recognize that. But in 2012, at a time when anyone with a cell phone can spread offensive views around the world with the click of a button, the notion that we can control the flow of information is obsolete. The question, then, is how do we respond?

And on this we must agree: There is no speech that justifies mindless violence. There are no words that excuse the killing of i nnocents. There's no video that justifies an attack on an embassy. There's no slander that provides an excuse for people to burn a restaurant in Lebanon, or destroy a school in Tunis, or cause death and destruction in Pakistan.

In this modern world with modern technologies, for us to respond in that way to hateful speech empowers any individual who engages in such speech to create chaos around the world. We empower the worst of us if that's how we respond.



Video Reports From Japan, Taiwan and China on Confrontation Off Disputed Islands

September 25, 2012, 11:18 am
By ROBERT MACKEY

As my colleague Hiroko Tabuchi reports from Tokyo, the Japanese Coast Guard fired water cannons on Tuesday at a flotilla of Taiwanese fishing boats off a chain of islands claimed by Japan, Taiwan and China. Japan's state broadcaster, NHK, captured some of the confrontation on video.

A video report from NHK World, the broadcaster's English-language satellite channel, showed a Japanese ship spraying water at one of the Taiwanese boats.

Video of a confrontation between the Japanese Coast Guard and Taiwanese fishing boats in a report from NHK World, the English-language channel of Japan's state broadcaster.

In its report on the face-off, the Taiwan ese broadcaster TTV showed more of the flag-draped fishing vessels off the islands, which Japan calls the Senkaku and China calls the Diaoyu.

Taiwanese television's report on a flotilla of vessels from Taiwan turned back by the Japanese Coast Guard in disputed waters.

The standoff was shown from a third angle in a video report broadcast just after noon local time by the Shanghai-based Chinese satellite channel Dragon TV. That report was later posted on the news section of Youku, a video-sharing site in China, where it was viewed nearly 900,000 times in a few hours.

Watching the confrontation unfold from Hong Kong, an American journalist, Doug Meigs, observed on Twitter that Chinese officials might well view the clash between two allies of the United States in the region with satisfaction.



Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)