Pity the modern dictator. Time was he could bump off a recalcitrant opposition figure, take out a dissident stronghold, massacre the entire population of a town and the world would be none the wiser. There might be a pesky reporter trying to get to the truth, but that could be taken care of, as President Assad’s security forces demonstrated earlier this year.
Yet the digital world has made it much harder to brush war crimes and atrocities under the kilim. Thanks to Youtube, Facebook and Twitter, surveillance states now find themselves under constant surveillance in turn. The spies are spied upon, lifting the lid — albeit only partially — on what is happening inside places like Syria. Factor in nosy- parkers like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, UN observer teams, ceasefire monitors and grandee envoys dropping by with television cameras, and the dictator bent on subduing a popular revolution with the gloves off has his work cut out these days.
To add to the intensifying scrutiny, four new books confront the revolution head-on, in a rush to publish that inevitably calls to mind Zhou Enlai’s possibly apocryphal remark that it was too early — in 1971 — to assess the French Revolution. They offer four distinct perspectives on contemporary Syria. Fouad Ajami is a Lebanese-born writer on the Middle East with a depth of cultural and historical knowledge that is largely missing from the western media’s coverage of a complex and little understood society. Samar Yazbek is a well-to-do Syrian novelist whose 2011 diaries plunge the reader into the dark immediacy of Assad’s Damascus. David Lesch is an American academic and Syria specialist who met Bashar al Assad frequently from 2004-2008, and Stephen Starr is an Irish journalist who has lived in Damascus for several years.
The Syrian Rebellion begins by tracing the mass uprising to several instances of regime retribution, including the ghastly case of Hamza al Khatib, a 13-year-old boy who scribbled anti-regime graffiti on the walls of Deraa.
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