feb 17, 2011 - A spontaneous demonstration broke out outside the Al-Hamidiyah Souq market in Damascus to protest a police beating of a shop keeper
Description:
Several men gathered and blocked a road, while chanting that "The Syrian people will not be humiliated". An eyewitness estimated that there were more than 1,500 demonstrators. Secret police officers arrived on the scene quickly, along with several government officials and finally Syria's interior minister, who dispersed the demonstrators, took the shop owner into his car, and promised an investigation.A couple of hours later, several videos of the events were posted on YouTube.
According to the blog Syria News Wire, a demonstration in Damascus, the Syrian capital, on Thursday, caught on video posted on YouTube, was not part of a wave of antigovernment unrest sweeping the Arab world.
The blog, which is written from Damascus and London, explains the video this way:
An unprecedented scene in Syria this morning as an estimated 1500 people took to the streets in a spontaneous protest.
They were angry that the son of a shop owner had been allegedly beaten by a traffic police officer. So they went on to the streets at Hariqa, just south of Souq Al-Hamidiyah in Damascus. From the video, it seems as if the protest spread down to the western end of Medhat Pasha.
They chant “the Syrian people will not be humiliated”, interspersed with, “shame, shame” and “with our soul, with our blood, we sacrifice for you Bashar”. That’s a very Syrian way of saying they were furious at the police, not the president. Also, note there was no chanting of “the people want the fall of the regime” (the words used in Tunisia and Egypt, and now in Yemen and Bahrain).
At the start of the video, almost every person in is holding up a mobile phone. With mobile phone video cameras plus Twitter and blogs to distribute the footage, public servants face a degree of accountability that they have never faced before.
In a surreal moment, the Minister of the Interior arrives and asks the crowd why they are demonstrating. He has now promised an investigation.
Another Syrian blogger, a student in Aleppo who writes on Twitter as Seleucid, called the video of the protest “proof that the Syrians can do it as much as anybody, they just don’t want to.”
This video and commentary from the Syrian blogosphere comes just three days after a teenage blogger, brought into court chained and blindfolded, was sentenced to five years in jail by a court in Syria. As Reuters reported, the blogger, “Tal al-Molouhi, a high school student who has been under arrest since 2009 and is now 19, had written articles saying she yearned for a role in shaping the future of Syria and supporting the Palestinian cause. Lawyers said the judge gave no evidence or details as to why she had been charged.”
