Human Rights

A seething revolt across much of Syria is being met with ferocious repression by the Ba’athist government’s security forces. But so far, the two cities where close to half of Syria’s population lives - Damascus and Aleppo - are relatively calm. In this evolving situation, what are the prospects for Syria’s regime and people? Vicken Cheterian reports and reflects. A visit to Damascus, at a time when so much of the rest of Syria is burning, offers a striking contrast to the images of the country presented in international broadcasting media....

After being pursued from Syria to Moscow, Abdullah Ocalan-leader of the PKK, the separatist guerrilla insurgency which seeks autonomy for Turkey’s large Kurdish minority-has fled to Italy. An Italian court has ruled that its country’s constitution prohibits Ocalan from being extradited to Turkey because he would most likely be executed. The State Department and much of the American media have criticized Italy for upholding its constitution while overlooking a far more important consideration: that Turkey has reacted more like a militant Mideast backwater than a NATO ally....

Almost every day now media outlets report on the continuous multinational effort to forge out a final peace settlement in the nine year-old conflict between the government of Azerbaijan and the people of the de- facto independent Nagorno Karabakh Republic-Artsakh. Their reports generally contain a brief on a recent round of talks, where parties would once again reiterate their incompatible positions, with mediators privately promising a diplomatic breakthrough soon. Over the years such reports have become enveloped in the usual repetition of grim statistics: tallies numbering the dead and refugees, and areas occupied....