A controversial Czech artist known for his anti-communist stance has sent a very clear message to the republic’s president ahead of parliamentary polls by installing a giant purple hand with a raised middle finger on Prague’s main river.
David Cerny, 45, placed his 10-meter statue of the hand making an obscene gesture on a pontoon boat on the Vltava River on Monday. The huge plastic sculpture is floating near the famous Charles Bridge and is pointed at the Prague Castle – the seat of leftist President Milos Zeman.
This unusual stunt comes only four days before Czech snap parliamentary elections, which may bring the Communist Party a share of indirect power for the first time since the Velvet Revolution ousted it in 1989. Zeman favors a post-election plan by the leftist Social Democrats to form a minority government with implicit support from Communists.
“This finger is aimed straight at the castle politics,” Cerny told the New York Times. “After 23 years, I am horrified at the prospect of the Communists returning to power and of Zeman helping them to do so.”
During the campaign ahead of January presidential elections, Cerny helped Zeman’s rival, charismatic aristocrat Karel Schwarzenberg of the Top 09 rightist party, who came second in the polls.
“Our president is just another reason not to live in the Czech Republic,” the artist told The Prague Post in September. “The political system here is not good, most people know that.”
Zeman was on a visit to Ukraine when the controversial installation was mounted. Through his spokesperson he declined to comment on the statue that he had not seen, Czech media reported.
Cerny is known for being provocative in his art. The floating hand is also not the first time that he has flipped the bird to make his point.
The artist first gained wide attention in 1991 when he got arrested after painting pink a monument to the Soviet tank – commemorating the liberation of Czechoslovakia by the Red Army in 1945 – and placing a raised middle finger on top of it.
Cerny also came up with kind of a logo of a red hand, giving the finger with an obscene slogan written beneath it, referring to the Czech Communist Party. The offending finger was given even more prominence after the Rolling Stone’s Keith Richards wore a T-shirt with the logo on it on stage in 2003.
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A video smuggled over the Syrian border by a former rebel features a mass execution of government soldiers by the Jund al-Sham group fighting Assad. The latest example of rebel brutality comes as Washington prepares to intervene into the conflict.
The video, obtained by New York Times and which has gone viral online, is a mobile phone recording of an execution that took place in April.
Seven government soldiers are shown shirtless on their knees in somewhat fetal positions with their faces to the ground. Some have their hands tied behind their backs.
Rebels stand behind the condemned men, pointing their firearms down at them and listening to their leader chant the verdict.
“For 50 years, they are companions to corruption,” the commander of the group says. “We swear to the Lord of the Throne, that this is our oath: We will take revenge.”
Having pronounced that, the man shoots the soldier closest to him. Other gunmen immediately follow suit to execute the rest of the captured soldiers. The dead bodies are then dumped into a well.
The man who smuggled the video across the border is former assistant to the chief of the group, who says he defected from it because he could no longer stand atrocities performed by his brothers in arms, according to New York Times.
The runaway, concealing his identity for security reasons, explains the seven soldiers were executed after videos of them raping civilians and looting were found on their cell phones.
The group he belonged to is little-known and not large, consisting of 300 fighters. It’s called Jund al-Sham, sharing the name with three international terrorist groups.
The rebel commander is Abdul Samad Issa, 37, also known as ‘the Uncle’ because two of his deputies are his nephews. According to his defected assistant the man believes his father was killed during a 27-day government crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in 1982, led by the father of Syria’s current president. Thus, fighting government forces now is partly a matter of personal revenge for Issa.
The video is one in a series of episodes raising questions over methods used by the rebel forces, some of which actually claim links to terrorists.
One of the groups, associating itself with Al-Qaeda attacked a Christian village on Wednesday.
In June, a teenage boy was allegedly executed by an Al-Qaeda-affiliated opposition group for supposedly blaspheming.
In May, the world was shocked to see a video of a Syrian rebel apparently eating the heart of a slain government soldier.
1 of 18. An activist wearing a gas mask is seen in Zamalka area, where activists say chemical weapons have been used by forces loyal to President Bashar Al-Assad in the eastern suburbs of Damascus August 22, 2013.
Credit: Reuters/Bassam Khabieh
BEIRUT |
BEIRUT (Reuters) – President Barack Obama called the apparent gassing of hundreds of Syrian civilians a “big event of grave concern” but stressed on Friday he was in no rush to embroil Americans in a costly new war.
As opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad braved the frontlines around Damascus to smuggle out tissue samples from victims of Wednesday’s mass poisoning, Obama brushed over an interviewer’s reminder that he once called chemical weapons a “red line” that could trigger U.S. action.
A White House spokesman reiterated Obama’s position that he did not expect to have “boots on the ground” in Syria.
Obama’s caution contrasted with calls for action from NATO allies, including France, Britain and Turkey, where leaders saw little doubt Assad’s forces had staged pre-dawn missile strikes that rebels say killed between 500 and well over 1,000 people.
But two years into a civil war that has divided the Middle East along sectarian lines, a split between Western governments and Russia once again illustrated the international deadlock that has thwarted outside efforts to halt the killing.
While the West accused Assad of a cover-up by preventing the U.N. team from visiting the scene, Moscow said the rebels were impeding an investigation.
The United Nations released data showing that a million children were among refugees forced to flee Syria, calling it a “shameful milestone”. And mosque bombings that left at least 42 dead and hundreds wounded in neighboring Lebanon were a reminder of how Syria’s conflict has spread. But, for now, there seems little prospect of an end to the violence.
According to U.S. and European security sources, U.S. and allied intelligence agencies have made a preliminary assessment that Syrian government forces did use chemical weapons in the attack this week and that the act likely had high-level approval from President Bashar al-Assad’s government.
Obama played down the chances of Assad cooperating with the U.N. experts who might provide conclusive evidence of what happened, if given access soon.
Noting budget constraints, problems of international law and a continuing U.S. casualty toll in Afghanistan, Obama told CNN:
“Sometimes what we’ve seen is that folks will call for immediate action, jumping into stuff that does not turn out well, gets us mired in very difficult situations, can result in us being drawn into very expensive, difficult, costly interventions that actually breed more resentment in the region.
“The United States continues to be the one country that people expect can do more than just simply protect their borders. But that does not mean that we have to get involved with everything immediately,” he said, reflecting long-standing wariness to follow the example of his predecessor, George W. Bush, and his ultimately unpopular ventures in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“We have to think through strategically what’s going to be in our long-term national interests.”
RED LINE?
Asked about his comment – made a year and a day before the toxic fumes hit sleeping residents of rebel-held Damascus suburbs – that chemical weapons would be a ‘red line’ for the United States, he replied: “If the U.S. goes in and attacks another country without a U.N. mandate and without clear evidence that can be presented, then there are questions in terms of whether international law supports it.”
Russia and China have vetoed United Nations Security Council moves against Assad in the past and oppose military action.
Having abstained to allow NATO powers a U.N. mandate to back Libyan rebels against Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, Moscow and Beijing have closed ranks against what they see as a desire by Western states to change other countries’ systems of government.
The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, despite a failure to secure a specific U.N. mandate for it, led to long wrangling over whether Washington and its allies broke international law.
In June, Washington agreed in response to evidence of small chemical attacks to arm rebel groups, despite misgivings about Islamist radicals in their ranks, some allied with al Qaeda. But rebel leaders say it is too little, leaving only a stalemate.
INSPECTION TEAM
International powers, including Moscow, have urged Assad to cooperate with the U.N. inspection team which arrived on Sunday to pursue earlier allegations of chemical weapons attacks.
However, there was no public response from the Syrian government, whose forces have been pounding the region for days, making any mission by the international experts perilous – as well as possibly destroying evidence. Syria denies being responsible and has in the past accused rebels of using gas.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said he intends to conduct a “thorough, impartial and prompt investigation” into the latest allegations. Top U.N. disarmament official Angela Kane was due to arrive in Damascus on Saturday to push for access to the site for the U.N. inspectors.
“I can think of no good reason why any party – either government or opposition forces – would decline this opportunity to get to the truth of the matter,” Ban said.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague said he believed the Syrian government was responsible for the casualties, which go on rising as medical staff and others fall sick. “It seems the Assad regime has something to hide,” he said.
“Why else have they not allowed the U.N. team to go there?” he added, saying that the attack was “not something that a humane and civilized world” could ignore.
But Russia, Assad’s main arms supplier, said the opposition was preventing the objective investigation of what happened.
In an apparent rebuttal of that, Syria’s opposition pledged to guarantee the safety of U.N. inspectors.
“We will ensure the safety of the U.N. team … It is critical that those inspectors get there within 48 hours,” Khaled Saleh, spokesman for the opposition Syrian National Coalition, told a news conference in Istanbul.
Opposition activists said they had been in contact with the specialist U.N. team in Damascus and had sent tissue samples with couriers trying to slip across from the Ghouta region into the government-held center to deliver them to the inspectors.
Speaking from the town of Arbin, one of those affected by mysterious deaths from poisoning, opposition activist Abu Nidal told Reuters: “The U.N. team spoke with us and since then we prepared for them samples of hair, skin and blood and smuggled them back into Damascus with trusted couriers.”
Activist Abu Mohammed, in Harasta, said: “We’re being shelled and on top of that Ghouta is surrounded by regime checkpoints. But even that isn’t a problem – we can smuggle them out. The problem is the location of the U.N. committee in the hotel. They’re under heavy guard and government minders.”
Another opposition leader, Syrian National Coalition Secretary General Badr Jamous, said in Istanbul that samples from victims had already been smuggled out of Syria for testing. He declined to say where they were sent.
The rebels’ efforts could prove futile; only material that has a clear provenance and a “chain of custody” would generally be treated as evidence by U.N. inspectors.
The longer the team waits for permission to investigate, the less likely it is to get to the bottom of an incident in which opponents say Syrian government forces fired rockets or missiles laden with poison gas canisters into rebel-held neighborhoods.
Western experts suspect an organophosphate agent, most likely sarin gas, was used in the attack.
“Because they are non-persistent agents, they dissipate very quickly,” said Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former head of Britain’s military counter-nuclear, biological and chemical warfare force and now a private contractor.
Images, including some by freelance photographers supplied to Reuters, showed scores of bodies laid out on floors with no visible signs of injury. Some had foam at the nose and mouth.
CALLS FOR ACTION
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said on Thursday that world powers must respond with force if allegations that Syria’s government was responsible for the deadliest chemical attack on civilians in a quarter-century prove true. Fabius stressed, however, there was no question of sending in troops.
European officials said that options ranging from air strikes or a no-fly zone to providing heavy weapons to some rebels were all still on the table. But there was little prospect of concrete measures without U.S. backing. “Without U.S. firepower, there’s little we can do,” one said.
Turkey, fearful of instability on its long southern border, called for an end to talk and time-wasting. “There is nothing left to say now,” said President Abdullah Gul. “It is now time for actual concrete action … The price of playing down the events and procrastinating through diplomatic maneuvering and trickery in the U.N. Security Council will be very high.”
(Additional reporting by Dasha Afanasieva in Istanbul, Roberta Rampton and Jeff Mason in Washington and Jack Kim in Seoul; Writing by Alastair Macdonald and Claudia Parsons; Editing by David Stamp and Tim Dobbyn)
BEIRUT |
BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syrian state television said government soldiers found chemical agents in rebel tunnels in the Damascus suburb of Jobar on Saturday and some of the troops were suffocating.
“Army heroes are entering the tunnels of the terrorists and saw chemical agents,” state television quoted a “news source” as saying. “In some cases, soldiers are suffocating while entering Jobar,” it said.
“Ambulances came to rescue the people who were suffocating in Jobar,” it said, adding that an army unit was preparing to storm the suburb where rebels fighting to oust President Bashar al-Assad are based.
Syrian activists accuse Assad’s forces of launching a nerve gas attack in Jobar and other suburbs before dawn on Wednesday, killing between 500 and more than 1,000 people.
Assad’s government has dismissed the accusation and its major ally Russia has suggested rebel fighters may have launched the attack themselves to provoke international action.
U.N. High Representative for Disarmament Affairs Angela Kane arrived in Damascus on Saturday to push for access to the suspected chemical weapons attack site for U.N. inspectors, who are already in Syria to investigate months-old accusations.
So far Assad’s government has not said whether it will allow access to the site despite being under increasing pressure from the United Nations, Western and Gulf Arab countries and Russia. If confirmed, it would be the world’s deadliest chemical attack in decades.
(Reporting by Oliver Holmes; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
Forces loyal to Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad are seen in Ain-Assan village during what they said was an operation to occupy it, in southern countryside of Aleppo, June 15, 2013.
Credit: Reuters/George Ourfalian
AMMAN |
AMMAN (Reuters) – Rebel brigades fought Hezbollah-backed forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad in and around Syria’s commercial hub of Aleppo on Sunday, trying to claw back territory lost to an assault that threatens the opposition’s grip on the city, activists said.
Rebel brigades poured into Aleppo last July and have more than half the city under their control. But pro-Assad forces have deployed there in the past three weeks, suggesting a push to retake the city could be under way.
So far, Assad’s forces have not made a major sweep into rebel areas, but given the size of the city and its position near Turkey allowing supplies to the opposition, it would be a major victory for the government if it were to regain Aleppo.
The battles in the city follow the capture by loyalist troops and their Lebanese Shi’ite Hezbollah guerrilla allies of Qusair, a strategic town in central Syria, after heavy bombardment that razed much of the town.
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said last week she feared that the blood shed in Qusair would be repeated in Aleppo and undermine international efforts to push for an end to the more than two year civil war.
The seizure of Qusair restored a crucial land link between Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon and Assad’s military, which is dominated by his minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam that has controlled Syria since the 1960s.
The involvement of Hezbollah fighters on the side of Assad, a fellow ally of the main Shi’ite power Iran, has galvanized Arab governments, including Egypt, behind the rebels, who mostly follow the Sunni version of Islam that dominates the Arab world.
Activists in the region said opposition forces, who include growing numbers of radicalized Islamists, have been mounting counter attacks on Hezbollah-backed troops and Shi’ite militiamen recruited from Shi’ite enclaves near the mostly Sunni metropolis, some 35 km (20 miles) from the border with Turkey.
Hezbollah, fighting openly in Syria to help Assad survive the uprising, does not comment on its operations in the country. A Lebanese security source said unlike Qusair, which is close to Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley, the group might not send its guerrillas to unfamiliar terrain in Aleppo.
“ALEPPO GRAVE”
An opposition operations room in northern Aleppo said in a statement rebel fighters had destroyed an army tank and killed 20 troops just northwest of the town of Maaret al-Arteek.
Opposition sources say rebels there have been holding back an armored column for the last two days sent from Aleppo to re-enforce loyalists recruited from the Shi’ite villages of Nubbul and al-Zahra further to the northwest.
“Assad’s forces and Hezbollah are trying to control northern rural Aleppo but they are being repelled and dealt heavy losses,” Colonel Abdeljabbar al-Okeidi, a Free Syrian Army commander in Aleppo, told al-Arabiya Television.
He said Hezbollah had sent up to 2,000 fighters to Aleppo and the surrounding areas, but expressed confidence the opposition would prevail.
“Aleppo and Qusair are different. In Qusair we were surrounded by villages that had been occupied by Hezbollah and by loyalist areas. We did not even have a place to take our wounded. In Aleppo we have a strategic depth and logistical support and we are better organized,” he said.
“Aleppo will turn into the grave of these Hezbollah devils.”
Battles also raged inside Aleppo itself, where the thousands of loyalist troops and militia reinforced by Hezbollah have been massing and attacking opposition-held parts of the contested city, driving rebel fighters back.
Opposition activists and military sources said the army was also airlifting troops behind rebel lines to Ifrin, in a Kurdish area, that would give access for a bigger sweep inside the city.
“For a week the rebel forces have been generally on the retreat in Aleppo but tide has started reversing in the last two days,” said Abu Abdallah, an activist in the area.
He said three main fronts had developed: inside the city; to the west at Maaret al-Arteek; and further northwest in farmland between the two Shi’ite villages and Ifrin.
The Syrian Revolution General Commission opposition group said in a statement that three people were killed in the al-Khalidiya neighborhood of Aleppo, two by army snipers and one rebel in fighting near the airport.
It is impossible to verify the accounts because of the restrictions imposed on international media by Syria.
(Reporting by Khaled Yacoub Oweis, Amman newsroom; Editing by Alison Williams)
