Syrian Freedom

#Syria’s deputy oil minister ‘defects, joins rebels’

08 March 2012 | 12:42:06 PM| Source: AFP

Syria’s deputy oil minister Abdo Hussameddin has announced from Lebanon his resignation in a video posted by activists on YouTube and said he was joining the revolt.

Hussameddin is the highest ranking Syrian official to resign from the regime of Syrian President Bashar el-Assad who has been battling a one-year revolt.

“I, the engineer Abdo Hussameddin, the deputy oil minister … announce my defection from the regime and my resignation,” he said in the video.

“I am joining the revolution of the people who reject injustice and the brutal campaign of the regime, which is seeking to crush the people’s demand for freedom and dignity,” he added.

Rami, the activist who shot the video of Hussameddin and posted it on YouTube, told AFP in Beirut that the opposition helped arrange his resignation. He asked that the location where the video was shot not be disclosed for safety reasons.

Hussameddin denounced Russia and China for backing the regime saying they were not “friends of the Syrian people but partners in the killing of the Syrian people”.

He said he had served in the Syrian government for 33 years and did not wish to end his life “serving a criminal regime”.

“That is why I have joined the right path knowing that this regime will burn down my house, hunt down my family and fabricate lies,” he said.

He advised his colleagues to abandon “this sinking ship”.

According to the United Nations, more than 7,500 people have died in the brutal government crackdown to put down the revolt that eruped last March.

Do 55% of Syrians really want President Assad to stay? #Syria

By Charlotte McDonald BBC News

An opinion poll was widely reported last month as evidence that 55% of Syrians think President Bashar al-Assad should not resign. But does the claim stand up to scrutiny?

The world is watching Syria, where every day there are new scenes of horror as the violence between protesters and the regime’s security forces continues.

Against this backdrop, some commentators have picked up on a striking statistic - that 55% of Syrians want President Assad to stay in power.

In a column in the UK’s Guardian newspaper, the statistic was used to suggest that the Western media was mis-reporting the situation in Syria, suppressing “inconvenient facts” for the purposes of propaganda.

The statistic has been reported widely elsewhere, from the New York Times, to Al Jazeera (in Arabic) Iranian owned Press TV, and Syrian news sites.

(Mis)interpreting data

• More than 1,000 people from 18 countries in the Middle East responded to YouGov Siraj’s internet poll question: “In your opinion, should Syria’s President Assad resign?”

• 81% of answered Yes

• 55% of respondents in Syria said they thought the president should stay

BUT

• Only 98 respondents were actually from Syria

• Only 18% of people in Syria have access to the internet

Source: YouGov Siraj internet survey

So what was this poll and who carried it out?

It was an internet survey of the Arab world by YouGov Siraj in December. It covered just more than 1,000 people in 18 countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

The central question was: “In your opinion should Syria’s President Assad resign?”

Across the whole region, the overall finding was that 81% of people polled thought President Assad should go.

But the polling company also stated: “Respondents in Syria are more supportive of their president. 55% do not believe Assad should resign.”

Looking closely at the survey report, it does not say explicitly how many of the 1,000 people who responded were from Syria. But it does say that 211 were polled in the Levant region, 46% of whom were in Syria.

Doing the sums, this suggests that only 97 people took part. When the BBC checked with YouGov Siraj for the exact breakdown, the company said that in fact there were 98 respondents from Syria (the difference arising from the fact that averages given in the survey report were rounded).

This is a very low sample according to the managing director of survey company ORB, Johnny Heald, who has been carrying out polls in the Middle East for many years.

“When we poll and we want to find out what Libyans think, or what Syrians think, we would rarely do anything less than 1,000 interviews,” he says.

“One thousand is the generally accepted industry minimum to be able to speak confidently about what people from a particular country think about an issue.

“If you say that this poll covers people from 18 countries, then that’s fine. But you need to be very careful when you interpret the findings.

“It is not good to say that 55% of Syrians, for example, think that Assad should stay when only 97 people were asked that question.”

But he has another criticism - according to UN figures, only 18% of people in Syria have access to the internet, which means that the sample polled is biased towards those who can get online.

President Bashar al-Assad has called a referendum on a new constitution this weekend

The people who conducted the survey at YouGov Siraj, the Dubai-based arm of a UK polling company, say the poll was not intended to be representative of all Syrians.

They too say the sample was too low for this and that internet penetration in the country is not good enough.

This is why they referred to “respondents from Syria” rather than referring to “Syrians”, they say.

However, the Doha Debates TV programme, which commissioned the poll and published its findings, were not as sensitive to the distinction.

The figure is described on its site as: “Syrians are more supportive of their president with 55% not wanting him to resign.”

In a statement, the pollsters at YouGov Siraj said that with hindsight they wish they had been clearer: “To the layman, there seems very little difference between the two expressions but for researchers, the difference is huge.

Journalists have jumped on (the statistic) and ran with it, without thinking about the science behind how they came to that figure”

Johnny Heald Managing director of survey company ORB

“I think we should have stressed the difference much more to our client (or simply not shown the Syria data, as there was always a chance it might be misinterpreted).”

When we asked the organisers of the Doha Debates about the statistic, they insisted that despite the small sample size, the result was “of interest”.

They say the figures and polling data are freely available for people to draw their own conclusions.

Is it OK to put out a figure based on such a low sample?

Johnny Heald thinks it is acceptable for pollsters to pull out data from a broader poll, because often it is interesting.

But he says: “What you should always do is say: ‘Caution - this is a low base size.’

“The problem comes when people interpret it to be representative of a country.

“And I think in defence of YouGov, they don’t claim the poll is nationally representative of what Syrians think.

“They have just pulled out the Syrian numbers and because it is an interesting story and somewhat controversial, I think the journalists jumped on it and ran with it, without thinking about the science behind how they came to that figure.”

#Syria’s murderous regime is doomed, says defiant William Hague

UK foreign secretary warns President Assad he risks all-out civil war if he remains in power, despite collapse of UN resolution

Rajeev Syal, staff and agencies

guardian.co.uk,Sunday 5 February 2012 12.30 GMT

Demonstrators protest against Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, in Binsh, near Idlib Photograph: Handout/Reuters

William Hague has described the Syrian regime as “doomed” and “murdering” and warned that the country is moving closer to an all-out civil war following the dramatic collapse of a major diplomatic effort to call for President Assad to stand down.

The foreign secretary said hopes now rested on the Arab League to increase pressure for political change in the light of this weekend’s setback. On Saturday, a United Nations security council resolution calling for the president to resign was vetoed by Russia and China, angering western diplomats.

Activists attacked Syrian embassies across the world as news of the vetoes spread.

“This is a doomed regime as well as a murdering regime. There is no way it can get its credibility back either internationally or with its own people,” Hague told Dermot Murnaghan on Sky.

“Because the regime is so intransigent, because it is conducting ten months unmitigated violence and repression – more than 6,000 killed with 12,000 or 14,000 in detention and subject to every kind of torture and abuse – it is driving some opponents to violent action themselves. That is tipping Syria closer to something that begins to look like a civil war,” he said.

In Syria, dozens were reported killed on Saturday in one of the bloodiest days since protests began last March. Rebel groups and opposition activists said the regime launched an assault on the city of Homs on Friday night using mortar and tanks to bombard civilian areas.

One opposition group said it had confirmed 62 deaths in Homs, while other organisations gave death tolls in excess of 200.

Hague, said that Russia and China’s veto had “emboldened” Assad’s position. “I think Russia and China do bear increased responsibility and that means in the Middle East and Arab world there will be a great deal of anger at the positions that Russia and China have taken.

“This underlines the need for a political transition and in our view for Assad to go, or in the plan of the Arab League to hand over to his deputy and form a unity government, thats a sensible way forward,” he said.

However, he said he would continue to work alongside the Russian and Chinese governments and plans to contact Russia’s foreign minister when he returns from a visit to Syria later this week.

“We will continue to work with Russia and China on this, we want them to change their position,” Hague said.

Asked about plans by Arab countries to expel Syrian diplomats, Hague said that Britain’s diplomatic options wre constantly being reviewed but any announcement would first be made to parliament.

“We haven’t taken any decisions to sever our diplomatic links at the moment but the Arab League is playing a very strong role … This is the main way forward now – for the Arab League to pursue their plan because they don’t need the UN to do that although it would have been good to have had a clear mandate from the United Nations.

“They should pursue their plan and intensify their own pressure on the Assad regime to stop the killing and allow a peaceful political transition.”

Hague said the UK had reduced its embassy operations in Syria to an absolute minimum and reiterated the government’s position of ruling out military intervention, stressing the differences with last year’s regime change in Libya.

“In Libya we had the authority of the UN to take all necessary measures. Given what has happened this weekend, we could not pass such a resolution.

Secondly, the consequences would be far more difficult to foresee in Syria than they were in the relatively straightforward Libya because of the knock on effects across the region. Thirdly it would have to be on a dramatically bigger scale in Syria in order to be effective,” he said.

The Sino-Russian veto was intended to promote a political settlement, China’s state news agency Xinhua said in an article today.

It “aimed at further seeking peaceful settlement of the chronic Syrian crisis and preventing possible drastic and risky solutions to it,” the piece said.

“With the veto, Russia and China believed more time and patience should be given to a political solution … which would prevent the Syrian people from more turbulence and fatalities.”

The opposition Syrian National Council condemned Moscow and Beijing for obstructing the passage of the draft resolution. The veto drew an angry response from American UN envoy Susan Rice, who wrote on Twitter that she was “disgusted” and said Russia and China would have blood on their hands.

But the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, criticised the UN resolution, saying it made too few demands of anti-government armed groups, and could prejudge the outcome of a dialogue among political forces in the country.

Russian news agencies reported that Lavrov and Russia’s foreign intelligence chief, Mikhail Fradkov, would meet Assad in Damascus on Tuesday.

Syria has been a key Russian ally since the Soviet era and Moscow has opposed any UN demands that could be interpreted as advocating military intervention or regime change.

Earlier on Saturday, Tunisia decided to expel Syria’s ambassador in response to the “bloody massacre” in Homs and said it no longer recognised the Assad regime. As news of the violence spread, a crowd of Syrians stormed their country’s embassy in Cairo and protests broke out outside Syrian missions in Britain, Germany and the US.